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– –begin web version of Cliff Notes– So, you are coming to visit America’s Craft Beer Capitol, San Diego, California, and you are only devoting one day for visiting the “best beer spots in SD”? Wrong move. There is simply too much going on here—new breweries, expanding breweries, satellite tasting room locations, beer bars, brewpubs, restaurants with amazing, local beer…hell, you can even get an Alesmith Speedway Stout at the baseball stadium—to ever possibly experience it all in just one day. You should have planned on staying a week. At the least. Here is the down and dirty on my favorite picks for a day of San Diego Beer (#SDBeer). My first piece of advice? Find a designated driver. Either enlist a friend or family member, or better yet, hire one of the amazing brew tour companies in San Diego to cart you around from one glorious beer destination to another (my favorite would be Summer and Lars and the crew at BrewHop: http://brewhop.com/) editor’s note: I also like Jon and Mindy of Brewery Tours of San Diego – very good team who are super friendly. You simply do not want to drink and drive, and it’s not worth being at a brewery and having to turn down the chance to try another awesome beer because you have to get behind the wheel. That situation where you want to check out one more beer from a brewery—maybe a new beer style of a special cask offering—will happen. Don’t miss out on awesome beer. With that being said, are you ready? No, you are not. Eighty-eight breweries? Countless beer bars and beer-centric restaurants? From one of the oldest breweries, Karl Strauss, to one of the newest, Council Brewing Company, there is a lot of great beer to drink in…Here goes nothing… Do We Drink Alpine Beer or Do We Go To Bed? Alpine Beer Company \| 2351 Alpine Blvd., Alpine, CA http://www.alpinebeerco.com \| @alpineshawn Don’t Miss Out on Awesome Beer: Nelson If you have only one day to check-out San Diego, the first question that you need think long and hard about, is: do you want (need) to make the trek out to Alpine Beer Company? Located in Alpine, California, the brewpub and brewery takes about at least 30 minutes to drive to and from each way, depending on where you are in San Diego. That’s a lot of time to devote to visiting just one brewery. Plus, when you get there, the beer might just convince you to extend the trip. You will never want to leave. The father and son team of Pat and Shawn McIlhenney at Alpine Beer Company make some of the best IPAs in the world. Period. The beer really is that delicious. “Nelson,” their rye IPA that predominantly features the Nelson Sauvin hop, is spicy, floral, and a cult-classic. Their other fan favorite, “Duet,” balances Simcoe and Amarillo hops into an amazingly drinkable 7.0% ABV West Coast IPA. Their lower ABV hoppy beers, such as Hoppy Birthday and Baby Face (a “baby” version of Nelson, clocking in at just 4.7% ABV), are perhaps the perfect accompaniment to some no-frills, but absolutely delicious BBQ food. A pint of Hoppy Birthday and a plate of pulled pork is heavenly. So is it worth it? In my opinion, yes. Just Duet. I would suggest getting there when the doors open, right at noon. Eat a lunch and enjoy some beers, then visit the brewery next door to snag a bottle or two to bring back home. Then, head back to San Diego for an afternoon and evening of visiting my favorite spots—new and old—in the city. San Diego Breweries – The New School From the time that you started reading this until right now, it might be safe to say that at least one new brewery has probably opened up in San Diego and there are also three additional breweries now-in-planning. But in all seriousness, so much great beer is coming from some of San Diego’s newest entrants onto the brewing scene. I do not view the San Diego Beer market as being saturated, there is no “bubble”—the market is mature, and there is always room for more awesome beer. It might seem obvious, but it is true. If you are making great beer in San Diego, you are going to be a successful brewery. Here are some of the newest stories in San Diego… Benchmark Brewing Co. \| 6190 Fairmont Ave, Suite G, San Diego, CA http://www.benchmarkbrewing.com \| @BenchmarkBrew Don’t Miss Out on Awesome Beer: Oatmeal Stout (it’s “life-changing”) Heading back into San Diego, the first brewery that I would stop at would most certainly be Benchmark Brewing Company (editor’s note: that last link is to a post I did about both Benchmark and Modern Times Beer shortly after they opened). This upstart brewery was founded by Matt and Rachael Akin, two of the most awesome and passionate people that you will meet. Matt’s father, Jim, is also part of an operation that brews some of the most intriguing beers in San Diego. In a town filled with 9% ABV double IPAs, Matt brews some incredibly flavorful beers that are still low in alcohol. Their IPA is only 5.1%, and leans more towards an English Pale or Bitter as opposed to a true to form West Coast, American IPA. It’s a delicious beer, nonetheless. Matt also brews a Belgian Table beer that is incredible, glass after glass, and their Oatmeal Stout really is “life-changing.” It packs all the flavor and body of a heavier stout, but you can enjoy it by the mugful. Simply a beautiful beer. Embracing the pub culture, Matt and Rachael love to spotlight local sports teams, as well as the National teams at the Tasting Room. Expect a USA-heavy vibe this summer as the Men’s National Team takes on the rest of the world in Brazil for the World Cup. Catch some futebol action when you visit and sip on a mug of Benchmark brew. Council Brewing Company \| 7705 Convoy Court, San Diego, CA http://www.councilbrew.com \| @councilbrew Don’t Miss Out on Awesome Beer: Gavel Drop Opened in May 2014, San Diego’s newest brewery is well-worth the time to stop in and visit. Liz and Curtis Chisum are two local homebrewers, active in the historic and vulnerable QUAFF homebrew club, who made the decision to go professional. Their brewery is tiny, just a three-barrel system, and it is tucked into the far end of an industrial complex. But, the beers that they are brewing have been phenomenal right out of the gate. Be sure to try Gavel Drop, an IPA that heavily features the Nelson Sauvin hop. In a town that loves Nelson (throwback to Alpine’s fantastic beer), this IPA from Council is gaining a cult following of its own. Citrusy, bright, with hints of the white-wine characteristic that can be present in this hop varietal, this beer drinks incredibly smooth. Council Brewing celebrates its Grand Opening on June 28, 2014, and San Diego will officially welcome its newest brewery in style. Liz and Curtis will have beer pouring on all sixteen of their taps, and special varietals of Pirate’s Breakfast (their Imperial Stout) will be available to taste. The future is definitely bright for this young brewery, and I for one am looking forward to watching them find their place in the San Diego beer community. Mike Hess Brewing: North Park \| 3812 Grim Ave, San Diego, CA http://www.mikehessbrewing.com \| @hessbrewing Don’t Miss Out on Awesome Beer: Habitus Rye India Pale Ale Head down to North Park to visit America’s Beer Boulevard (30th Street), home to the iconic Toronado bar, as well as Tiger! Tiger! Tavern (just around the corner on El Cajon Boulevard.). While visiting two of the best beer bars in the county, check out North Park’s coolest production brewery. Tucked into an old book store on Grim Avenue, Mike Hess Brewing has a thirty-barrel brewhouse and a cellar that is unlike any other brewery you have seen. Walking across the catwalk into the tasting room, you can catch a birds-eye view of the brewery that is sunken into the lower level of the building. Once you pick your jaw up off the floor, you arrive in their tasting room, a clean and well put together environment. Order a flight of their delicious beers. This way, you can sample five awesome beers, and then return your tasting glassware to the bar to exchange them for a Hess Brewing can glass. That’s right, cans. Hess is one of the San Diego breweries that have been making some noise with canned beer lately, including Modern Times Beer and Pizza Port Brew Company in the Bressi Ranch location. Hess Brewing cans several of their beers, including Habitus. A deeply flavorful rye IPA, Habitus took home a well-deserved Gold Award at the World Beer Cup in the Rye Beer category in 2014. It’s that damn delicious. Rip Current Brewing \| 1325 Grand Ave, San Marcos, CA http://www.ripcurrentbrewing.com \| @ripcurrentbeer Don’t Miss Out on Awesome Beer: Bonzer Pale Ale No visit to San Diego is complete without a trip to North County for beer. Home to some iconic San Diego breweries such as Stone Brewing Company, and Lost Abbey and Port Brewing Company, there is little doubt that some awesome beer is being brewed up North of the city proper. If you head up the freeway, go check out the relative newcomers at Rip Current Brewing Company. Having just celebrated their first anniversary, Paul Sangster, Guy Shobe, and the crew are hitting their stride and they are brewing flat out awesome beer. Paul (as are Curtis and Liz from Council) is another QUAFF brewer, and he is probably most well known as being the 2011 Ninkasi winner at the National Homebrewer Conference (the Ninkasi Award is awarded to the homebrewer of the year). Paul brews a diverse range of styles: Kolsch, Milds, Bitters, Dunkels, Hefes, IPA, Scottish Ales, an Altbier…if there is a BJCP beer style, Paul brews it and he brews it well. Maybe I am simply a stereotypical hop-head, but to my palate, their hoppy beers are divine. I would not miss out on a taste of “Bonzer Pale Ale,” a crushable American pale ale, and “Lupulin Lust,” a juicy and redolent double IPA. “In the Curl” and “Caught in a Rip,” a double and a triple IPA, respectively, are two other hoppy delights. San Diego Breweries – The Old Guard The new school of breweries would be nowhere without standing on the shoulders of the giants. San Diego has an amazingly deep history of brewing culture. Although these breweries have been around a while, and have been in the collective conscious of the craft beer mindset for years, do not pass up the opportunity to revisit the classics and take in the tradition of brewing amazing beer in San Diego. Stone Brewing Company: World Bistro & Gardens \| 1999 Citracado Parkway, Escondido, CA http://www.stonebrew.com \| @stonebrewingco Don’t Miss Out on Awesome Beer: Go-To IPA Of course, this list begins with Stone Brewing Company. It is impossible to understate the import and the impact that Stone Brewing Company has with respect to craft beer in San Diego. These guys are absolutely responsible for the scene here today. The World Bistro & Gardens is a veritable Disneyland of beer, and it is definitively a must-see location for every beer drinker during their lifetime. In addition to the lineup of Stone beers, the Bistro serves up some incredible guest beer on tap and it features a bottle list curated by Dr. Bill Sysak, well-known for his cellar collection and for his Master Pairings. Try to squeeze in the time for a quick Go-To IPA in the Gardens, you will not be disappointed. If you can find a peaceful spot to meditate about beer, you just might achieve Nirvana. Otherwise, be careful as this place tends to fill up quickly and the crowds detract from some of the enjoyment. If you have never been, go. If you have been, your time might be better spent down the road in San Marcos visiting Rip Current. Still, it is remarkable to think just how definitive Stone is when it comes to San Diego Beer. Karl Strauss Brewery\| 5985 Santa Fe Drive, San Diego, CA http://www.karlstrauss.com \| @karl_strauss Don’t Miss Out on Awesome Beer: Mosaic Session IPA After a visit to Benchmark Brewing Company, you are close enough to make a stop at another iconic San Diego brewery, Karl Strauss. Chris Cramer and Matt Rattner started Karl Strauss when the term “craft beer” did not even exist. Today? Well, they are brewing some of the most consistently high quality craft beers around. Red Trolley Ale, alone, has won seventeen awards between the World Beer Cup and the Great American Beer Festival. Uh, wow. At their Tasting Room location, you can catch a glimpse of the bottling line in action. Or check out the lab where the quality assurance program does its thing to make sure that bad beer never leaves the brewery. Recently, the Brewers Association has been preaching: “Quality, quality, quality…” and these guys take that to heart. While you are there, try their new Mosaic Session IPA. Brewed with 2-Row, malted wheat, and a kiss of crystal 10, this beer has a refrained malt profile to showcase the glory of the Mosaic hop. Damn tasty stuff. Pizza Port Brewing Company: Carlsbad \| 571 Carlsbad Village Drive, Carlsbad, CA http://www.pizzaport.com \| @PizzaPortBeer Don’t Miss Out on Awesome Beer: Carlsbad Raceway IPA Again, when you are talking about the history of San Diego beer, you cannot leave Pizza Port out of the discussion. Founded by Vince and Gina Marsaglia, the Pizza Port “empire” spans five brewpub locations in San Diego and San Clemente, and it features some incredible alumni brewers like Tommee Arthur (now at Lost Abbey) and Jeff Bagby (of the soon-to-be Bagby Beer Company). Although Solana Beach was the original location, I would choose to end my San Diego experience at the Pizza Port in Carlsbad for a fresh glass of one of my all-time favorite beers, Carlsbad Raceway IPA. Of course, the best part is that you can get a delicious pie for dinner and relax in a fantastic beach community. Pick up some cans of their Carlsbad Chronic Ale, Swami’s IPA, or Ponto’s S.I.P.A. to bring home, each a delicious memory of an amazing visit to San Diego. San Diego Beer – But Wait, There’s More Well, I have already been waxing poetic about San Diego Beer for almost seven pages, and I have only just hit the breweries. I have not even mentioned the amazing beer bars (so I will briefly)… Tiger!Tiger! Tavern \| tigertigertavern.blogspot.com \| 3025 El Cajon Blvd., San Diego Blind Lady Ale House \| blindladyalehouse.com \| 3416 Adams Ave, San Diego Hamilton’s Tavern \| hamiltonstavern.com \| 1521 30 th Street, San Diego Street, San Diego O’Brien’s Pub \| obrienspub.net \| 4646 Convoy Street, San Diego Toronado SD \| toronadosd.com \| 4036 30 th Street, San Diego Street, San Diego Churchill’s Pub and Grille \| churchillspub.us \| 887 West San Marcos Blvd., San Marcos Encinitas Ale House \| encinitasalehouse.com \| 1044 South Coast Highway 101, Encinitas And I haven’t mentioned the swanky restaurants that always feature awesome, local, San Diego Beer… Waypoint Public \| waypointpublic.com \| 3794 30 th Street, San Diego Street, San Diego Alchemy Cultural Fare \| alchemysandiego.com \| 1503 30 th Street, San Diego Street, San Diego Urge Gastropub \| urgegastropub.com \| 16761 Bernardo Center Drive, San Diego Ritual Tavern Kitchen \| ritualtavern.com \| 4095 30th Street, San Diego Well, I think that that just about hits the highpoints…if you cannot find awesome beer here in San Diego, then you just are not doing something right. Have a great visit, and let me know what your favorites are. Oh, and I heard that the guys over at Societe Brewing Company make some decent beer too. CHEERS! — Remember, use #SDBeer in your posts, tweets and comments on social media so we can all easily find the best of San Diego Craft Beer. With a bit of looking, you’ll find gems like Iron Fist, Lightning Brewery, Thorn Street, and many other small breweries who are doing really interesting stuff. And you can always reach me with questions at opassons@gmail.com or by leaving notes in the comment section. There is plenty of room for really good craft brewers in every state across the country. This is my way of highlighting some of the great aspects of our region. In case you missed it, download the handy PDF version –Future UK Government budgets for offshore wind are unlikely to support Scotland’s ambitions to develop the industry, the first minister has said. Nicola Sturgeon has called on the government to act now to provide confidence to the sector by increasingboost budget allocations to allow offshore wind to be delivered on a far greater scale. Sturgeon’s plea comes after the results of the first contracts for difference auction were announced last week. The auction awarded 15-year contracts which guarantee a price for the power generated as part of the government’s plan to encourage renewable energy. Offshore wind projects competed for a share of £260million-£155 million for projects commissioning from 2016-17 and an additional £105million for schemes commissioning from 2017-18 onwards. Only one Scottish offshore windfarm received a contract, while two major offshore windfarms were refused, leaving uncertainty over their future development, Ms Sturgeon said. She argued that Scottish wind power is now “substantially cheaper than nuclear”, and said that onshore wind development shows long-term investment on a large-scale leads to substantial cost reductions. Speaking ahead of a visit to Whitelee Wind farm, Scotland’s largest onshore windfarm, the first minister said: “Scotland has made huge progress in renewables deployment in Scotland, generating enough renewable energy to meet 44% of Scotland’s annual electricity demand, generating millions of pounds of community benefit, and displacing an estimated 12million tonnes of carbon dioxide across the UK. “Scottish onshore wind is now considerably cheaper than new nuclear; thanks to sustained support and large-scale deployment of projects such as Scottish Power’s Whitelee development. “The UK Government must now show greater ambition for the Scottish offshore sector. “We are already seeing cost reductions in offshore wind but the scale of growth planned for the sector will be a key driver to delivering further cost reductions for the long-term benefit of consumers. “It is essential that the UK Government provide confidence to the offshore wind industry that sufficient money will be available in future allocation rounds to allow the sector to move forward with assurance and enable costs to be further reduced. “Without this ambition Scotland risks missing the opportunity to cement the growth of an industry, with significant supply chain benefits, while decarbonising our energy supply.”Melissa Allison follows the world's biggest coffee-shop chain and other Seattle caffeine purveyors. July 28, 2010 at 10:33 AM Comments (0) E-mail article Print Share Posted by Melissa Allison After eight days trying to suss out the best coffee in Seattle, the posters at Reddit.com haven't gotten very far. They've listed Espresso Vivace, Portland-based Stumptown Coffee, Seattle Coffee Works, Caffe Vita and Trabant Coffee & Chai. They've done a bit of Starbucks bashing, including touching on 15th Avenue Coffee & Tea and Clover brewing machines. But there's not much depth. Lighthouse Roasters, anyone? Herkimer Coffee? Zoka Coffee Roasters? Come on, let's clue them in about Seattle coffee! Post your ideas on this string at Reddit.com. (Many thanks to Seattle Times researcher David Turim for pointing it out.) Update 3:15 p.m.: CoffeeHero.com recently posted a list of the best coffee spots downtown, recommending Seattle Coffee Works, Trabant and Stella Caffe. Update 7/29/2010: Here's what I got for telling Redditers that there are more than a handful of great coffeehouses in Seattle: "I couldn't decide if I wanted to punch her in her smug little face before or after I read the article."IBM will roll out its first commercial quantum computer later this year. The 5 quantum bit – or qubit – system called IBM Q will be available as a cloud-based service that people can access over the internet for a fee. Though currently in its infancy, quantum computing might one day allow scientists to simulate dynamic biochemical interactions with unprecedented accuracy – a development that could speed up drug discovery. IBM’s system is, however, far from a tabletop appliance. Its superconducting qubits – the basic unit of computing known as binary digit or bit in classical computers – need temperatures of 20mK, lower than the temperature between the stars. The computer is housed in a multistage refrigerator with two cooling loops containing different helium isotopes. Although the system is made out of millions of atoms, it behaves like a single quantum atom Ivano Tavernelli, IBM Zurich Unlike classical bits, which can only be in two states, 0 or 1, the number of states a qubit can occupy is unlimited. In behaviour typical to quantum objects such as atoms, each qubit can assume superposition states, in which it is 0 and 1 at the same time. This means the information density in quantum systems is higher, which would make them able to perform many more calculations per second than conventional computers. IBM’s quantum computer, for example, has only five qubits, but is already about as powerful as a modern laptop that is based on about 10 times as many classical bits. ‘Quantum mechanics is one of the most successful theories in physics to describe nature, especially at its microscopic scale,’ explains Andreas Fuhrer, a quantum physicist at IBM’s research laboratories in Zurich, Switzerland. The easiest way to simulate natural systems would therefore be a quantum computer – an idea proposed several decades ago by physics Nobel prize winner Richard Feynman. The complexity problem Although classical computers become more powerful every year, complex simulations like those of dynamic biological systems are, and might always be, out of reach – even for supercomputers. Describing molecules – for example their orbitals or their interactions with other molecules – becomes impossible for scientists to do accurately for anything larger than a handful of atoms at a time. Scientists need to apply heavy approximations in their simulations: only ‘a small part is described quantum mechanically and the rest is described with a highly approximated theory like classical mechanics – molecules become balls and sticks bound together by springs’, explains Ivano Tavernelli, a biochemist and theoretical physicist at IBM Zurich. IBM’s qubits are made from superconducting oscillators, which can be programmed with microwave pulses. ‘This is a way to create an artificial atom using a fully controllable macroscopic device,’ explains Tavernelli. ‘Although the system is made out of millions of atoms, it behaves like a single quantum atom.’ Marco De Vivo, who runs the molecular modelling and drug discovery lab at the Italian Institute of Technology in Genoa, carries out computer-aided molecular docking studies. These predict how a potential drug molecule binds to a biological target, for example a protein. De Vivo’s team performs docking studies on millions of compounds, but ‘the picture we get is static’, he says. ‘In nature, proteins aren’t static, they move according to the laws of physics.’ Molecular dynamics can look at these systems in motion, but probing them using quantum mechanical models is currently impossible. Google and several university labs have previously built primitive quantum computers but IBM will be the first company to focus on how people use the system. In early 2016, IBM unveiled a freely accessible online service, the Quantum Experience. Intended as a training tool, it allowed IBM to gather data on usage and find out how it could be improved. Next top model Since its introduction, ‘40,000 users have already been experimenting with the Quantum Experience for research into quantum systems, but not yet for simulations of any chemical systems’, says Fuhrer. ‘For this we will have to wait for future updates beyond the current 5 qubits,’ he adds. Currently, the Quantum Experience and IBM Q are not more powerful than a regular laptop. Though IBM has not yet announced the exact launch date of IBM Q, or how much it will cost to access the system, it is clear that the 5 qubit computer won’t be powerful enough for any simulations yet. Nevertheless, ‘having this first quantum computing system available will push the community to develop algorithms and software, and move into a promising direction’, says De Vivo. Accurate molecular simulations on quantum computers could not only speed up the drug discovery process but also lower costs, De Vivo thinks. It is likely that within the next 10 years, quantum computers with 50 qubits will become available. Their computing power will rival that of the most advanced classical supercomputers but even more advanced systems might be needed to simulate complete biological system on a quantum level.Infamous torrent search engine Pirate Bay was sunk again after a server raid in Sweden, but has emerged more determined than ever with servers located in Ukraine. — The Pirate Bay was for many people their first experience of peer to peer file sharing on a large scale and became the first place to search for the latest movies and TV shows to download and view for free. For millions of people the ease of access to immediately available, high quality copies of media that was as yet unavailable to most around the world was a sensational resource. The website has been shut down many times, often forcibly, but has now risen again with a new home in Ukraine. Pirate Bay now has its own section on the site entitled ‘legal threats’, suggesting their belligerence toward the authorities has not been dampened by the recent attack in Sweden which saw their servers raided. The database was recovered however and has now been uploaded to servers in the Ukraine which will keep it safe and secure for the foreseeable future. The site is, besides its URL, is the same as it has always been, with simple and effective search options as well as the ability to add files for sharing. Far from just movies and TV, the site also allows people to peer-share video games, books, comics, music and almost all other media. A spokesperson for Pirate Bay explained, “The Pirate Bay can be chased to the ends of the earth, but the authorities will never stop it. It has become an online institution and its existence is mandated by its community of millions of active users, who will always guarantee its continuation in the face of legal aggression. Our new servers in the Ukraine will now enable us to safely serve that community with the service they want, without having to charge them for the privilege.” About Pirate Bay: Pirate Bay is an online search engine with the most extensive database of digital entertainment content anywhere in the world. Visitors of the site can search, download and contribute magnet links and torrent files, which facilitate peer-to-peer file sharing among a huge community of people all using the BitTorrent protocol. The site is hugely popular but comes under frequent attack by copyright holders. Contact Info: Name: Joe Bragg Organization: Brandoutreach Phone: (415) 632 1664 Website: http://thepiratebay.com.ua/ Source URL: https://marketersmedia.com/pirate-bay-sets-sail-again-after-servers-raided-in-sweden-are-migrated-to-new-base-in-ukraine/71739 Source: MarketersMedia Release ID: 71739Secretary of State John Kerry and his wife Teresa Heinz are investors in 12 companies in the People’s Republic of China, including a firm that operates in the most repressed part of Tibet, according to a Daily Caller News Foundation investigation. The investments are from a Heinz family trust called “HFI Imperial,” according to Kerry’s official financial disclosure report, which was reviewed by TheDCNF. The fund invests exclusively in Asian-based companies throughout the Pacific Rim — from Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand to the People’s Republic of China. “Secretary Kerry is not a beneficiary of these trusts, and Mrs. Heinz Kerry also exercises no control over the investment decisions made by the independent trustees,” State Department official spokesman Admiral John Kirby told TheDCNF. However, the State Department declined to describe the nature of the trusts or identify the individuals making the investments. By far, the most controversial Kerry-Heinz investment is in Tibet 5100 Water Resources, Ltd, a Chinese-owned and operated company that sells a “luxury” brand of bottled drinking water in Europe as a rival to Evian and Perrier. Word of the Kerry-Heinz investment prompted calls for the couple to immediately end their investment in Tibet 5100 Water, which was rebranded by company officials last December as “Tibet Water.” “We urge Secretary Kerry to ensure that this investment comes to an end immediately. It is unfortunate now that through this fund, Secretary Kerry’s family — knowingly or not — is supporting a Chinese business, which is exploiting a Tibetan resource and doing harm to its environment,” Alistair Currie, a spokesman for the Tibetan advocacy group Free Tibet, told TheDCNF. A government official working on China policy told TheDCNF that “as a government official, that’s an asset that should be immediately divested.” He requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of his work. “This shows what they are willing to invest in to enhance their family’s wealth and that sends a message in terms of public policy,” said the official. “If you’re to invest in tobacco stocks, when you invest in what various human rights group indicate are antithetical to the interests of indigenous people like the Tibetans, those raise questions about the moral quality of the investments that are being made. It’s appropriate for the public to be asking questions.” Matteo Mecacci, president of the International Campaign for Tibet, told TheDCNF that harvesting Tibet’s water by Chinese firms is clear exploitation of the Tibetan people. “The control of the bottled water industry in Tibet by Chinese businesses, without the involvement and consultation of the Tibetan people, is another dangerous example of the exploitation by Beijing and of the lack of any kind of meaningful autonomy for the Tibetan people under Chinese rule,” Mecacci said. Tibet 5100 Water is headquartered in the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR), a closed section of China that was the center of a 2008 Tibetan uprising. Chinese authorities have harshly repressed the Tibetan populace in the years since that uprising. The State Department has repeatedly reported serious Chinese human rights abuses in Tibet, most recently in the department’s latest human rights report: “The government’s respect for, and protection of, human rights in the TAR and other Tibetan areas remained poor.” Tibet Water is unusually close to the Chinese government and to its powerful communist party. During the 2008 uprising and the Chinese repression that followed, Tibet Water was chosen as the “official drinking water” of the 11th National Committee of Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. Tibet Water was also selected as the “official drinking water” of the 17th and 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China. The 18th Congress was held in 2012 and elevated Xi Jinping as China’s current president. The wholesale diversion of water from Tibetan glaciers has also alarmed environmentalists. Tibet’s Himalayan mountain region reportedly has 37,000 glaciers and is considered “Asia’s freshwater bank account.” Tibet Water’s diversion could cause environmental problems as water is siphoned off for luxury products, according to the site Meltdown in Tibet. “The water collected would otherwise flow through wetlands where yaks and sheep graze. It is not known how the factory’s siphoning of water has impacted the ecosystem,” according to the site. National security experts also believe investment in a state-owned company by a family member of a sitting secretary of state carries many problems. “Is the investment worth the risk,” asked Col. James Waurishuk (ret.), who served on the staff of the White House National Security Council and as a senior psychological operations officer to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “Is there a potential where you might jeopardize national security policy because you’re the Secretary of State? When you get that close where his wife is an investor and he’s the Secretary of State, it’s a real concern,” Waurishuk told TheDCNF. Heinz investments also include the Indonesian tobacco company PT Hanjaya Mandala Sampoerna Tbk, which manufactures hand-rolled and machine-rolled clove-blended cigarettes. The company distributes its products in the domestic and international market. Another tobacco holding by the Heinz trust is Huabao International Holdings Ltd, a Chinese company that supplies flavors and fragrances for tobacco. Boer Power Holdings, a large electricity distribution company based in Wuxi and Shanghai, is in the Kerry-Heinz portfolio, as is China Mobile Communications Corporation, China’s largest state-owned mobile telecommunications company by market capitalization. Both companies are considered “critical infrastructure” that touch on Chinese national security. “Because it is critical infrastructure, one would assume it’s an entity overseen by the state. Any investment here is a cause of concern,” the anonymous government official told TheDCNF. Heinz also invested in Haier Electronics Corporation, one of China’s top-selling makers of home appliances. The Qingdao, a China-based company, announced earlier this year that it was trying to buy General Electric’s appliance division. The Wall Street Journal reported in March that the Obama administration approved the acquisition. At least six of the Asian companies in the Imperial portfolio are also registered in the Cayman Islands or in Bermuda, well-known offshore tax havens. TheDCNF previous reported that there were at least 11 other firms in the Heinz portfolio that were incorporated in offshore tax havens. Both Tibet 5100 Water and Boer Power are incorporated in the Caymans. The other Asian companies with offshore registration are: Want Want China Holdings, Ltd a rice cakes and flavored milk company. Registration: Cayman Islands Dairy Farms International Ltd., food and personal hygiene products. Registration: Bermuda Gingko International Co. Ltd. contact lenses. Registration: Cayman Islands Tencent Holdings Ltd e-commerce. Registration: Cayman Islands Heinz also invested in food companies: Changshouhua Food Company, which manufactures corn oil; Labixiaoxin Snacks Group; Multi Bintang, an Indonesian beer company. SoFun Holdings, a real estate and home furnishings company The annual capital gains for the Imperial fund is $50,000. “$50,000 may not be a lot to the Kerry-Heinz family. But it exceeds the medium income of the average American,” the government official observed. Follow Richard on Twitter Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.The Liberal government has introduced tough new measures aimed at protecting sexual-assault complainants from intrusions into their sexual past, the first strengthening of the rape-shield law in a quarter-century. In a Criminal Code amendment that a sexual-assault crisis centre called a direct response to the acquittal of broadcaster Jian Ghomeshi last year, proposed legislation would spell out for the first time that a complainant's text messages, e-mails and video recordings with sexual content or a sexual purpose can be kept out of trials. A new provision would subject these messages, including those sent after an alleged assault, to the same rules as evidence of a complainant's past sexual activity: requiring a judge's advance approval after a closed hearing for them to be used in a trial. A second change would prevent personal records of the complainant that are in the accused's possession, such as journals or diaries, or medical records, or perhaps personal letters, as in the Ghomeshi sex-assault trial, from being used as evidence unless a judge agrees in a private hearing. The same process is currently used when an accused seeks access to records held by third parties, such as psychologists or rape-crisis centres. Story continues below advertisement Read more: Unfounded: Police dismiss 1 in 5 sexual assault claims as baseless Read more: Calgary begins Canada's first external audit of sexual-assault case files Read more: Canada's judges urged to speak out and change outdated perceptions "Women who work with us were very discouraged after what we saw in the Ghomeshi case," Hilla Kerner, a spokeswoman for the Vancouver Rape Relief and Women's Shelter, said in an interview. The provisions in the new bill send a message that "your past, the things you did before the attack and after the attack, will not deter the criminal justice system from actually dealing with the attack and holding men accountable."The government would also, for the first time, say in law that complainants have the right to legal standing when a court is considering an accused person's request to introduce evidence that is protected under the rape-shield law – that is, to have a lawyer make arguments, separate from those made by the prosecutor, on the complainant's behalf. Judges would have to inform each complainant of this right. (Complainants could not appeal if they lose the argument.) Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould said she hopes the proposed changes "will go a long way towards ensuring that complainants are treated with the compassion, dignity and respect they deserve." But defence lawyers say the bill is deeply unfair to accused people and will be subject to widespread constitutional challenge. The changes arrive in an environment of heightened public attention to the issue of whether victims of sexual assault can find justice. Story continues below advertisement Story continues below advertisement The Globe and Mail revealed this year that some police forces have a high rate of cases classified as unfounded. A series of high-profile sexual-assault trials have raised concerns about the difficulty of securing convictions, women's willingness to trust the system and judges' knowledge of the law. These include an Edmonton trial in which a judge locked up a complainant to ensure she would testify, a Calgary trial in which a judge asked a complainant why she did not keep her knees together, a
5 yards per reception. He may not be a natural hands catcher, per se, but again, the goal is to look for traits that translate. And Pumphrey’s elusiveness as a running back shows up when he runs routes, too. This route, run against Wyoming, is one that would get him open about 99% of the time against NFL man coverage. Matched up with a linebacker, he broke off a quick little shoulder shake near the line of scrimmage, then made a terrific inside cut, caught the pass and flew upfield for almost 25 yards. (His propensity for letting the ball get into his body showed up there, as well, but didn’t hurt him on the play.) When a running back shows as advanced an understanding for reading defenders as Pumphrey displays, that vision usually pays off in the passing game. Pumphrey sees the game one step ahead of those trying to tackle him. Blocking will be a tall order on those passing downs—a 170-pound back trying to anchor against a blitzing, 250-pound linebacker will be a mismatch every time. But, to his credit, Pumphrey’s blocking did not show up as a clear weakness during his college career. • 2017 NFL draft rankings: Chris Burke’s top 10 players at each position Check out this play. Pumphrey helps chip a Wyoming defensive end before finding, and picking up, a linebacker coming on a looping blitz. The rest of San Diego State’s line imploded here, but Pumphrey’s effort helped turn what would have been an easy sack into an incompletion. While he may not have the raw power to stuff blitzers, he recognizes where he needs to be and does what he can to keep his quarterback clean. Pumphrey does not have a growth spurt coming. He is never going to be viewed as a bellcow NFL running back. His hands (8 1/4") are red-flag-level small, which might help explain why he will let passes get into his gut. There are concerns. There also are myriad reasons to believe Pumphrey can succeed at the next level. He displays the patience and vision of a veteran NFL back, paired with the quickness to burn defenses. Want a power back that will wear down defensive fronts? Look elsewhere. Need a playmaker that helps an offense spread the field and can pick up yardage in huge chunks? Pumphrey’s your guy.Facebook today is taking another step ahead in its ad targeting strategy, which serves users advertising based on their location and online purchasing and browsing histories. The social network is launching partner categories: some 500 “unique groups”, with more to come, which are descriptors (one example: “buyers of children’s cereals”) that match up with relevant people among Facebook’s 1 billion+ users. Facebook says that advertisers can “futher refine” the categories by using other targeting options it already offers. As with Facebook’s other targeting ad-tech news, Datalogix, Epsilon and Acxiom will be among the companies providing data to power the service. Datalogix alone says it will be providing some 300 of these audience segments. This is one of the first official products to come out of the partnership with these ad targeting data specialists, which were first tested in September 2012 and then officially announced in February. (Two other stories looking at how these partnerships are progressing are here and here.) While Facebook has been rolling out some features in ads and in its user services by platform — for example, mobile-only and desktop-only — it’s perhaps a measure of how important this is to the company that it is being rolled out across both desktop and mobile ads today. Targeting using data from the wider web is a big progression on Facebook’s existing advertising services. Facebook, of course, has been relying on user information to target ads on its site before this, but only relying data that has been picked up within Facebook itself (although that’s an area that is also expanding). Ad targeting techniques like the ones being introduced today are used on the wider web, so it is important for Facebook to have them as well if it wants to continue to pick up ever-larger parts of businesses’ online marketing budgets. Facebook’s had one crucial client win this week in that vein: General Motors is back to testing out ads for Facebook after pulling its marketing there a year ago. Its recent acquisition of Atlas from Microsoft also fits into this bigger strategy of having an all-in-one platform for providing online advertising services to businesses. As you can see from the screenshot of how it looks below, Partner Categories provides a number of relevant details for each category — but not any information about specific users. They include how many people are in a category — 14.8 million for kids’ cereal! — and some of the purchasing history that goes into them getting put into that group. That includes how often a product is bought over the last year, and details of where the information got sourced. For users, there are the inevitable pros and cons. On the one hand, you will be seeing ads that, in theory, will be based on things you are interested in (if you could call Cap’n Crunch an interest, that is). “Our ultimate goal is to make the ads people see on Facebook as relevant as the information they see from their friends,” Yvette Lui, director of global marketing solutions, global data & audience partnerships at Facebook, noted in a news release put out by Epsilon. “Targeting features like custom audiences and partner categories help make this possible. Our partnership with Epsilon gives marketers a more accurate and effective way to reach the right groups of real people, which makes for a better ad experience.” But… on the other, it’s always slightly annoying and menacing when you’ve browsed online for, say, plane tickets to Guatemala — and perhaps even purchased them already — and yet continue to get served ads for related plane tickets everywhere else you visit on the web. Indeed, while this gives advertisers a lot more detail about how, where and to whom to serve ads, what it does not do is ensure that those advertisers will necessarily be the most relevant matches for you. For example, it’s not a guarantee that the kids’ cereal buyer category will only be used by Kellogg’s or Quaker Oats. It might be a vitamin or toy company, or any kids product company, or any company selling things to parents, or really any company at all that may decide to serve an advert to that particular product category. As with other targeting services on Facebook, a user can opt out of getting ads from specific advertisers, or from targeting altogether.Facebook, Google, and Twitter are planning to use “trust indicators” on news articles posted to their platforms in an effort to combat “fake news.” “These new indicators will appear as symbols in online journalism — attesting how a story was reported, by whom and their credentials, and a media property’s standards — and as pieces of online code to deliver improved search and news results,” reported USA Today. According to the report, “Facebook will add Trust Indicators to its information ‘button’ giving users context about articles in their news feed,” while “Google plans to look at ways to use the indicators,” which could appear next to articles on Google News, Google Search, and other Google services. “We believe that helping people access this important contextual information can help them evaluate if articles are from a publisher they trust, and if the story itself is credible,” declared Facebook Product Manager Andrew Anker on Thursday. Google’s Vice President of News Products also added that they “believe the indicators can help our algorithms better understand authoritative journalism – and help us to better surface it to consumers.” Leading Silicon Valley companies have previously attempted to combat “fake news,” with Facebook rolling out a “related articles” section below popular stories and those deemed to be “fake news.” Charlie Nash is a reporter for Breitbart Tech. You can follow him on Twitter @MrNashington and Gab @Nash, or like his page at Facebook.Leaning over a table stacked with “Resist!” buttons and “Impeach Trump” stickers, Kathy Harrington pointed to the offending spot. “It’s probably still there somewhere,” she said. Harrington, 56, was inviting attendees of the annual Musikfest bash in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, to sign up to support progressive causes – and to protest against Donald Trump. Interactions with festival-goers over two busy weekends on Main Street in Bethlehem had been “about 75% positive, about 25% negative, and of that I would say maybe 10% more in-your-face negative,” said Harrington, who was wearing a pink “I stand with Planned Parenthood” T-shirt. And then there was one guy who “just looked at us and spit”, said Sandra Davis, 58, a colleague of Harrington, who pointed out the evidence still evaporating from the pavement. “They feel empowered,” Davis said of Trump supporters since the election. “They’re given voice. The louder and the more vulgar, the better.” Images from the night before of white supremacists carrying torches in Charlottesville, Virginia, were deeply disturbing but not surprising, said another activist, Ginny Atwell. “I think his core base are the true deplorables,” Atwell, 72, said of Trump. “The white supremacists. He’s delivering exactly what they wanted. White male supremacy.” “No women and no minorities,” said Harrington. “And keep everybody else out,” said Atwell. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Kathy Harrington, 56, joins fellow political activists during Musikfest in Bethlehem. Photograph: Mark Makela for the Guardian Whatever it is that might be changing about America under Donald Trump, it seems, an improvement in the quality of political discourse in reflexively moderate places like Northampton County, Pennsylvania, is not part of it. Once the home of the country’s second-biggest steel manufacturer, Bethlehem is the Democratic heart of a region that may be turning more Republican – unless it isn’t. The county voted twice for Barack Obama before falling for Trump. The Guardian has been reporting from the area over the last eight months to test the political winds and to gauge whether voters here feel that the Trump presidency is living up to its promise. The current national turbulence, and Trump’s role in it – with his reluctance to call out white supremacists in Charlottesville and his saber-rattling over North Korea – has laid bare local divisions. Trump supporters generally cheer the president’s attack-dog instincts, while critics say Trump’s character and style have emboldened violent expression and created flare-ups of racial and ideological tensions locally. Down the street from Harrington’s table, Bill Kuzman, 65, who grew up in the area, was watching a youthful blues act perform. Wearing an NRA cap and a tropical shirt, Kuzman said he thought the president’s aggressive rhetoric on North Korea – “locked and loaded”, “fire and fury” – was “absolutely great.” “I’m glad he’s in there right now,” Kuzman said. “Sometimes you got to smack the bully. Like in school. I don’t know how things are going to pan out, but if Korea does something to us, I don’t think he’s going to think twice about going in, and I support that.” But Kuzman was not a foreign policy voter. “From my understanding and research on Trump, he does believe in Christian values,” Kuzman said. “And he does not believe in abortion, and he does not believe in gay marriages. To me those are the top three issues. I don’t care who is running.” Harrington, the progressive activist, said she’d heard that kind of line from other Trump supporters. “One person said, ‘I’m really religious and that’s why I voted for Trump’,” said Harrington. “Which doesn’t make any sense at all, because he’s like, the exact opposite of any Christian thing you could ever think of.” ‘He speaks to the common man’ Facebook Twitter Pinterest Oliviamarie Staniec, nine, holds her eight-month-old sister, Pearl, at the Northampton County 4-H Fair. Photograph: Mark Makela for the Guardian Oliviamarie Staniec guided her spring heifer to the middle of the show ring. The nine-year-old had a holster for her grooming brush, a show stick a foot taller than she was, and a side ponytail. She stopped her animal and hooked one of its shanks to line up its legs. Her careful eyes followed a judge with a cowboy hat and a belt buckle as he looked the calf over. “She did a very nice job as far as clipping on this animal. Did a very nice job squaring those legs,” said the judge over a public address system. “Let’s give a hand to these young ladies out here. They’re doing a really nice job.” The dozens of spectators at the Northampton county 4-H Round Up in Nazareth, Pennsylvania, on Saturday applauded as the contestants led their calves back to a shed where older participants were brushing, watering and bedding their animals. Later in the day, there would be judging for rabbits and baked goods and crafts. Oliviamarie’s mother, Dominique Staniec, a sixth-generation farmer, said she had gotten her family involved in 4-H as a way of reinforcing the values of work, responsibility and fair competition. “People don’t respect each other in America anymore,” said Staniec, 39. “Even kids, they’re running rampant, there’s no discipline. And there’s all these lazy freeloaders – I could go on. Look, we have our kids working. They are very proud. And not everybody gets a ribbon. They have to win a ribbon.” For the first time in her life in November, Staniec had voted in a presidential election – for Trump. What was the appeal? “His whole thing,” Staniec said. “He was the one. I really believe this country needs to be run like a business, not like a donation center.” If there had been any Democratic organizers at the Northampton 4-H event, they might have had to seek out the refrigerator full of prize-winning pies for solace. Many of the voters in the crowd said they could, in principle, back a candidate from either party, but most of them said they were sticking by Trump. “I don’t vote party lines, I vote for the person,” said Joyce Ludwig, a consultant in the medical device industry who is “over 50 but under 60”. “The bottom line was, I could not ever vote for Hillary.” “I feel like the parties have changed over the years,” said Dennis Koehler, 39, a farmer and a registered Democrat whose parents were likewise Democrats but who said he had always voted Republican. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Dennis Koehler: ‘I feel like the parties have changed over the years.’ Photograph: Mark Makela for the Guardian “The Republicans were the rich ones and your Democrats were the hard-working man. Now it seems like the Democrats are the ones looking for the free handouts and the Republicans are the ones doing the work.” As he spoke, Koehler, a mild-mannered mile from the caricature that sometimes circulates of the angry Trump supporter, held Pearl, his eight-month-old daughter, with Staniec, his fiancee. He listed his top issues of concern as commodity prices, fertilizer prices, fuel costs, health insurance, liability insurance and environmental regulations. “My brother and I are the ninth generation in our family to be on that farm, and we really don’t have any plans to change,” he said. “It’s a piece of history. Our family was there before this country was a country.” Koehler said he thought Trump was doing fine so far. “It’s going to take time before you’re really going to see real improvements in anything,” he said. “Whether you’re talking about imports, exports, the general economy. It takes time. But I think there’s progress being made.” That kind of patience is not uncommon among Trump supporters, whose experience of the political moment can seem placid, in a world of headlines that have for many people induced a feeling closer to panic. “I think it’s all about personality and character,” said Ludwig, explaining Trump’s appeal. “He says what he means. It’s not like you hear all these flowery words and then you’re going: ‘Now, what did he say?’ He speaks to the common man.” ‘Democrats need a stronger sense of mission’ Facebook Twitter Pinterest Attendees listen during Musikfest. Photograph: Mark Makela for the Guardian Sixty years ago, John P Miller was in the US army and stationed on the Korean peninsula when a company of North Koreans crossed the border under cover of a typhoon. “They got 75 miles before we caught up with them,” said Miller, 82. “They just surrendered. They were surrounded, totally. It was only one company. But it scared the living daylights out of us.” In retirement from a career in accounting, Miller runs a sheep and chicken farm in Bethlehem township with his wife, Jacquie, 79. After some initial misgivings about Trump, the couple had voted for him and remain supportive, blaming Congress for the non-fulfillment so far of large chunks of the president’s agenda. But the army veteran called Trump’s burly rhetoric in the confrontation with Kim Jong-un “questionable”. Miller wondered whether Trump might do something to project military force without increasing the risks of a cataclysmic escalation. “The question is whether he should just keep quiet,” Miller said. “Think the things he’s saying, but not say it.” That was out of the question for Cheech Wagner, 59, Staniec’s mother. “We need to kick his ass,” she said, referring to Kim. “It’s about time. It’s about time. Because sooner or later – the guy is a nut. Some people think Trump is, but let me tell you, he’s putting his foot down. “We need somebody with a strong backbone.” Back at her table at Musikfest, Harrington, the activist, was also talking about the need for political backbone – not in the White House, but in the ranks of the local and national Democratic leadership, if the party hopes to turn the political tide in places like Northampton. Facebook Twitter Pinterest A residence displays an anti-Trump sign on the front lawn during Musikfest. Photograph: Mark Makela for the Guardian “They need to be more organized, they need to have a stronger sense of mission,” Harrington said. “We don’t want to say we’re Democrats, we want to say we’re progressives. And there’s a lot of old-school people in there, and they’re saying that’s treasonous, and that we should stick to the old-school values. But none of that stuff’s working the way it used to. “We’ve got to revamp how we think about politics now. And there’s a lot of Democrats who don’t want to do that.” Standing by Trump In the days following the violence in Charlottesville, the president gave a series of statements culminating in a news conference on Tuesday in which he defended people who took part in the far-right rally and seemed to draw a moral equivalence between white supremacist marchers and the protesters who confronted them. “You had some very bad people in that group,” Trump said of the white supremacists, “but you also had people that were very fine people on both sides.” He added: “I think there’s blame on both sides,.” The president’s comments, which came at the end of three days of White House statements of various temperatures, prompted military generals, elected Republicans, and the former presidents Bush to issue strongly worded statements of condemnation of the KKK and other white supremacist groups. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Children dance to the Minx, a Kinks tribute band, during Musikfest. Photograph: Mark Makela for the Guardian “Mr President... Your words are dividing Americans, not healing them,” said the South Carolina Republican senator Lindsey Graham. But a prominent grassroots Trump supporter in Northampton county refused all criticism of the president on the issue. The media was twisting Trump’s words, said Tom Carroll, a criminal defense lawyer and a vice-chairman of the local Tea Party who traces his ancestry to a member of the Union army and said he did not mind Confederate monuments coming down around the country. “I think he said it pretty powerfully,” Carroll said of Trump’s criticism of neo-Nazis. “No matter what he does, you people are going to say he’s not doing enough. You people with these questions are going to destroy our nation. You are bringing us to revolution and civil war, because of the absurdity where you are saying that no matter what he does, it isn’t good enough.” Carroll said Republicans who put out statements tacitly criticizing the president were part of a “political establishment” bent on destroying Trump, who he said had been better on the issue of race and racism than Obama, who Carroll said had not done enough to condemn the killer of five police officers in Dallas, Texas, last year. “This is the establishment from both parties who don’t like the fact that their apple cart is being turned over, and the truth about their corruption is being let out all over the world,” said Carroll. “And they don’t like it, and they’re going to do anything they can to destroy the man who is shedding the light of truth on their corruption.” Sign up for regular email dispatches throughout the year to hear from Tom and the people of Northampton CountyOne of the few remaining "Shanahan guys" remaining on the roster, Jacob Burney is reportedly not coming back to coach for the Washington Redskins next year. Burney coached with Mike Shanahan with the Denver Broncos from 2002-2008 and followed him to the Redskins when he signed here in 2010. Burney has been coaching the Defensive Line since then. He survived the coaching purge following the 2013 season along with DC Jim Haslett, and remained on the payroll until a new DC had the chance to assess the staff. Yesterday it was reported that OLB/DL coach Brian Baker was not coming back, today it is Burney. Joe Barry is currently at the Senior Bowl practices with the rest of the Redskins brass. Many coaches who are looking for positions with teams network in Mobile, and Barry likely has people already in mind for the positions that are vacated. ESPN's John Keim has heard speculation that ILB Kirk Olivadotti could be the only member of the current defensive staff that is retained. The Redskins also reportedly really like DBs coach Raheem Morris, but his future with the team is not confirmed until it's confirmed. Three sources have either told or confirmed to @ESPNRadio980 that #Redskins DL Coach Jacob Burney (hired in 2010) will not be coming back. — Chris Russell (@Russellmania980) January 22, 2015 Like I tweeted yesterday: talk among some assistants was that possibly only Olivadotti would return. Now baker, burney out. Morris? We'll c — John Keim (@john_keim) January 22, 2015 [UPDATE: 1:41 pm 1/22/15] Mike Jones is confirming that Burney will not return, no news on other defensive coachesStan is losing control. The phantom realm brings arcane hexes into a pulsing neon reality, where demons fight in packs and use every trick they have to break your defense. Throw spells and traps mid-combo, ride the edge of control and chaos in this fresh take on action combat. You are your own worst enemy in Phantom Trigger. Story You play as Stan, a white-collar middle-class worker living an ordinary life that gets disrupted by a mysterious event. Discover a brand new world and connect the dots along a branching story through neon-demonic worlds. Phantom Trigger has 4 alternate endings. Gameplay Merging elements from slasher, RPG, and rogue-like genres, Phantom Trigger takes a rich combo system and builds on it, with trapping and freezing enemies, herding groups, burning bosses and dashing from one combo to the next. FeaturesProof-of-stake voting is a superb idea. Its potential is much wider than resolving the specific blocksize limit question. However, I don't believe it is right for Bitcoin. Bitcoin can't adopt major changes easily, if at all. An altcoin supporting proof-of-stake voting could allow continuous voting on the block reward(inflation rate), transaction fee, awarding bounties, hashing algorithm parameters, etc. The Bitcoin model has been to have a genius choose all these parameters correctly 5 years ago. That's worked well, but it is inflexible. A proof-of-stake voting model would trust the owners of a currency to modify the parameters as the currency and environment evolved. I trust the owners of a currency to vote in a way that strengthens the currency they own. Owner's interests are perfectly aligned with the long-term success of a currency. I'd like to see an altcoin where the owners decide monetary policy through proof-of-stake voting. Ah a man after my own heart. I couldn't agree more.You should check out the thread on netcoin which is an ambitious plan to implement some of these principles. I'm pretty sure this is going to be an iterative process (e.g.. think of ppcoin as the first several iterations).Atlas Tania Sánchez, excandidata de Izquierda Unida a la Comunidad de Madrid, y Pedro del Cura, alcalde Rivas-Vaciamadrid, han sido hoy imputados por un juzgado de Arganda del Rey tras una denuncia presentada en enero por el Partido Popular y admitida a trámite a mediados de marzo. En la querella se les acusa presumiblemente de prevaricación, malversación y tráfico de influencias por el caso Aúpa. El Ayuntamiento de Rivas otorgó, entre 2002 y 2008, contratos por 1,4 millones de euros a Héctor Sánchez, hermano de la exaspirante. El padre de los Sánchez, Raúl -también imputado- era concejal todos esos años y no se inhibió en las votaciones. Tampoco lo hizo en la última adjudicación a esta cooperativa sociocultural la propia Tania por un valor de 137.000 euros. También han sido imputadas Abril Barceló y Yolanda Pérez, las dos socias del hermano de Tania Sánchez que abandonaron la cooperativa para convertirse en funcionarias del Ayuntamiento. Desde sus nuevos puestos -sacaron unas oposiciones que se autoconvocó Del Cura- firmaban los concursos a los que se presentaba Héctor. El 22 de junio están llamados a declarar Del Cura y las dos fundadoras de Aúpa. Y al día siguiente los tres miembros de la familia Sánchez. PP: "Esto demuestra que no eran fuegos de artificio" Jesús González Espartero, cabeza de lista del PP en Rivas -el partido que presentó la querella-, expresaba esta tarde su "alegría” por la imputación: “Esto demuestra que hay sustancia. No como decía Tania Sánchez de que era una campaña contra ella para terminar con su candidatura. Que era una querella política para darnos publicidad”. Desde febrero el PP pide la dimisión del alcalde Pedro del Cura y el popular aspira a que ahora este no se presente a la reelección. “La pelota está ahora en el tejado de Podemos. ¿Qué va a hacer Pablo Iglesias? ¿Hay distintos tipos de imputados? ¿La va a tratar como a Ana Mato?’”, se pregunta González Espartero, especulando con la idea de que Sánchez vaya en la lista de Podemos en las generales. En este momento, según el popular, IU Rivas negocia posibles pactos con Podemos, PSOE y Ciudadanos para gobernar el municipio tras perder la mayoría absoluta. “La ciudadanía ha querido que nosotros estemos en la oposición. Pero yo espero que el resto de partidos pacten para echar a IU que lleva 21 años en el poder”. A mediados de enero el PP se querelló contra los hoy imputados. Como entre ellos estaba Tania Sánchez, por entonces diputada regional de IU y por lo tanto aforada, el partido interpuso la querella ante el Tribunal Superior de Justicia de Madrid. Pero al abandonar esta su escaño y la coalición, el TSJM se inhibió a favor de un juzgado de Arganda del Rey. Tanto Tania como Raúl Sánchez negaron siempre que supiesen que su hermano e hijo fuese el gestor de la cooperativa a la que el Ayuntamiento otorgaba contratos. Incluso aunque trascendió que la propia exdiputada recibió clases de canto y batería. Del Cura, esos años concejal de Juventud, es el único que reconoció ante una comisión de investigación que conocía los vínculos familiares del administrador de Aúpa. Ambos firmaban los contratos por lo que no podía negarlo. La imputación de Pedro del Cura puede suponer que tenga que abandonar la Alcaldía. Del Cura ha ganado por muy poco en las elecciones y comienzan ahora las negociaciones con otros partidos para formar Gobierno. Rivas Puede, la candidatura de Podemos en la localidad, ha tenido un resultado muy parecido y no está dispuesto a gobernar con alguien imputado. Además, el código interno de IU no le permite mantenerse como cabeza de lista de IU en Rivas. Además, Del Cura impidió que una sección de IU contraria a él, en parte por el caso Aúpa, se presentase a las elecciones municipales bajo el nombre de Rivas x la Izquierda. El regidor notificó a la Junta de Alcalá de Henares que el nombre del partido no estaba inscrito en el Ministerio de Interior -un error solucionable- y la candidatura se malogró. En ella estaba el anterior alcalde, José Masa, padre político de Del Cura. Tania Sánchez finalmente no se sumó a la propuesta de Podemos a la Comunidad de Madrid y ha trabajado por candidaturas de "unidad popular" en otros sitios. La noche de las elecciones el líder de Podemos. Pablo Iglesias -que había defendido la inocencia de Sánchez ante los medios- alabó su labor en Twitter. De candidata de IU a investigada 2001. Cuatro animadoras socioculturales constituyen la cooperativa Aúpa. Al año siguiente, ganan tres concursos por 164.000 euros. 2003. En diciembre la empresa cambia su sede social a la casa de Raúl Sánchez, padre del nuevo administrador único, Héctor Sánchez. 2004. Aúpa consigue contratos por 553.734 euros. A partir de ese cambio, las cuantías se dispararon. Además de contratos de música, también los había para el programa de verano de la Concejalía de Infancia y Juventud, un proyecto de educación de barrio o la red de centros juveniles. 2008. Tania Sánchez no se inhibe en la adjudicación de un contrato a su hermano por 137.000 euros. Es el último que se concede. Al año siguiente Aúpa cierra. Noviembre de 2014. Se destapa el caso Aúpa en los medios y el día 30 ella arrasa en las primarias de IU a la presidencia de la Comunidad de Madrid. Enero de 2015. Tania Sánchez y su padre niegan en una comisión municipal que supiesen que Héctor fuese el administrador de Aúpa. El PP presenta la querella ante el Tribunal Superior de Justicia de Madrid. Febrero. Sánchez abandona IU y su escaño en la Asamblea de Madrid. Al dejar de ser aforada, el caso pasa a un juzgado de Arganda del Rey. Marzo. El juez admite a trámite la querella del PP. Sánchez renuncia a presentarse a las primarias de Podemos para la Comunidad. Mayo. Pedro del Cura pierde la mayoría absoluta en Rivas. 1 de junio. Los seis demandados son imputados. Sigue con nosotros la actualidad de Madrid en Facebook, en Twitter y en nuestro Patio de Vecinos en InstagramFans of the hit TLC show “19 Kids and Counting” were excited to watch daughter Jill Duggar get married in June–but they weren’t expecting to hear she was pregnant just two months later. Duggar and her husband had pledged to remain sexually abstinent until marriage. So, had they violated the pledge? Or was she just sharing the news before the customary 12 weeks most women wait to make sure the baby survives the first trimester, when miscarriages are most likely? Duggar announced a March due date, which means she was married when she became pregnant. She simply was ready to let the world know, telling Page Six: “Understanding that the majority of miscarriages happen within the first trimester, and believing that every life is precious no matter how young, we decided to share our joyful news as soon as we could.” As Bethany Mandel pointed out in The Federalist, it was brave of Duggar to tell the world of her pregnancy so early. But Duggar’s statement yesterday is much more than brave. It demonstrates a genuine respect and acknowledgment of life that those who consider themselves pro-life might want to consider. By validating the humanity of the rapidly growing child in her womb, the outside world was reminded that a distinct human being came into existence at the moment of fertilization, complete with a unique genetic code, fingerprints and personality that never again would exist were this life to end before birth. As the Heritage Foundation’s Sarah Torre wrote, this tiniest of humans is “someone who has inherent value and possesses a right to life”–just like you and I. A friend who recently miscarried twins told me she wished she had opened up about her miscarriage to people instead of bottling it up inside. “I felt their spirits inside me,” she said. It wasn’t just losing the hope of motherhood (it was her first pregnancy), it was the devastating loss of her children, whose souls she felt, whose bodies she nourished, whose heartbeats vibrated within her. More than simply the knowledge of a growing baby, the physical evidence is indisputable. As Mandel wrote: “We have been made to believe that a ‘fetus’ is a ball of cells well beyond when it actually is (it resembles a human, with a heartbeat, just two weeks after a missed period). Arms, legs, and a head are clearly visible on an ultrasound, waving around, just one month in.” Not everyone will be as comfortable as Duggar about sharing pregnancy news so early, but there’s absolutely no reason it should be taboo to do so. In fact, it may help some recognize the truly scientific humanness of unborn babies at every stage of life. And that is a beautiful thing.Pankaj 'escrow.ms' Bhardwaj was arrested by police for participating in a fraud ring that used cloned debit cards to withdraw money from other people's accounts at automated teller machines (archived). Under his forum username escrow.ms, Bhardwaj was a member of the "Default Trust" list used to seed the reputation ratings system on Theymos's Bitcointalk forum. He enjoyed a stellar reputation on that forum as evidenced by a thread on that forum discussing recent developments in the life and times of escrow.ms forum escrow, default trust member, and apparent fiat payment card cloner. Escrow.ms is not the first member of Bitcointalk's default trust list to undergo a sudden transition from trustiness to ignominy. Shortly after the creation of the default trust list, inaugural member member TradeFortress operated node.js based webwallet service Inputs.io for only a few short months before 4,100 Bitcoins disappeared from the service on November 7th, 2013.0 SHARES Share Tweet We now have a clear candidate for Oath Keepers Peace Officer of the Year. In the below video, a true oath-keeping peace officer stands up for the rights of Americans on the Fourth of July, 2015, by dressing down and warning a security guard to not mess with the Constitution that the officer swore an oath to defend. [ot-video type=”youtube” url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdC2wfsNMLg”] In the video, the officer can be heard to say: He Lives Here … Alright? He’s watching fireworks. It’s Independence Day, alright? There’s a Constitution that I swear an oath to, so don’t freaking mess with it with these citizens, you understand me? I know you’re not subjected to the Constitution when it comes to your job, but don’t mess with it. They have a right to their property, they have a right to not be searched by anybody, you understand that? They have a right not to be accosted. He lives here. I swore an oath to the Constitution. I’m not … Don’t mess with it. You understand? Simply OUTSTANDING. This officer is a fantastic example of a true “peace officer” who takes his oath to the Constitution seriously. I am going to nominate him for Oath Keepers Peace Officer of the Year. This is the kind of officer we need on the streets – one who understands his oath, understands the rights of the people, and is committed to defending the Constitution. It appears the officer is dressing down a security guard, not another cop, since he says “I know you’re not subjected to the Constitution when it comes to your job.” Private security guards don’t have to swear an oath as a condition of their employment (though they are still legally liable if they violate citizens’ rights). But it is still OUTSTANDING. What a way to celebrate Independence Day. God bless him and his family. They have reason to be proud of him, and so does his department and community. Please leave a comment in the Youtube video, thanking this officer for laying down the law – the Supreme Law of the Land – to that security guard. This is exactly what all officers need to do, and they need to do it whether they are witnessing abuse by security guards, by other police, or by federal agents, bureaucratic weenies, or politicians – anyone who violates the Constitution and the rights of the people needs a public dressing down like this. I swore an oath to the Constitution. DON’T MESS WITH IT. Understand? Priceless. Go get em.’ For the Republic, Stewart Rhodes “This hand
al on the Theatrical Cut Audio commentary by Kelly, producer Sean McKittrick and actors Drew Barrymore, Jena Malone, Beth Grant, Mary McDonnell, Holmes Osborne, Katharine Ross and James Duval on the Theatrical Cut Audio commentary by Kelly and filmmaker Kevin Smith on the Director’s Cut Brand-new interviews with cast and crew, including Richard Kelly and XXX The Goodbye Place, Kelly’s 1996 short film, which anticipates some of the themes and ideas of his feature films The Donnie Darko Production Diary, an archival documentary charting the film’s production with optional commentary by cinematographer Steven Poster Twenty deleted and alternate scenes with optional commentary by Kelly Archive interviews with Kelly, actors Jake Gyllenhaal, Jena Malone, Drew Barrymore, James Duval, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Holmes Osborne, Noah Wyle and Katharine Ross, producers Sean McKittrick, Nancy Juvonen, Hunt Lowry and Casey La Scala, and cinematographer Steven Poster Three archive featurettes: They Made Me Do It, They Made Me Do It Too and #1 Fan: A Darkomentary Storyboard comparisons B-roll footage Cunning Visions infomercials Music video: Mad World by Gary Jules Galleries Trailers TV spots Exclusive collector’s book containing new writing by Nathan Rabin, Anton Bitel and Jamie Graham, an in-depth interview with Richard Kelly, introduction by Jake Gyllenhaal and contemporary coverage, illustrated with original stills and promotional materials Limited edition packaging featuring new artwork by Candice TrippQuebec politicians have passed a unanimous motion calling on businesses to greet their customers with a simple, warm "bonjour," rather than the "bonjour/hi" often heard in Montreal's shops and restaurants. All 111 MNAs who were present voted in favour on Thursday, including every Liberal MNA. Introduced by the Opposition Parti Québécois, a staunch defender of the French language, the motion "invites all businesses and workers who enter into contact with local and international clients to welcome them warmly with the word 'bonjour.'" The motion, which carries no legal weight, comes after two days of heated debate at the province's National Assembly over the bilingual welcome, bonjour/hi. The greeting is used by many Montreal businesses as a way to signal customers are welcome to speak in either French or English. The debate flared up after census numbers released Wednesday showed a slight drop in French as the main language in the workplace in some parts of Quebec. The PQ's Jean-François Lisée has repeatedly pressed the premier to condemn the use of bonjour/hi, calling it a sign of a creeping bilingualism in Montreal workplaces. After change, Couillard backs motion Premier Philippe Couillard took exception to the original wording of the PQ's motion, which called the bilingual greeting "an irritant." The PQ lifted that term from Quebec's new French language minister, Marie Montpetit, who had used it to describe bonjour/hi during an interview with the French-language TVA news channel last Friday. With the term "irritant" removed from the motion, Couillard said he decided to support the motion because he wanted to affirm the predominance of French. "The sentence that I think was offensive for English-speaking Quebecers was to qualify an English word as an irritant for the population. This being removed, I think it is a very good text," he said. Montrealers weigh in Quebec politicians have passed a unanimous motion calling on businesses to greet their customers with a simple "bonjour," rather than the "bonjour/hi." Here's what you think. 0:55 Reaction on the streets of Montreal was mixed. Some said they prefer the bilingual greeting. "By just saying bonjour, it takes the charm out of Montreal, I think, because we are a bilingual city," said Montrealer Marie Nakhleh. Others told CBC News they understood what the motion was trying to accomplish. "I never saw anything wrong with bonjour/hi, but I get it if they want to uphold their French heritage, which seems like what they're trying to do." Jan Wilson, manager at Sir Winston Churchill pub on Crescent Street, says she doesn't think it was necessary for politicians to pass a motion addressing how customers are greeted. (CBC) Jan Wilson, the manager of Sir Winston Churchill pub on Crescent Street in downtown Montreal, says she's made hiring French-language speakers a priority and thinks the motion is unnecessary. "We're here to service the public, and we want them to feel as comfortable as possible. So if we can switch to their language, English or French, we'll do so."A spokesperson for New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said Saturday that President-elect Donald Trump Donald John TrumpHouse committee believes it has evidence Trump requested putting ally in charge of Cohen probe: report Vietnamese airline takes steps to open flights to US on sidelines of Trump-Kim summit Manafort's attorneys say he should get less than 10 years in prison MORE’s charitable foundation cannot cease operations until an investigation into the organization is complete. Trump announced earlier Saturday that he would dissolve the Donald J. Trump Foundation amid mounting scrutiny over potential conflicts of interests with his business holdings. The foundation has been the subject of an investigation by the New York attorney general's office following reports from The Washington Post that the charity’s funds may have been used to personally benefit Trump. ADVERTISEMENT "The Trump Foundation is still under investigation by this office and cannot legally dissolve until that investigation is complete,” Amy Spitalnick, a spokeswoman for Schneiderman, said in a statement to The Hill. Trump’s transition team did not immediately respond when asked for comment. Spitalnick first gave the statement on Twitter in response to a question from the Post. .@Fahrenthold @realDonaldTrump Foundation still under investigation by @AGSchneiderman, cannot legally dissolve until investigation complete — Amy Spitalnick (@amyspitalnick) December 24, 2016 Over the course of the campaign, the newspaper revealed that Trump had not given the charity any of his own money in a number of years and that he used its funds to buy portraits of himself and other memorabilia. The foundation was also fined by the IRS for making a political donation of $25,000 in support of Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi — a violation of rules governing the use of charity funds. Bondi later declined to pursue an investigation into the now-defunct Trump University and is also now serving on the Trump transition’s executive committee. In a statement Saturday, Trump said that he was dissolving the charity to avoid the appearance of having a conflict of interest, though he has previously said that he would be legally immune from such conflicts as president. “The Foundation has done enormous good works over the years in contributing millions of dollars to countless worthy groups, including supporting veterans, law enforcement officers and children,” Trump said. “However, to avoid even the appearance of any conflict with my role as President I have decided to continue to pursue my strong interest in philanthropy in other ways.”If you have the misfortune of standing within earshot of a Pittsburgh Steelers fan during the next seven days, you will hear him say some really, really dumb stuff. Part of that can't be helped -- the Steelers are Appalachia's Team and native-born fans speak in a distinct hillbilly dialect that's almost impossible for the average American to understand. But even if you can make sense of the Pittsburghese (listen to this really long lecture by a Carnegie Mellon professor trying to explain it to what is presumably the most sophisticated group of students in western Pennsylvania, making excuses for moonshiners in the process) you're liable to hear a few really zany arguments put forth by these proudly undereducated rubes. Here are a few to watch for, along with a few points you might make in reply if you're interested in arguing with an angry hillbilly. Keep in mind these people aren't much for rationality -- they're more likely to, say, skimp on spending a few thousand bucks to extinguish an underground coal fire, instead letting it burn until they have to demolish the entire town. Continue Reading Hey, the Stillers ain't goink get any mur calls from the refs than yinz guys are. We can argue about this season's calls all day, but the fact is, if the Steelers win this Super Bowl, they'll get a lot of assistance from the referees, just as they did in the last two they've played. Bill Leavy, the referee who handed the game to Pittsburgh in 2005, actually apologized for his poor performance last year. Leavy says he expects to take the regrets to his grave. I bet it follows him further than that. Arizonans probably have horrible memories of the jobbing we took. If the Steelers win, they'll have help from the zebras. Sad but true. Dr. Cope would be so proud of this team -- it's classic Steelers football! First of all, legendary Steelers broadcaster Myron Cope didn't even have an honorary doctorate from any accredited university -- he appears to have earned some sort of degree from the University of Pittsburgh, which is more or less a fancy community college -- let alone an actual doctorate so no one should call him that, even in jest. Second, if he can see the team from where he is in the afterlife (they presumably have Cox cable there), he's got to be ashamed of the way Ben Roethlisberger has conducted himself over the last year. And that's just the latest. Ben's a scumbag (who's now, suddenly, talking about God after games), and I'm sure Cope would even see it that way. It's not just that incident or that player, either. There are also rumors about Hines Ward's ill-fated lecherousness involving a porn star who mocked him -- in the post Favre/Woods era, it's nice to see a guy like Aaron Rodgers quietly dating women such as a pretty, talented Tennessee girl and a model/grapefruit heiress. That's how you're supposed to do it. So far Mike Tomlin has done a remarkable job winning with this team, but it's also become clear the team is slowly but surely developing serious character issues, despite what some people want to believe. Yinz guys give dem Stillers fans a hard time but it's all a bunch of jumbo. We're jest like any other football fans. "Jumbo" is what "Stillers" fans call bologna, and it's a staple food in Pittsburgh, served on white bread purchased from the Giant Iggle, maybe with mayonnaise if they're feeling fancy. They love that shit -- and it's why they're not like other football fans. I once called the Steelers "White Trash America's Team" and they are. There's something about the black and yellow -- perhaps it is the black and yellow itself -- that draws food stamp re-sellin', meth-cooking rednecks into the fold. Every team has a few loud, boorish fans; the "Stillers" have a few normal ones. Go into the shittiest dive bar within five miles of your house anywhere in America and start shit-talking the team -- you'll find a guy in jean shorts to argue with. Try the same thing with the Bears, the Patriots or even the Packers -- the percentages won't compare. Dem Stillers got more rangs than anyone -- that's why Pittsburgh's the best! In 1967, the NFL came up with a really great marketing gimmick and started calling its championship game the "Super Bowl." No one outside Pittsburgh considers championships any less impressive if they occurred before that date, but ask a Steelers fan about it and you'll hear that such games are "ancient history" and that "no one cares." The roots of this disconnect run to the fact that, as best I can tell, the average Steelers fan is born to a mother who is 16.2 years old, meaning it really has been like four generations since the Super Bowl started. Also, however, they're covering a deep-seeded insecurity about their pathetic past. For the first 40 years of their existence, the team was a joke. In terms of championships, they're still behind this weekend's opponent, the Packers, as well as the Bears, Giants, and Browns. What does that distinction mean? Those other teams are old money. Class acts, all of them. The Steelers are, in contrast, like the owner of a really, really successful dirtbike dealership. He's got a lot of money, but no one in polite society has much interest in socializing with him, and no one wants him moving into their neighborhood and installing a jacuzzi the size of a small golf-course pond. Just look at a guy like Toby Keith -- the Okie is a lifelong Steelers fan with an album called White Trash With Money -- and you get a pretty good picture of Steeler success. They (and the refs) deserve credit for their championships -- especially the ones in the '70s, which former Steelers players have admitted they did Mark McGwire-style, with the assistance of steroids, a drug the team is largely responsible for having introduced into the league. Should those championships therefore have a big, fat asterisk on them? You be the judge -- just extend the same opinion to the great Barry Bonds. Yoi! Hines Ward is great! Lookata how he blocks them cornerbacks! What a player! It's nice to see Hines' reputation is finally starting to match reality -- he's the NFL's dirtiest player, not some hard-nosed old-time receiver with a bright smile and a heart-warming backstory, as he was too often depicted by the media in years past. Still, he gets off a lot easier than he should. Ward is scum. Actually, scum is too nice a word for him. He's a cheap-shot artist and a cheater. And when he does actually take a lickin', he cries about it like a little girl and asks the league to suspend the guy who tackled him. Ward fits in nicely with the Steelers and their fans.Show full PR text BlackBerry Curve 9315 Smartphone Introduced By T-Mobile and RIM T-Mobile's most affordable BlackBerry smartphone provides productivity tools and features to keep customers connected BELLEVUE, Wash. and WATERLOO, ON – Jan. 3, 2013 – T-Mobile USA, Inc. and Research In Motion (RIM) (NASDAQ: RIMM; TSX: RIM) today announced the most affordable BlackBerry® smartphone on T-Mobile's nationwide network – the BlackBerry® Curve™ 9315. Powered by the BlackBerry® 7.1 operating system with 3G connectivity, the sleek new smartphone is easy-to-use and provides tools that enable customers to stay connected to the people and information that matter most. "At T-Mobile, our goal is to delight customers. The new BlackBerry Curve 9315 will delight customers with unprecedented value while also allowing them to combine their mobile business and personal use in one great device," said Brad Duea, senior vice president of product management at T-Mobile. "The Curve 9315 is the most affordable BlackBerry smartphone on our nationwide network and provides our customers with a wide variety of productivity and social features to keep them connected and make their mobile lives easier." "We're pleased to work with T-Mobile to bring the BlackBerry Curve 9315 to customers," said Richard Piasentin, managing director for the U.S. at Research In Motion. "The Curve 9315 is designed to make it incredibly easy to stay connected with friends, family and coworkers and will be popular with customers upgrading to a smartphone for the first time, as well as existing Curve customers looking for a step up in speed and functionality." Combining an intuitive interface with a QWERTY keyboard, the BlackBerry Curve 9315 features built-in Wi-Fi® connectivity for voice and data, enabling customers to access the information they need when and where they need it, and Wi-Fi calling, allowing calls and messages over an available Wi-Fi network. With a dedicated BlackBerry® Messenger (BBM™) key, preloaded apps for Facebook® and Twitter® and the Social Feeds 2.0 app, customers can easily interact with their friends, coworkers and social networks whether it's instant messaging, posting or tweeting. The new BlackBerry Curve 9315 offers a 3.2-megapixel camera with LED flash and digital zoom as well as video recording capabilities. Customers also have the ability to geo-tag the location of their pictures by utilizing the smartphone's built-in GPS. In addition, the smartphone features a microSD card slot for up to 32GB of additional media storage and a built-in FM radio letting customers tune in to local FM stations. With the BlackBerry App World™ storefront, customers have exclusive access to a wide range of apps, allowing them to enhance their smartphone experience with entertainment, personalization and productivity apps of their choosing. The BlackBerry Curve 9315 will be available in an exclusive pre-sale for T-Mobile business customers beginning January 16 and is expected to be available in T-Mobile retail stores, via www.T-Mobile.com, and with select dealers and national retailers beginning January 23, 2013. For well-qualified customers, the Curve 9315 will require a $49.99 out-of-pocket down payment and 20 equal monthly payments of $10 per month via T-Mobile's Equipment Installment Plan (EIP)1, with a two-year service agreement and qualifying T-Mobile Value voice and data plan. Customers may also purchase the Curve 9315 for $49.99 after a $50 mail-in rebate card, with a two-year service agreement and qualifying T-Mobile Classic voice and data plan.2 1EIP: On approved credit and 0% APR. Qualifying plan required for duration of EIP agreement; account must be in good standing. Available only in participating locations; not available in Wash., D.C. 2All prices, taxes and fees additional. For more information on T-Mobile products and services, visit http://www.T-Mobile.com. For more information about the BlackBerry Curve 9315 smartphone, please visit http://us.blackberry.com/smartphones/blackberry-curve-9310-9315.html.In reaction to Bruce Jenner's transition and Mike Huckabee’s controversial comments on transgenderism and gender-neutral bathrooms, a panel of CNN experts ripped the former Arkansas governor for his supposed insensitivity. The June 2 edition of OutFront featured Daily Beast editor-in-chief John Avlon and HLN host Dr. Drew Pinsky, and they both lambasted Huckabee repeatedly by insinuating that he doesn’t view transgender people as human beings. Pinsky asserted that Huckabee’s comments have now “bled over into misogyny and sexism in the course of his being insensitive on these issues.” He added, “[t]he fact is that there’s a human being here, these are human beings that deserve sensitive care and the best possible care by experts, not attack by their politicians.” Avlon simply reiterated Pinsky’s point and argued that Huckabee was making these comments to get laughs: I think the problem with this sound bite is that he's clearly using it as a laugh line. And as Dr. Drew said, you are dealing with real human beings here and you don't like to see politicians divide and ridicule for political gain or simply to play to the base. The larger point, of course, is that we’re undergoing a sea change in this country in a gay civil rights moment that a lot – the majority of Americans now support marriage, something that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. After Burnett played a clip in which Huckabee explained the possible dangers of having gender-neutral bathrooms, Pinsky implied that the 2016 presidential candidate doesn’t really understand the issue: Look, they're confusing gender identity with sexual orientation. He's not helping the process. As we're saying, there's a cultural moment here when these issues are coming to the fore. People want to be sensitive, they want to get their head around – they want to understand this. And this sounds very much like the kind of, sort of, frankly knuckleheaded notions that people had about gays and lesbians not that long ago. And this is the same phenomenon. Should we not allow a gay man into a man's room either, Mr. Huckabee, is that also what you're saying? I mean, for goodness sake. Burnett – seemingly in wholehearted agreement with the HLN doctor – suggested that Huckabee thinks “ if you're transgender or gay, right, that you're somehow some sort of a predator.” Pinsky agreed and noted that Huckabee’s rhetoric “is being used for political gain, and it’s actually harming people.” The relevant portion of the transcript is below.You may have never heard of it, but if you are a Chrome user, chances are you’ve used Google’s QUIC protocol already. As Google disclosed this week, about half of all requests from Chrome to Google’s servers are now served over QUIC. So what’s the big deal here? QUIC is Google’s experimental, low-latency Internet transportation protocol over UDP, a protocol that is often used by gaming, streaming media and VoIP services. The name ‘QUIC’ stands for Quick UDP Internet Connection. UDP’s (and QUIC’s) counterpart in the protocol world is basically TCP (which in combination with the Internet Protocol (IP) makes up the core communication language of the Internet). UDP is significantly more lightweight than TCP, but in return, it features far fewer error correction services than TCP. This means that the sending server isn’t constantly talking to the receiving server to check if packages arrived and if they arrived in the right order, for example. That’s why UDP is great for gaming services. For these services, you want low overhead to reduce latency and if the server didn’t receive your latest mouse movement, there’s no need to spend a second or two to fix that because the action has already moved on. You wouldn’t want to use it to request a website, though, because you couldn’t guarantee that all the data would make it. With QUIC, Google aims to combine some of the best features of UDP and TCP with modern security tools. On a typical secure TCP connection, it typically takes two or three round-trips before the browser can actually start receiving data. Using QUIC, a browser can immediately start talking to a server it has talked to before. QUIC also introduces a couple of new features like congestion control and automatic re-transmission, making it more reliable that pure UDP. With SPDY, which later became the basis for the HTTP/2 standard, Google already developed another alternative protocol that had many of the same goals as QUIC, but HTTP/2 still runs over TCP and still runs into some of the same latency cost. It’s reasonable to ask why Google doesn’t just work on improving TCP instead then. The problem here, the company points out, is that TCP support is often built directly into operating system kernels — and that’s not something Google has any control over. “QUIC allows us to test and experiment with new ideas, and to get results sooner,” the team writes in explaining its decision. “We are hopeful that QUIC features will migrate into TCP and TLS if they prove effective.” Given how many Windows XP installs are still out there, it’s obviously not something that will happen overnight. If Google designed a whole new protocol, then all of the machines that make up the backbone of the Internet would also have to understand it — but they already understand UDP. Google says that it has seen about a three percent improvement in mean page load times with QUIC on Google Search. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but you have to remember that Google Search is already about as optimized as possible. Other sites — and especially latency-heavy web apps — will likely see better improvements. Users who connect to YouTube over QUIC report about 30 percent fewer rebuffers when watching videos and because of QUIC’s improved congestion control and loss recover over UDP, users on some of the slowest connection also see improved page load times with QUIC. Google says it plans to propose HTTP2-over-QUIC to the IETF as a new Internet standard in the future. In some ways, this mirrors Google’s work with SPDY. There, too, the company first prototyped the protocol using Chrome and its own servers and then later proposed it as the basis of the new version of HTTP. If you want to see if your connection to Chrome uses QUIC, by the way, here is a browser extension that can tell you and you can find all the details about Chrome’s QUIC usage under the net-internals flag (chrome://net-internals/#quic).According to Steve Jobs, we've already entered the post-PC world thanks to the iPad, the iPhone, and other non-computer computing devices. But have we? Sure, musicians and artists might get by doing their work on these newfangled devices, but what about those of us who lack the talent to doodle New Yorker covers for a living, forcing us to perform more "normal" jobs? When I reviewed the original iPad in the spring of 2010, I wrote part of the review on the iPad itself. At that time, however, apps for the iPad were few; developers didn't yet have a full grasp of what it meant to develop software for such a large non-laptop device. I wrote the section of the review in the iPad's default Notes app—text only, of course—and did the formatting work, the images, and the content management system (CMS) wrangling on a traditional computer, as any sane person would. But both native and Web apps have come quite a long way over the last 17 months, causing us to wonder: is it now truly possible to do a full day's worth of work for Ars using nothing but an iPad? The initial proposition seemed crazy. I was sure it was not possible to work this way. My job as a writer and editor here at Ars depends on (too much) serious multitasking with multiple open windows. I wasn't sure I'd even be able to successfully write full articles with proper formatting, links, images, and HTML using only iPad apps. And let's not even talk about the Ars CMS—many of us at Ars have attempted to use it from our iPhones in the past; it has always ended in tears. So imagine my surprise when a day on the iPad actually worked. My tools My job changes on an hourly basis, and can only be described as "managed chaos." I typically use either a 27" iMac or an 11" MacBook Air, depending on what I'm doing or where I need to be. My essential software tools include a fully functional Web browser, an IM client for communicating with writers and other editors, some way to access IRC (the "office" part of our virtual office lives), an e-mail client, a Twitter client, an RSS reader, and a simple writing app that can export clean HTML. As those of you with iPads already know, Safari works well for Web browsing; Mail, despite its various annoyances, is okay for getting the e-mail job done. I had extremely poor experiences in the past dealing with the official AIM app for iPad, so on high recommendation from Twitter, I purchased the $9.99 Beejive IM client for iPad. A Web-based IRC solution already existed for me thanks to Ars developer Lee "Quick Draw" Aylward, whose Alice client is so useful to those who switch devices regularly that it has become my main IRC client on my "real" computers, too. (The benefit here over another client—even Web-based ones—is that Alice keeps you connected even while you're not on the page, so you can easily load it up to see what's been going on while you were away doing other things.) Twitter was easy—I just used the official Twitter client for iPad—and I decided to forego RSS, because who really wants to sift through thousands of RSS items every hour of the day on any device? The biggest challenge was finding a writing app to suit my—and the CMS's—tastes. On recommendation from former Ars writer David Chartier, I decided to try out the $4.99 Writing Kit, which boasts Markdown support and clean HTML exports to my iPad clipboard or e-mail. Shockingly, these features are already hard enough to find in a normal Mac app (I use MacJournal for this purpose under OS X), so I was pleased to find something that at least seemed to offer what I wanted on the iPad. My rule was that I couldn't touch a real computer all day, though I did use a wireless hardware keyboard with the iPad via Bluetooth. I figured if Apple allows it without jailbreaking, I could allow it too. I usually have no problem typing on the iPad's onscreen keyboard for short items, but if I was going to work all day on the thing, I needed the screen space and typing speed that a hardware keyboard would offer. With that, I was off.Larry Hagman, who played the conniving and mischievous J.R. Ewing on the TV show Dallas, died Friday at Medical City in Dallas, of complications from his recent battle with cancer, his family said. He was 81. “Larry was back in his beloved Dallas re-enacting the iconic role he loved most,” his family said in a written statement. “Larry’s family and close friends had joined him in Dallas for the Thanksgiving holiday. When he passed, he was surrounded by loved ones. It was a peaceful passing, just as he had wished for. The family requests privacy at this time.” The role of J.R. transformed Mr. Hagman’s life. He rocketed from being a merely well-known TV actor on I Dream of Jeannie and the son of Broadway legend Mary Martin, to the kind of international fame known only by the likes the Beatles and Muhammad Ali. Mr. Hagman made his home in California with his wife of 59 years, the former Maj Axelsson. Despite obvious physical frailty, he gamely returned to Dallas to film season one and part of season two of TNT’s Dallas reboot. Friends were in shock Friday, especially those who saw him only days ago. But those close to him say he knew the end was coming and he was glad to have his family in town for Thanksgiving. For Dallasites, Mr. Hagman’s recent return to film the TNT show was a pleasant reminiscence of the days when Dallas was the biggest TV program in the world, seen by an estimated 300 million people in 57 countries. Mr. Hagman lived part of the year in a penthouse at the Mansion on Turtle Creek, now known as the J.R. Ewing Suite, and the actor became part of the fabric of the city — attending polo matches with restaurateur Norman Brinker, unwinding over cocktails with oilman Jake Hamon and his wife, Nancy, at their Bluffview home or dining with Mansion on Turtle Creek owner Caroline Rose Hunt, whose oil-rich family was the nonfiction version of the Ewings. “Hagman in his role as J.R. was mythic, and as a human he was a hard-working ambassador for Dallas and the underdog,” Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings said Thursday night. “I had spent a couple of evenings with him recently … and he always pitched in to help the city.” Mr. Hagman lit the scheming J.R. with his own innate sense of fun and mischief. “From the moment we met him, he started the entire ball rolling,” said his TV ex-wife Linda Gray (a.k.a. Sue Ellen Ewing) last month at a fundraiser in Preston Hollow for the Larry Hagman Foundation, which promotes creative arts education for children in the Dallas area. “He came into a room in Burbank. He walked in with a saddlebag filled with ice and bottles of champagne. That is how we had our first read-through of the original script. That bonded us to this wonderful man.” In September, Ms. Gray played host to Mr. Hagman for an 81st birthday lunch at Café Pacific in Highland Park Village. Throughout the summer of 1980, the world hung on the question “Who shot J.R.?” The ultimate TV cliffhanger aired on March 21, 1980, when an unseen assailant shot J.R. Ewing twice. As everyone waited to find out who the shooter was, Mr. Hagman had an epiphany that would pave the way for TV giants such as Jerry Seinfeld and the cast of Friends to get a larger share of the profits from their shows. In his memoir, Hello Darlin’, Mr. Hagman said, “Ronald Reagan was campaigning against Jimmy Carter, American hostages were being held in Iran, Polish shipyard workers were on strike, and all anyone wanted to know was, who shot J.R.?” The world was filled with J.R. T-shirts, coffee mugs and bumper stickers. “Everyone was making a windfall from J.R. except me,” he said. He threatened to leave the show if his contract were not renegotiated. After months of tense negotiations, he was finally given his $100,000 per episode asking price. Originally from Weatherford, Mr. Hagman was born to 17-year-old Mary Martin and 21-year-old Benjamin Hagman, an attorney. “How hillbilly can you get?” Ms. Martin later said. The marriage lasted five years, and Mr. Hagman was raised largely by his maternal grandmother while his mother became a famous stage actress. Mr. Hagman also worked as a stage actor before appearing in films such as Ensign Pulver and the Otto Preminger epic In Harm’s Way. But he first became a star when he was cast as an Air Force officer who falls for a genie in a bottle played by Barbara Eden in I Dream of Jeannie. It was a major hit that fizzled, according to Mr. Hagman, after he and Jeannie were wed on the show. “Once they got married,” he said, “nobody cared anymore.” When Dallas debuted as a five-part miniseries in April 1978, J.R. was merely a supporting character. But Mr. Hagman’s dazzling portrayal soon earned him bigger and bigger pieces of the story line until he was the star of the show. "All of us at TNT are deeply saddened at the news of Larry Hagman's passing," the cable network said in a statement. "He was a wonderful human being and an extremely gifted actor. We will be forever thankful that a whole new generation of people got to know and appreciate Larry through his performance as J.R. Ewing." A statement issued by Warner Bros. on behalf of the Dallas executive producers, cast and crew praised Mr. Hagman as "a giant, a larger-than-life personality whose iconic performance as J.R. Ewing will endure as one of the most indelible in entertainment history. He truly loved portraying this globally recognized character, and he leaves a legacy of entertainment, generosity and grace." Despite the enormous cultural impact of the J.R. character, Mr. Hagman refused to be defined by the part. He continued to show his acting chops with role such as the H.L. Hunt/Clint Murchison composite character in Oliver Stone’s Nixon and as Gov. Fred Picker in Primary Colors. Michael Cain, founder of the Dallas International Film Festival, was a close friend of Mr. Hagman’s. The Dallas star appeared at a festival event in 2011, handing out awards to up-and-coming high-school filmmakers. “I was blessed to … witness his heart that was so full of passion and charity and mischievousness,” Mr. Cain said. “His friendship will be missed by many, including me. Recently on a trip to Santa Monica, I was initiated into a celebration, a ritual that Larry performed with guests as the sun set over the ocean, where we shouted out to the sun as the final sliver passed over the hills. … I know he would want us to stand and shout and celebrate his life and the passion with which he loved and lived it.” In addition to his wife, Mr. Hagman is survived by a daughter, Kristina Hagman; a son, Preston Hagman; and five granddaughters. Staff writer Robert Wilonsky contributed to this report.27 June 2014 / Barron’s – In the past four years, no asset class has done as well as Bitcoin – and it’s not even close. Since the beginning of 2010 to the end of 2013, it literally had a return of one million times capital invested, growing from 1,000 Bitcoins to the dollar to 1,000 dollars for a single Bitcoin. Naturally, this trajectory has been anything but a straight line, with a sharp boom-bust cycle in 2011 (skyrocketing from $1 to $30 very quickly, followed by a slow, steady decline back to $1) and two smaller roller coaster rides in the past 18 months (from $13 to $266 then back to $50 in early 2013, then the most recent run-up from $100 to $1100 in less than 90 days this past winter, followed by a series of sharp drops down to its latest cyclical nadir at $380 a little over a month ago). Today, the price has stabilized (for now) and has been trading in a more relatively narrow range of $550 to $620 for the past few weeks. Most of the price crashes had nothing to do with the adoption or usefulness of bitcoin, but of regulatory uncertainty and/or technological problems with a private company in Japan, Mt. Gox, which for many years was its largest exchange. Just as the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers and bailouts of AIG and Citibank sent shockwaves through the U.S. economy but did not collapse the dollar, so too did Mt. Gox’s incompetence in dealing with growth, technical and legal issues eventually lead to that company’s demise, but not bitcoin’s. Today, dozens of better run Bitcoin exchanges, most with professional management and millions in venture backing, are highly unlikely to repeat the same mistakes. Bitcoin represents a fundamental change not only in the financial world, but in technology. The underlying algorithms that allow Bitcoins to be created but not duplicated, as well as to have a permanent, undisputable record of each transaction, is called the blockchain. This technological breakthrough has been hailed by many of our nation’s top venture capitalists as more important than the currency itself….. Read more http://online.barrons.com/news/articles/SB50001424053111904544004579650261196030186Female menopause has been known for centuries, but it has only recently been discovered that males also go through a similar phenomenon with identical symptoms. Synonyms: Late Onset Hypogonadism (LOH), Male Climacteric, Andropause, Viropause, ADAM (Androgen Deficiency in the Aging Male) and PADAM (Partial Androgen Deficiency in the Aging Male). he medical profession has long debated the existence of male menopause. Does it really exist? If so, at what age does it affect men? What are the symptoms? Are they reversible with treatment? What precautions can a man take to prevent/postpone its arrival? How is it similar to/ different from female menopause? Or, on the other hand, is it a non-existent entity? Is it just a another ploy to emasculate men further? Are senile eighty-year old men who are seen dating nubile young women really as capable as they appear to be or are they merely fooling both
Unlocked window - 19% Kicked in door - 23% Broke through window - 16% Through garage door - 7% I had a key - 7% Other - 16% 2. If a house or an apartment had an alarm system, what was your reaction? No problem, I can turn it off - 3% No problem, I won’t set it off - 0% I’ll be gone before police arrive - 31% Leave immediately - 66% 3. If there was a security camera near a door or entry way, would that stop you from breaking in? Yes - 40% No - 43% Maybe - 17% Respondents said they could change the direction of the camera, break the camera, throw a cloth on the camera, climb on the roof to get around the camera, or cut a wire. Other convicts would cover their face before the break-in. Burglars under the influence of drugs would break-in without taking any camera precautions. 4. Did you target lower income or higher income neighborhoods? Lower income - 0% Higher income - 54% Doesn’t matter - 46% 5. Were you deterred by gated communities? Yes - 43% No - 46% Maybe - 11% Some respondents feared being cornered once inside the gated community. Some needed to know the way out before entering the gated community. 6. Were you deterred by dogs? Yes - 57% No - 39% Maybe - 4% Like Rangel, other convicts admitted to drugging a dog to put it to sleep. Barking is a deterrent. Other convicts would consider the breed before approaching the animal. 7. Did you care if the lights were on? Yes - 25% No - 64% Maybe - 11% Some convicts doubled checked to ensure the owners were gone, some knocked on the door to see if anyone would answer. 8. What room in the home was the most appealing? Bedroom - 62% Living room - 21% Kitchen - 3% Dining room - 8% Other - 6% A few convicts, including Rangel, said the “kids room” was off limits. Burglars also considered office rooms to have a substantial amount of valuables. A few targeted the garage. 9. When you broke into a home, did you bring an accomplice? Yes - 54% No - 36% Maybe - 10% Some brought an accomplice in case something went wrong. A few didn’t trust accomplices. 10. When you broke into a home, was it typically a house of someone you knew? Yes - 21% No - 68% Maybe - 11% Some did not want to risk being “found out." Others felt it was easier to target people they had befriended. 11. Did you break into homes in your own neighborhood? Yes - 28% No - 72% Many convicts did not want their neighbors to learn that they were a burglar. Some did break into homes in their neighborhood because it was easier to transport stolen goods. 12. Did you prefer to avoid confrontation? Yes - 92% No - 4% Maybe - 4% Most did not want to risk getting caught. A few convicts would not break-in if children were present. A select few did not fear confrontation. 13. What attracted you to burglarizing a home? Drugs - 42% Bills/Rent- 21% Thrill/ Excitement - 18% Family - 9% Other - 9% Many convicts admitted that they burglarized people to pay for a drug addiction. Most respondents who said they did it for the “thrill” also said they needed to pay for a drug addiction. Those who said they stole for their families said were not motivated by drugs. 14. How can a burglary victim avoid a physical confrontation? (open response) "It’s hard to avoid it when it’s your own home. You want to protect your stuff. These days burglars are scared of loud alarms and bright lights." "Hide from the burglar and do not let them know you are home. Call 911 and have an emergency evacuation plan out of the house and take a self-defense course." "Run." "Make sure no one is home." "Just let them take what they want and don’t make eye contact." "Scope out the residence first. Check times of going and coming for a couple of days." "Get on the ground." "Do not approach the burglar." "By remaining vigilant and being aware. Most burglars are high on drugs and don’t want a confrontation. If spotted, they take flight to avoid it." "Leave and call 911 or carry a firearm." "Hide." "Just cooperate. I mean, in my personal experience, I never had to hurt anybody. But, cooperate and everything should be fine." "Seriously. Nothing. If it’s going to happen, it’s just going to happen. You be safe. Don’t try to stop him." "Run if they see people." "Call the police." "Report anything that would be suspect. Don’t bring any attention to themselves." "Don’t be in the way." 15. Do you see a solution to the problem of home break-ins and burglaries? (open response) "More help for [blank]." "Yes, multiple, but all of the major solutions don’t exactly go towards the positive side of the law. It’s an epidemic." "I believe that most people break into homes and businesses because they need the money to support their addiction. As one addict comes to prison or another one gets recovered, there is another one born into addiction or trying a drug for the first time or sticking a needle in their arm. There will never be a solution to drug addiction or burglaries. However, there is always hope to overcome any obstacle. There is a way to stay safer. Addiction has no type." "No." Multiple survey respondents wrote this. "Help those who need assistance." "Large dogs. Security system." "Just play Superman it if is happening." "Hire felons so they have a way to make money. Offer better drug treatment programs." "The only solution is to combat drugs and actually rehabilitate offenders. Sending them to prison only makes them worse. A small percentage of us are successful in being treated for drugs in prison." "I honestly don’t think there will ever be a solution. It is bound to happen to every few minutes a day. "No, there is always someone seeking the thrills or a need." "Yes. Need better security such as cameras and pets." "Not really. If a burglar wants something they are going to do whatever they can to get it." "Sorry, but no. Just the life we live today." "My last burglary resulted in death and here I sit years later with remorse, but it took a death to make me realize that the style of life wasn’t worth it." "No. people on drugs will do anything to stay high." 16. May KOB-TV schedule an interview with you to discuss your survey answers?Arsenal are ready to sell Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain to Liverpool with as many as eight other first-team players following him out the exit door. The England international is yet to agree a new deal with the club and with only a year remaining is likely to be sold this summer with Anfield understood to be his most likely destination. Jurgen Klopp is a known admirer and is set for a busy summer as he attempts to build a squad capable of challenging both in the Premier League and in Europe where the Reds are back in the Champions League after a two-year absence. Join Independent Minds For exclusive articles, events and an advertising-free read for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month Get the best of The Independent With an Independent Minds subscription for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month Get the best of The Independent Without the ads – for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month Shape Created with Sketch. How could Arsenal line up this season? Show all 12 left Created with Sketch. right Created with Sketch. Shape Created with Sketch. How could Arsenal line up this season? 1/12 How could Arsenal line up next season? How could Arsenal line up next season? Getty 2/12 GK: Petr Cech Cech may have been dropped for the FA Cup final, but the experienced shot-stopper is unlikely to lose his Premier League place anytime soon. The goalkeeper will turn 36 next season and yet he remains one of Arsenal’s best players. Getty 3/12 WB: Hector Bellerin Struggled for form towards the end of last season but still one of the best full-backs in the country. Offers pace and power down the wing. Getty 4/12 CB: Shkodran Mustafi The German defender enjoyed a solid debut campaign in English football, making 37 appearances in all competitions for the club. Still only 25 and will improve next season, with a year of English football already under his belt. Getty 5/12 CB: Laurent Koscielny His poor discipline cost Arsenal in a couple of vital games, but he remains an important, influential player. There have been rumours Marseille have made Koscielny their top transfer target this summer, but it is highly unlikely Arsenal will sell. Getty 6/12 CB: Rob Holding After impressing with his maturity and composure in a back-three last season, there's every chance Arsene Wenger could place his faith in the youngster once again for the new campaign. Getty 7/12 WB: Sead Kolasinac Arsenal’s first signing of the summer. A versatile 23-year-old defender, Kolasinac plays predominantly at left-back but expect Wenger to have him push on. Getty 8/12 CDM: Granit Xhaka Attracted a lot of criticism for his displays last season, but grew in confidence throughout the campaign and has the talent to become a vital player for Arsenal over the coming seasons. A superb distributor of the ball. Getty 9/12 CM: Santi Cazorla One of Arsenal's most technically-gifted players and the glue that keeps the side's midfield together. Doubts over his fitness and whether he's got another season left in him, but should he be firing on all cylinders Wenger will want to make full use of him. Getty 10/12 LCM: Mesut Ozil Still negotiating a contract extension with the club. His performance levels dipped alarmingly last season, but when he is in form, he remains one of the finest passers of the ball in the world. Getty 11/12 RCM: Riyad Mahrez Mahrez recently announced his intentions to leave Leicester this summer and Wenger refused to rule out a move for the Premier League champion. Mahrez would bring real flair to Arsenal's side, as well as the ability to make something out of nothing. Getty 12/12 CF: Alexandre Lacazette The instinctive centre-forward that Arsenal have longed for ever since Robin van Persie's departure. Industrious and physical, he'll bring a tough edge to Arsenal's front line. Getty Arsenal are set for an overhaul of their own and are under pressure to cut their wage bill in the wake of the Premier League's new cost control measures that are coming into force this summer. The rules say that a club’s wage bill should not be more than £7m more than it was in 2016-17, or £19m more than from the 2012-13 season. If it does increase beyond that limit, the money can only come from external sources such as player sales, ticketing or commercial money, rather than Premier League central funds. If Arsenal’s wage bill does jump by as much as they want it to with proposed new deals for Alexis Sanchez and Mesut Ozil, they are unlikely to make up the money through commercial or ticketing or TV money for next season, not least because they will be playing in the Europa League, not the Champions League. This means the money will have to be found in player sales this summer, not just of fringe players, but first-team players too. Olivier Giroud is another who could follow Oxlade-Chamberlain out with Napoli joining Marseille and West Ham monitoring his situation. Jack Wilshere is another who could leave after spending last season on loan at Bournemouth but his wages may prove a stumbling block to a permanent move. Shape Created with Sketch. Arsenal summer transfer targets Show all 10 left Created with Sketch. right Created with Sketch. Shape Created with Sketch. Arsenal summer transfer targets 1/10 Arsenal summer transfer targets Which players might Arsenal attempt to sign this summer? 2/10 Alexandre Lacazette, Lyon Last summer saw Arsenal attempt to sign Lacazette, only for Lyon to refuse to sell the “irreplaceable” striker. It is more widely expected that he will depart this summer, however, in a recent interview the player confirmed he will be looking to play Champions League football. With Arsenal unable to qualify for the competition, it seems unlikely he'll be willing to join the side with a number of other clubs closely circling. Murmurs of a £60m price-tag will make him available to a select few teams. 3/10 Arda Turan, Barcelona It has been strongly rumoured that Arsenal will target the 30-year-old Turkish midfielder this summer. Turan has not had the desired impact at the Camp Nou, registering just three goals and assists in 18 league appearances this term. While this increases the likelihood that Barcelona will offload the playmaker, it also raises questions over whether Arsenal will risk bringing him in. £25m is the touted price, which is certainly within the club’s reach. 4/10 Pablo Fornals, Malaga At just 21, central midfielder Pablo Fornals has impressed domestically with strugglers Malaga this season, so much so that he has already been handed his full debut for Spain by manager Julien Lopetegui. Santi Cazorla’s injury ravaged season has cast doubts over his future at Arsenal and at 32 years old, it would be sensible to find a replacement. Arsenal have struggled to identify a reliable midfield partnership since Cazorla’s season-ending injury and the pragmatic Fornals, at around £15m, is reported to be a prime target for the club to solve the issue. 5/10 Patrik Schick, Sampdoria The 21-year-old Czech centre forward has made headlines recently after a series of impressive performances for his club and country. With 13 goals in 31 appearances in Serie A this season, he is not the most prolific of strikers but has proven his impressive technical ability and physical attributes. With Olivier Giroud rumoured to be nearing an exit, 6ft 2in Schick could be viewed as an ideal replacement. Chelsea and Tottenham are also rumoured to be interested, as well as a host of foreign clubs, and there is believed to be a £21 million release clause in the player’s contract, meaning the highly rated striker is affordable. 6/10 Ben Chilwell, Leicester The 20-year-old left-back is a realistic target for the Gunners, who are reportedly long term admirers of the player. Chilwell is capped by England at U18 level and would be an affordable and logical signing. First choice left back Nacho Monreal is now 31 and back up Kieran Gibbs has failed to assert himself at the top level. The potential of selling Gibbs, as well as other home-grown players, also means that Arsenal will need to sign another one to ensure they meet the FA’s regulations. His contract runs until 2021 and it is likely he would cost between £5-7m. 7/10 Rick Karsdorp, Feyenoord Arsenal were said to be keen on a move for the young Dutch back in January until Arsene Wenger shut down the rumours. His words, however, were that although Karsdorp is a ‘good player’, Arsenal were not ‘in the transfer market’ in January. With the summer window beckoning, the club look sure to offload Carl Jenkinson and Mathieu Debuchy who have fallen far out of favour. Karsdorp, 22, recently signed an improved contract offer until 2021 - yet this could realistically mean little if Arsenal are serious about signing him. 8/10 Leon Goretzka, Schalke: The 22-year-old German midfielder is the second Schalke midfielder on this list. When playing at VfL Bochum, Goretzka’s head coach Peter Neuruer described him as the “talent of the century”. He is a versatile player who is most comfortable deployed as a central midfielder but has played behind the striker and out wide in his time at Schalke. Sporting Director Christian Heidel recently confirmed that he has not yet held decisive talks with Goretzka amid doubts over his future, with just one season remaining on his contract. This situation means he could be snapped up for around £20m. 9/10 Virgil van Dijk, Southampton With Per Mertesacker nearing the end of his Arsenal career, despite that stellar FA Cup performance, van Dijk will certainly come into consideration. The 25 year-old centre back is highly sought-after in the league and is a realistic target for anybody with money. With Arsenal out of the Champions League, it would be difficult to compete with the likes of Manchester United, Liverpool, Chelsea and Manchester City for both financial and footballing reasons. Southampton are thought to want around £50m for the Dutchman. 10/10 Kylian Mbappe, Monaco Mbappe is one of the hottest properties in Europe and is perhaps a surprise inclusion on the list. Robert Pires shocked supporters when he declared that he believes his former club ‘will sign’ the French starlet, coinciding with Wenger’s confession that Arsenal are interested in Mbappe. However, the financial muscle and prestige of other clubs will likely prove an issue. Reports that Real Madrid are preparing a bid of more than £80,000,000 will blow the likes of Arsenal out of the water. Don’t hold your breath on this one. There are plenty of fringe players likely to depart, including Calum Chambers, Wojciech Szczesny, Chuba Akpom, Kieran Gibbs, Lucas Perez and Carl Jenkinson but Hector Bellerin is set to stay with the Gunners telling Barcelona that the Spanish right back is not for sale at any price. Keep up to date with all the latest news with expert comment and analysis from our award-winning writersSo my pea plants are starting to get pretty tall, which means they are hanging pretty close to the ground. From what I’ve read, trellising is helpful at this point (all about peas from Mother Earth News), although I do know some organic farmers who don’t bother. Some ideas for constructing trellises can be found from Raygunomics, Rock Farmer, and Vertical Gardener. As with everything in this garden so far, I’m going to use what I can find. I have some decent twine and some branches that I found by the road in my neighborhood. Here’s what I came up with: I also constructed smaller trellises for a few pea plants I am growing in containers: Now I just have to make two more long trellises for my other pea patches!Around 10 years ago, I mocked the idea of any sane person wanting to read an ebook. I’ve been wary of making predictions ever since. All the same, I hope I’m on safe ground when I say that the Inspector Rebus novels are going to be of lasting interest to posterity. I say this not because of the quality of the prose, or the sheer number of people who currently read the books. I may think they have artistic interest, but I can’t speak for future generations. My certainty comes from the idea that these books will continue to have historical value. Each is a finely rendered snapshot of a specific time and place. The descriptions of 1980s Edinburgh struck me forcefully when I read Knots and Crosses last week (alongside plenty of other Reading group contributors). This week, reading The Falls, I was even more aware of how well the novel captures a specific time. And how interesting it was to realise that this era now seems long gone, even though the novel was only published in 2001. Inspector Rebus: the birth of a real heavyweight Read more Before I try to explain why you should read The Falls if you want to know about life in Scotland around the turn of the millennium, a few caveats. Obviously, the characters are egregious. I’m not saying that everyone in Edinburgh was a criminal, a regular at the Oxford Bar or a dour, violent policeman, terrified of the inside of his own head. Nor do I want to overstate the realism in the novel. As in most of the Rankin books I’ve read, things get pretty wild in the penultimate chapter. That is not a criticism. I love the catharsis, the adrenaline ride, the camp confessional speeches and watching Rebus rumble his way through a good physical challenge. Definitely part of the fun, as far as I’m concerned, though you have to take the action with an Edinburgh chippy-sized portion of salt. But in other ways, The Falls is an intriguing bit of social, technological and political history – and one that feels real both factually and emotionally. It tells us important things about the world in which it is set. Just as The Maltese Falcon immediately throws its reader back to 1920s San Francisco, and Sherlock Holmes is one of the first reference points for late 19th-century London, Rebus does the business for his generation in Edinburgh. “I think it’s astonishing that so many people would want to read about a dour Presbyterian Edinburgh cop,” Rankin once said. But he admitted that he understood something of the appeal. Crime fiction is going through a second golden age. It seems to me … that the literary novel is actually looking back. The crime novel is dealing with illegal immigrants, paedophiles, drugs, and it’s dealing with the big moral questions of good and evil. He might also have added that few other books are so good at capturing small moments of day-to-day life. The Falls is full, for instance, of telling passing references to developments in the Scottish capital. Towards the end of the story, we see a character called Jean Burchill walking in the centre of town: “She paused again on North Bridge, staring eastwards towards where the new parliament showed no signs of progress.” And so we learn that the construction of the new parliament is something of a running joke. A sentence later, we learn that the Scotsman newspaper has moved its offices from its old home (“currently been gutted: another new hotel in the making”) near North Bridge to be nearer to the parliament. In the novel these things seem strange, new, flimsy and possibly even a little daft. Will that hotel have the resonance of the old Scotsman building? We’re asked to doubt it. And this question seems all the more interesting just over a decade later, when the new parliamentary setup has become such a fixed part of a Scotland dominated by Holyrood. The action also takes place in that curious period around the turn of the millennium when the dotcom boom had been and gone, but social media and smartphones were barely imagined. One of the (weaker) strands in the book relates to an online role-playing game that needs participants to be able to connect to the internet remotely and often. This might seem fairly contemporary, except that this is presented as an unusual and expensive behaviour full of protocols and intricacies that need to be explained to the non tech-savvy. There are also WAP phones. I’d mercifully forgotten about these devices until reminded by The Falls how important and advanced a few people had then tried to claim they were – just as poor old tech-hungry Grant Hood does in the novel: Hood held up his mobile phone. ‘It’s a WAP,’ he explained sheepishly. ‘Just got it today. Sends emails, the lot.’ I find it hard to imagine many other novels featuring WAP phones. Likewise, few other histories will recall that many similar conversations were going on around the UK at the same time, how ridiculous everyone thought the WAP evangelists were, and how quickly those poor souls became embarrassed. Who wants to be bothered by the internet on a phone, after all? In an article like this one, such particulars may seem fleeting and inconsequential, but in the novel itself, where there are so many other flashes of memory, they start to feel brightly illuminating. Rankin never lets his details get in the way of the story, but they accumulate beautifully. To give another example, The Falls is full of unhealthy living, especially involving alcohol. A quick ebook audit revealed: * One hundred and twenty-two references to alcoholic “drink” (As in: “He just liked to drink.” “They’d been drinking on and off all afternoon …” And not including the alternative “fizzy drinks” – although these too are a marker of ill-health.) * Four additional references to “booze”. * Twenty-two mentions of “whisky”. Plus an additional Talisker and four Ardbegs. * Eight beers. (A low number, but quality makes up for the lack of quantity: “Rebus took a long swallow of beer. Having nursed his pint while Rebus downed two double whiskies and two beers, Grant was dismayed to find another half poured into his glass as soon as there was room for it.”) * Seven lagers. * Five Guinnesses. * Seven vodkas. * Two gin and tonics. * 11 references to wine. (As in: “She’d had three glasses of wine on top of the champagne.”) * Four champagnes. * Four mentions of IPA (often in multiples: “‘Three IPA,’ Harry began.”) * 60 coffees. * 10 sugars. * Dozens of cups of tea. (Most inexpertly served: “‘Now that’s class’ she said, examining the teabag floating in the mug.” “Switched a kettle on and rinsed a mug under the tap. Teabag, powdered milk.” * One “herbal infusion”. (A non-caffeinated tea drink, which does not go down well with the person made to drink it.) * 39 cigarettes. * 13 additional references to cigarette smoke. * One “fag break”. I’m sure there’s far more in there, too. It’s an accumulation that points towards a national phenomenon highlighted in The Falls: “The Scots had an unenviable record for heart disease and tooth decay, both the result of the national diet: saturated fats, salt and sugar.” You learn a lot from the sheer quantity of items in the novel that are variously tooth-rotting, waistline-expanding, mind-boggling, liver-crumbling, lung-busting. But the clever thing is the way Rankin gets behind the statistics and shows the urges that lead to this death-courting lifestyle. He addresses the question directly at one point: She’d wondered what it was that made the Scottish people reach for the comfort foods, the chocolate, chips and fizzy drinks: was it the climate? Or could the answer lie deeper, within the nation’s character? But really the important thing is the way the drinks and fags blend into the action, and give a real feeling for this lifestyle. The Farmer, Siobhan Clarke, Jill Templer: we can’t logically explain their desire for drink any more than they can, but we understand why they’re driven to the bar. Most of all, we get inside John Rebus, who winds through the novel like so much toxic sludge, an astonishingly unhealthy emblem of Scottish manhood, as Jean Burchill makes clear in conversation with the stodge-loving detective: ‘I’m guessing,’ she said, ‘that you like a fry-up on a Sunday.’ ‘Am I so transparent?’ ‘Quite the opposite. You’re a flesh-and-blood Scottish male.’ Rebus is Every-Scottish-man, just as, in a way, he is Every-detective in the mould of Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe and all those other the hard-living, deep-drinking loners of this genre. Yet it would be wrong to think of him as an empty vessel for these ideas and cliches. The whole thing works because Rankin has taken the archetypes and made them his own. Rebus lives and breathes – to the extent that you can almost smell the whisky he’s been drinking. He has his own way of thinking, his own way of talking, his own way of brooding, his own vulnerability, his own demons, his own horror of being alone in his house. His own reasons for fancying a pint or four, now and again. There’s something about him. And if I’m having trouble defining it, that’s just another mark of his complex, tangled humanity. It isn’t exactly charisma – his colleagues find him too annoying for that, but he is compelling, intriguing and unique. In fact, scrub everything I’ve just said about posterity and historical interest. These novels will also endure because their central character is so strong. Rebus is immortal, even though he’s drinking himself to an early grave.Phineas and Ferb is an American animated musical comedy television series. Originally broadcast as a one-episode preview on August 17, 2007 and again previewed on September 28, 2007, the series officially premiered on February 1, 2008 on Disney Channel, running until June 12, 2015. The program follows Phineas Flynn and his stepbrother Ferb Fletcher[1] on summer vacation. Every day, the boys embark on some grand new project; these are usually unrealistic given the protagonists' ages (and are sometimes downright physically impossible), which annoys their controlling sister, Candace, who frequently tries to reveal their shenanigans to her and Phineas' mother, Linda Flynn-Fletcher, and less frequently to Ferb's father, Lawrence Fletcher. The series follows a standard plot system; running gags occur every episode, and the b-plot almost always features Phineas and Ferb's pet platypus Perry the Platypus working as a spy (named "Agent P") for OWCA (the Organization Without a Cool Acronym), to defeat the latest scheme of Dr. Heinz Doofenshmirtz, a mad scientist driven largely by a need to assert his evilness (although he is not especially evil and has a good heart in some situations.) The two plots intersect at the end to erase all traces of the boys' project just before Candace can show it to their mother. This usually leaves Candace very frustrated. Creators Dan Povenmire and Jeff "Swampy" Marsh had previously worked together on Fox's The Simpsons and Nickelodeon's Rocko's Modern Life. The creators also voice two of the main B-plot characters: Major Monogram and Dr. Doofenshmirtz. Phineas and Ferb was conceived after Povenmire sketched a triangular boy – the prototype for Phineas – in a restaurant. Povenmire and Marsh developed the series concept together and pitched it to networks for 16 years before securing a run on Disney Channel.[1] Plot [2] Povenmire drew inspiration for the show from his boyhood in Mobile, Alabama The show follows the adventures of stepbrothers Phineas Flynn (Vincent Martella) and Ferb Fletcher (Thomas Sangster), who live in the fictional city of Danville, in a (never specified) tri-state area, as they seek ways to occupy their time during their summer vacation. Often these adventures involve elaborate, life-sized and ostensibly dangerous construction projects. Phineas's older sister, Candace Flynn (Ashley Tisdale), has two obsessions: "busting" Phineas and Ferb's schemes and ideas, and winning the attention of a boy named Jeremy (Mitchel Musso).[3] Meanwhile, the boys' pet platypus, Perry, acts as a secret agent for an all-animal government organization[4][5] called the O.W.C.A. ("Organization Without a Cool Acronym"), fighting Dr. Heinz Doofenshmirtz.[6] Much of the series' humor relies on running gags used in almost every episode, with slight variation.[7] Most episodes follow a pattern: Some incident gives Phineas an idea for a project, and he announces, "Hey Ferb, I know what we're gonna do today!" Meanwhile, Perry slips away, using one of many hidden tunnels, to a secret underground base. Phineas (or occasionally another character) remarks, "Hey, where's Perry?" Major Monogram briefs Perry (whom he calls "Agent P") on his mission; this sometimes amounts to nothing more than "Doctor Doofenshmirtz is up to something; find out what it is, and put a stop to it!" Candace sees what the boys are doing, and resolves to tell her Mom to "bust them". Perry breaks into the skyscraper office of Doofenshmirtz Evil Inc. (complete with its own easy listening jingle, and variations depending on location and time). Doofenshmirtz traps Perry and explains his current evil plan. Perry escapes the trap and they battle. Phineas and Ferb complete their project. Mom gets home and Candace thinks that, at last, Mom will see what the boys have been up to and believe her, but just as Mom is about to step into the back yard, all evidence vanishes, usually as a side effect of Doofenshmirtz's device. [6] [7] Doofenshmirtz, foiled again, cries out, "Curse you, Perry the Platypus!" Other running gags: An adult asks Phineas if he is rather young to be performing some complex activities; he responds, "Yes, yes, I am" (although the adult never tries to stop the boys from their fun, and Phineas usually has all legal clearance for his ideas to be executed, including building permits.) Doofenshmirtz's names for his contraptions all have the same suffix, "-inator", as in Shrinkinator, Giant Dog Biscuit-inator, "Eradicate Rodney's -Inator", etc. [1] Eventually he starts calling them "inators" as a generic term. Eventually he starts calling them "inators" as a generic term. Doofenshmirtz has a daughter, Vanessa, who generally finds his work boring, but sometimes tries to prove to her mother that he is evil. Like Candace, she always fails. Ferb rarely speaks more than once in an episode. Garden gnomes are often seen or used as plot points. Isabella, who has a crush on Phineas, comes into the backyard and asks, "Whatcha doin'?" in a distinctive singsong tone. She doesn't like it when other characters (besides Phineas) say that line. For example, in "Suddenly Suzy", after both Suzy and Candace speak that line, Isabella grumbles "Uh, hello!?" and "Do I even need to be here?", respectively. Aspects of the show's humor are aimed at adults,[8] including its frequent pop-cultural references.[9] Co-creator Dan Povenmire, who had previously worked on Family Guy, sought to create a less raunchy show that would make similar use of comic timing, metahumor, humorous blank stares, wordplay and breaking the fourth wall.[10] Povenmire describes the show as a combination of Family Guy and SpongeBob SquarePants.[11] Jeff "Swampy" Marsh, the other co-creator, said the show was not created just for kids; he simply did not exclude them as an audience.[8] Episodes Season Episodes Originally aired First aired Last aired 1 47 August 17, 2007 ( ) February 18, 2009 ( 2009-02-18 ) 2 65 February 19, 2009 ( ) February 11, 2011 ( 2011-02-11 ) 3 62 March 4, 2011 ( ) November 30, 2012 ( 2012-11-30 ) Across the Second Dimension August 5, 2011 ( ) 4 48 December 7, 2012 ( ) June 12, 2015 ( 2015-06-12 ) O.W.C.A. Files November 9, 2015 ( ) Crossover January 5, 2019 ( ) On May 7, 2015, Disney officially announced that the series had wrapped up after four seasons, and the final hour-long episode titled "Phineas and Ferb: Last Day of Summer" would premiere on June 12, 2015 on Disney XD, simulcast on Disney Channel. A 73-hour marathon of the show would begin on Disney XD on June 9, 2015.[12] The series officially ended on June 12, 2015 on Disney Channel and Disney XD. It was also announced that a stand-alone hour-long special titled "O.W.C.A. Files" would be released the following autumn. The special officially premiered on Disney XD on November 9, 2015. Characters [13] platypus was included in the series due to its interesting appearance. The series' main characters live in a blended family, a premise the creators considered underused in children's programming and which reflected Marsh's own upbringing. Marsh considers explaining the family background "not important to the kids' lives. They are a great blended family and that's all we need to know."[14] The choice of a platypus as the boys' pet was similarly inspired by media underuse, as well as to exploit the animal's striking appearance.[13] The platypus also gives them freedom to "make stuff up" since "no one knows very much about them."[14] An additional reason for choosing a platypus allowed them to own that "mental real estate", so that if a person thinks "platypus", they'll associate it with "Agent P", just as an ogre is now commonly associated with Shrek.[15] Marsh called the characters "cool, edgy and clever without... being mean-spirited." Animation director Rob Hughes is said to have noted that "in all the other shows every character is either stupid or a jerk, but there are no stupid characters or jerks in this one."[3] Music The series is known for some of its memorable songs, which appeared in almost every episode since the first-season "Flop Starz". Disney's executives particularly enjoyed the episode's song, "Gitchee, Gitchee Goo", and requested that a song appear in each subsequent episode.[3] The music earned the series a total of four Emmy nominations: in 2008 for the main title theme and for the song "I Ain't Got R
Alan Autry and Fresno County Supervisor Bob Waterston brought the idea forward to make California 99 into a toll road. The two officials planned for toll booths at either end of the route through the Central Valley (probably just north of the Grapevine and somewhere near Sacramento), and the tolls would provide funding for needed upgrades along California 99. In a Fresno Bee article, Waterston commented about tolls: "When you bring this up to people, first of all there's a shock, and then it's 'Why not?' You know, they do it in Connecticut." 6 It is not clear whether this proposal was vetted through the Fresno County Council of Governments or with other regional planning agencies in the Central Valley. A toll road remains a possibility, but it is not at the forefront of possible solutions. Background/History Much of this activity began in the city of Fresno, often referred to as the largest city in the country not served by an Interstate highway. Interstate 66, proposed in 1991 as a new east-west, cross-country Interstate corridor, was the first course of action for Fresno politicians to bring the city onto the Interstate Highway System. However, Interstate 66 would have traveled over the Sierra Nevada Mountains, perhaps via Kings Canyon and/or Sequoia National Parks to enter Fresno via California 180. Environmental concerns seemed to outweigh the benefit of Interstate 66, so the concept of this route gained little momentum in Fresno. By Fall 2004, Interstate 66 was actively planned for construction in Kentucky but virtually nowhere else. However, Fresno politicians continued in their quest to bring Fresno into the Interstate Highway System by looking at other avenues, specifically, the California 99 freeway. On June 11, 2003, the "California Report" segment on KQED, San Francisco's National Public Radio station, indicated that there is a strong desire in Fresno to put the city onto the Interstate Highway System.4 Fresno is the largest city in the United States not served by a single Interstate Highway, and there is a sense of prestige that would be created by converting California 99 into an Interstate. Although local politicians support such a new Interstate, there is a cost associated with converting the highway to Interstate standards and changing the signs. One of these politicians was Assemblyman Bill Maze, who brought the issue to the California legislature in July 2004. At that time, Assemblyman Maze crafted Assembly Joint Resolution (AJR) 63, "Relative to State Highway Route 99," a measure that would memorialize the intent of the legislature of California (Assembly and Senate) to advise the President and Congress of the United States a request that they "enact legislation to include State Highway Route 99 in the Interstate Highway System." 1 The resolution was adopted by both houses of state government and filed with the California Secretary of State on August 19, 2004. Notably, the resolution requests either (1) the federal government exempts California 99 from fulfilling Interstate standards or (2) the state of California is exempted from financing any costs to upgrade California 99 to federal Interstate requirements. In the resolution, Maze listed a variety of reasons why California 99 ought to be incorporated into the Interstate Highway System:1 The California 99 corridor has the "largest urban area not in the Interstate highway system and Fresno is the largest city in the United States not served by an Interstate highway." The "omission of highways in the urban areas of the Central Valley from the interstate highway system cannot be justified and should be remedied." Economic development along the California 99 corridor, pursuant to studies that have "long shown that economic development is enhanced in areas that are close to Interstate highways." The Central Valley one of the highest concentrations of unemployment in the United States, and upgrading the highway could enhance opportunities to promote employment and eliminate what has been a persistent problem in an agricultural region In a shot at Interstate 5, the resolution states "Interstate Highway 5 has been designated the NAFTA corridor, even though most of the trucks engaged in international trade and commerce travel on State Highway Route 99... [and] truck cargo volumes on State Highway Route 99 exceed those on Interstate Highway 5 and are among the highest in the entire nation, and this is the only segment of the federal highway system with this level of traffic not in the interstate highway system." An improved California 99 corridor would bring environmental benefits, including the reduction of truck and auto congestion, which in turn would lead to the reduction of air pollution, which is a severe problem throughout the Central Valley. Vacationers and tourists to Yosemite, Sequoia, and Kings Canyon National Parks generally use California 99 rather than Interstate 5 to reach their destinations even though "families prefer to travel to their destinations along Interstate highways that are known to be twice as safe as other highways, and tourism would be enhanced if State Highway Route 99 is upgraded to an interstate highway." Finally, the resolution indicates that the Central Valley is "the most rapidly growing part of California, and one of the most rapidly growing areas of the nation, and future demand will make all of the arguments for upgrading State Highway Route 99 even more urgent." The effort to bring a second north-south Interstate to the Central Valley was almost derailed by State Senator Dean Florez, who considers California 99 a historic corridor that needs some preservation. Florez pulled AJR 63 from the consent agenda of the Senate, and it was initially denied in July 2004.2 Senator Florez and Assemblyman Maze negotiated, and they agreed to add the following language: "State Highway Route 99 is granted a historic designation of 'Historic Route 99.'" In addition, the two agreed to the language that supports an exemption to requirements that California 99 meet Interstate standards.1 Notably, the California 99 designation would almost certainly have to change. As noted in the legislative analysis of AJR 63, the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) has a "formal policy for the signing and number of future interstate corridors. The number of future IHS routes must be coordinated with the states and approved by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials and FHWA. The designation of 'Interstate 99' is currently being used by the state of Pennsylvania, which means that California more than likely would have to renumber SR 99." On August 10, 2005, the SAFETEA-LU added California 99 from Interstate 5 south of Bakersfield north to Sacramento as High Priority Corridor 54.5 In addition, SAFETEA-LU designated California 99 officially as a future Interstate corridor, although it did not specify a numerical designation. SAFETEA-LU authorized a higher priority (yet unspecified amount) for funding general improvements to California 99 since it is a future Interstate corridor, but the appropriations package included several specific earmarks for the route. It is unclear how this action will impact the state's plans for the route. Highway Guides California 99/Golden State Freeway Southern Terminus - Interstate 5 - Mettler, California This terminus location is just an approximation at the current time. Therefore the concept of trying to photograph the location is impractical and not requested at this time. Northern Terminus - Interstate 5 - Stockton, California This terminus location is just an approximation at the current time. Therefore the concept of trying to photograph the location is impractical and not requested at this time. Potential Alternate Northern Terminus - Interstate 305 / Business Loop I-80 / U.S. 50 - Sacramento, California This terminus location is just an approximation at the current time. Therefore the concept of trying to photograph the location is impractical and not requested at this time. Sources Assembly Joint Resolution 63: Relative to State Highway Route 99 http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/pub/bill/asm/ ab_0051-0100/ajr_63_bill_20040819_chaptered.html. Official Newsletter of Bill Maze http://republican.assembly.ca.gov/ enewsletters/b_index.asp?Dist=34&mem=130&news=1162. Assembly Bill Analysis of AJR 63 http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/pub/bill/asm/ ab_0051-0100/ajr_63_cfa_20040716_163702_asm_floor.html. KQED, San Francisco's National Public Radio station. "Nunes discusses Highway 99." Visalia Times-Daily Local News, July 16, 2004. "Officials propose a Highway 99 toll road." The Fresno Bee, February 1, 2004. Final Draft - Route 99 Corridor Enhancement Master Plan - note that this is a large PDF file. See also the Caltrans District Six Route 99 Master Plan Index. "Interstate 2000: Improvement for the Next Millenium." Roads and Bridges, June 1997. Page Updated April 6, 2016.Roland TR-09 the Missing Manual – A user’s guide to the TR-09 Rhythm Composer A USER’S GUIDE TO THE ROLAND TR-09 Rhythm Composer THE MISSING MANUAL DOWNLOAD PDF FORMAT – Version 0.1 November 2017 THE MISSING MANUAL This is user’s guide number five – The User’s Guide to the Roland TR-09 I’ve collected all of the information I can about the TR-09 Rhythm Composer and compiled it into a PDF document for you which is in the form, and in the spirit of the original TR-909 manual. I started doing these because the first leaflet style manuals which arrived with my Roland Boutique synths were too small to read, and so abbreviated that I was left feeling a little underwhelmed. I wanted more. So I learned more, and tried a bunch of things and eventually took my notebooks and turned them into the missing manuals for these lovely little things. I hope they open a world for you, and guide you through the features, and serves you as a reference guide for things you forget, or wonder about. At the end there is both a “patch memo” intended for transcribing your settings for the sounds, as well as a “pattern” memo” which is meant to allow us to transcribe the actual patterns we write. I hope these are useful to you, and make writing beats, and sharing ideas easier, and more fun. PLAY LIVE! Join me. I LOVE YOU. Sunshine Jones Nov 1st 2017 San Francisco, CaliforniaPhoto by scarknee You won’t find any mention of Dr. Dmitri Isaev’s clinic online. Patients can’t look up its number in a phone book. Both its address and name are kept secret and those who would like to see Isaev, Russia’s top sexology expert, find out about the location of his St. Petersburg clinic only by word of mouth. For nine years, Isaev, a 60-year-old psychiatrist, led a five-member commission of doctors at St. Petersburg State Pediatric Medical University which issued official permission for gender-reassignment surgeries and for the necessary changes to identity documents. It ranked as both the country’s largest such commission and among its most active, authorizing corrective procedures for up to half of the few hundred sex-change surgeries that occur in Russia each year, according to Isaev. Costs for the permits were kept at a relatively modest 10,000-15,000 rubles, or about $162-$243, based on current exchange rates. But on July 20, 2015, Isaev, a well respected academic, was forced to resign and his commission was dissolved, pushing Russia’s trans community even further to the periphery of society. So, he moved on and created another commission. This time, under cover. It took 11 months for Isaev to find a location in St. Petersburg, traditionally considered Russia’s most liberal city, that would allow such a commission to operate under its auspices. A first try employed Isaev, but declined the commission. Pressure from groups describing themselves as defenders of Russia’s majority Orthodox Christian faith explains that reluctance. Such activists use public shaming campaigns to target supporters or suspected members of Russia’s LGBTQ community. They had hailed the closure of Isaev’s first commission, and would not likely tolerate the opening of a second. They do not appear aware that such a body now exists. A flag from the unrecognized “Donetsk People’s Republic” in Ukraine, a photo of President Vladimir Putin and and anti-gay signs are displayed in Timur Bulatov’s office in St. Petersburg. Photo by Amy Mackinnon. Their campaign against Isaev started in 2014, a year after the passage of a federal law banning perceived “gay propaganda.” A self-styled gay “hunter” named Timur Bulatov (whose legal last name is coincidentally also Isaev) spearheaded the initiative. When interviewed by Coda about Isaev’s work, Bulatov charged that the doctor had “created an entire army of gender perverts.” The campaign against Isaev mounted for months before the psychiatrist was forced to leave his faculty post in July 2015. First came texts to his cell phone with messages like “You’re a pervert,” he recounted. Then, phone calls from strangers threatening to have him fired as the faculty head of clinical psychology. A full-fledged social media campaign followed, distributing his phone number and photo across anti-gay social-media pages. Finally, as complaints about his work with transgender Russians mounted at the district attorney’s office, the State Pediatric Medical University’s rector told him to resign and to leave quietly, Isaev said. “As long as it was in electronic form, the university said nothing,” Isaev said of the complaints. “I didn’t expect the university administration would take their side.” Even when Isaev resigned and moved into private practice, he said that Bulatov began hounding the administration of the first clinic that employed him, threatening to “spread information that this is not a clinic for normal Russians, for normal Orthodox people.” Asked about his treatment of Isaev, Bulatov compared him to Dr. Frankenstein. In interviews with Russian media outlets, the university’s rector Vladimir Levanovich said that the university had ignored the complaints made against the doctor and that Isaev had freely resigned in order to focus on his research. Often appointed by the government, university officials are careful to avoid public scrutiny, Isaev said. “Everything is ordered vertically... The fewer problems, the more calmly they live. So they decided to get rid of the source of their problems.” The past few years remind the doctor of the mid-1980s, when he first started studying male teenagers’ sexual behavior. Frustrated by the lack of recent research (the latest citations in Soviet academic papers dated to the 1920s), Isaev requested articles on homosexuality from outside the Soviet Union. Soviet customs officials, though, declined the requests, saying that “Pornography is not allowed in the USSR.” But at least in those days, “the rules of the game were clear,” Isaev added. “It’s incredibly complicated to predict what can happen now.” After perestroika and the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, Isaev openly pursued his research, regularly traveling to international conferences. He has since published over 120 academic works on homosexuality, transgenderism and other psycho-sexual topics. Those publications and his work on the former State Pediatric Medical University commission made him nationally known among Russia’s transgender community. The loss of his commission and faculty position came as a blow to trans Russians, who have a shrinking list of advocates. “Things moved from a dead stop thanks to Isaev,” said Anastasia Gerasimova, a 40-something, Moscow-based epilation specialist who received permission for a sex-change from Isaev’s first commission. “People would come to his consultations from across the country.” When Isaev first began studying the sexual behavior of male teenagers in 1984, homosexuality was still officially considered a pathology. Photo courtesy of Dmitri Isaev. As of November, Isaev’s new commission had seen 38 patients over the past seven months. One local transgender activist, Igor Burtsyev, half-joked that some activists in the city are partially pleased that the old commission closed since it gives the new body greater independence from an official government institution like the University. “Part of us want the government to actually change something, but those of us quite close to the situation understand that until the government changes things, we actually have it much better,” Burtsyev explained. Isaev also sees the paradox in the temporary relief provided by the move to a private setting. But with the Russian government largely endorsing the crusade against homosexuality, he predicts that leaving Russia may soon be the only way he can continue his research. “Sexuality is a model that undermines the foundation of authoritarianism,” he commented. “A battle against sexuality is always a battle against individuality and, by definition, against liberal values.”To read more from our Comic-Con preview, pick up the new issue of Entertainment Weekly on stands Friday, or buy it here now. Don’t forget to subscribe for more exclusive interviews and photos, only in EW. At the end of Legion’s first season, scientist Oliver Bird (Jemaine Clement) and the phantasmagorical Lenny Busker (Aubrey Plaza) were seen driving away from supermutant David Haller (Dan Stevens) and the rest of the Legion gang in search of “someplace warm.” And the opening script page from the X-Men show’s season 2 premiere initially suggests they’ve succeeded in that quest. But all isn’t what it appears. “Lenny and Oliver are being used by this character, Amahl Farouk,” says executive producer Noah Hawley. “He wears their faces from time to time. It’s his way of hiding himself. I had this thought of, ‘What does Freddy Krueger do during the day?’ I thought it was interesting, the idea of the downtime of these characters. They’re not being used and so what is reality like for them? They’re being placated, that they’re in some place beautiful that may not actually be a physical space, it may be a mental space, like an astral plane. They have everything they need, they’re by the pool, it’s beautiful, but at a certain point, there’s part of them that realizes that they’re just trapped in this reality they don’t have any control over.” FX Legion will return in 2018. Read that script page above.Pictured: Moses the massive hound who was rescued by firefighters from a cat flap This is the enormous 13 and a half stone dog who was stuck for two hours after getting his head wedged in a cat flap. Huge hound Moses Chan had to be rescued by firefighters after squeezing his big head into the tiny hole. The 14-month-old Dogue de Bordeaux, who measures more than 5ft tall on his hind legs, had been trying to copy his owner's four cats, but didn't realise how big he was. Barking mad: Moses Chan was left lodged for two hours after squeezing his head into a cat flap 'I can't believe I have a blonde dog who thought he could fit in such a tiny gap,' said owner Lisa Saberi, who has only had Moses a week. 'He seems to think he's a cat. He is always trying to play with them and he tries to eat their food if I'm not watching.' Lisa, 29, had left Moses to run around in the garden while she went to the shops with her 13-year-old daughter, Natasha and son Hayden, 10. Pet Rescue: It took firefighters 45 minutes to set Moses free from the cat flap But Moses got fed up with being outside and when he saw cats Hunni, Clover, Paddy and Marley going through the cat flap he decided to do the same. Luckily next-door neighbour Reece Young, 12, heard Moses whimpering for help and quickly realised what was wrong when he peered over the fence and could only see the back end of the big dog sticking out the door. He quickly tried to free the huge dog but had no luck so called his mum, Jackie, who came home and phoned the fire brigade. Puppy love: Moses with owner Lisa Saberi, 29 Lisa, from Welwyn Garden City, Bucks, a mature student at Ruskin Anglia University, Cambridge said: 'I wondered what was going on when I got back. I couldn't believe Moses had been so silly. 'He looked so sad and sorry for himself I was really concerned, but it was a very funny sight. You could just see this huge head.' It took 45 minutes for the firemen to rescue Moses by drilling holes around the plastic cat flap. The poor pooch was then taken to the vet with a grazed neck but is now on the mend. Lisa added: 'He was very worn out and distressed, but he's much better now. I've taken the cat flap out and will board up the hole so it won't happen again.'A Ukrainian Mi-24 helicopter gunship flies above a military base in the eastern Ukrainian town of Kramatorsk on Wednesday. REUTERS/Gleb Garanich Russian troops fighting on the side of separatists in Ukraine are advancing in the southeast region of the country, Ukraine President Petro Poroshenko said on Thursday. "I have made a decision to cancel my working visit to the Republic of Turkey due to sharp aggravation of the situation in Donetsk region, particularly in Amvrosiivka and Starobeshevo, as Russian troops were brought into Ukraine," Poroshenko said in a statement. "Russia, Ukraine now at war," tweeted geopolitical expert Ian Bremmer of Eurasia Group, adding that "Ukraine economy will collapse if direct fighting [with] Russia persists; support from the West isn't there. Poroshenko now needs a ceasefire." The United Nations Security Council is holding an emergency meeting Thursday afternoon in New York on the escalation in Ukraine at the request of Lithaunia, a NATO state which shares a border with Russia. "There's an invasion of Russian troops into the east of Ukraine," Dainus Baublys, the minister counselor for Lithuania's UN mission, told Business Insider. "Up to 1,000 Russian troops invaded yesterday... they continue pounding Ukrainian forces across the border with their artillery and they are deploying more artillery pieces along the border." Google Maps The new front opened in Amvrosiivka and Starobeshevo opens a pathway to Crimea, which Russia annexed with special forces troops in March. The fear is that Russia is attempting to create a land link between Russia and the strategic peninsula. Russian troops are leading a separatist counteroffensive in the east, bringing in tanks and using artillery from inside Ukrainian territory. A Russian-backed rebel leader said that at least 3,000 to 4,000 Russian troops were fighting inside Ukraine. "Current servicemen are also fighting in our ranks, as they came to us to struggle for our freedom instead of their vacations," prime minister of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) Alexander Zakharchenko told Russian media. "This is characteristic only for Russians." Reports from the ground describe an escalating ground war. "This is what happened: They crossed the border, took up positions, and started shooting," Sgt. Aleksei Panko said after telling The New York Times on Wednesday that about 60 armored vehicles crossed the border near the town of Novoazovsk. "This is now a war with Russia." Novoazovsk, south of Amvrosiivka and Starobeshevo, is on the highway linking Russia to the Ukrainian port of Mariupol and onto Crimea. Ukraine's military said Russian troops had taken control of Novoazovsk and several other settlements in the south of Donetsk region. "Ukrainian troops were ordered to pull out to save their lives. By late afternoon both Russian convoys had entered the town. Ukraine is now fortifying nearby Mariupol to the west," Ukraine's national security and defense council said in a statement. A look at the fighting in Ukraine's southeast, where until this week Ukrainian forces were re-taking territory very quickly over the summer. REUTERS U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt also said Russian soldiers were directly involved in the new offensive. And Daniel Baer, the U.S. Ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, called the latest escalation a "man-made tragedy, directed by the Kremlin." "Russian supplied tanks, armored vehicles, artillery and multiple rocket launchers have been insufficient to defeat Ukraine's armed forces, so now an increasing number of Russian troops are intervening directly in the fighting on Ukrainian territory," Pyatt wrote on Twitter. "Russia has also sent its newest air defense systems including the SA-22 into eastern Ukraine and is now directly involved in the fighting." Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk has called for an emergency U.N. Security Council meeting to deal with the issue of Russian troops in Ukraine, although Russia sits on the council and could veto any proposal that arose. "The Russian military's use of artillery from locations within Ukraine is of special concern to Western military officials, who say Russian artillery has already been used to shell Ukrainian forces near Luhansk," Andrew Kramer and Michael Gordon of The Times reported Wednesday. "And along with the antiaircraft systems operated by separatists or Russian forces inside Ukraine, the artillery has the potential to alter the balance of power in the struggle for control of eastern Ukraine." State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said Wednesday that Russia's "incursions" in Ukraine indicated "a Russian-directed counter-offensive is likely underway," which she said was of "deep concern" to the U.S. She accused Russia of "sending its young men into Ukraine, but not telling them or their parents where they are going or what they are doing." "These are not steps you take when you are operating in a transparent manner," Psaki said. "We are also concerned about the Russian government's unwillingness to tell the truth even as its soldiers are found 30 miles inside Ukraine." Russian servicemen drive armored vehicles on the outskirts of the city of Belgorod near the Russian-Ukrainian border on April 25. Stringer./REUTERS On Tuesday, dozens of heavily armed strangers with Russian accents and military gear without insignias appeared in an eastern Ukrainian village east of the rebel stronghold of Donetsk and set up a roadblock. "The people at the new checkpoint, they were polite military men wearing green. Definitely not Ukrainian. They're definitely not from around here," one man told Reuters. The "green men" are a reminder of the Russian special forces that were used to annex the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea. The Times noted that Russian President Vladimir Putin, who was in Belarus this week for talks with Ukrainian and European leaders, may be "calculating that Moscow could intervene in eastern Ukraine with conventional Russian forces without risking further Western economic sanctions." Yatsenyuk suggested the response from the West needed to be tougher, saying that U.S. and European Union sanctions leveled on Moscow had not been "helpful" in keeping Putin from continuing to escalate the situation. He said measures like freezing Russian assets and banning Russian bank transactions should be considered as new punitive measures. "Vladimir Putin has purposely started a war in Europe. It is impossible to hide from the fact," Yatsenyuk said. Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, shakes hands with his Ukrainian counterpart Petro Poroshenko as Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev stands nearby, in Minsk on Tuesday. REUTERS/Sergei Bondarenko/Kazakh Presidential Office/Pool Here's a look by province, and what else Russia would have to annex to create the land bridge: REUTERS And here's the fighting as of today, according to Ukraine's military: NSDC NOW WATCH: 11 Facts That Show How Different Russia Is From The Rest Of The World Armin Rosen contributed to this reportA Day in the Life of a Freelance Journalist—2013 Here is an exchange between the Global Editor of the Atlantic Magazine and myself this afternoon attempting to solicit my professional services for an article they sought to publish after reading my story “25 Years of Slam Dunk Diplomacy: Rodman trip comes after 25 years of basketball diplomacy between U.S. and North Korea” here http://www.nknews.org/2013/03/slam-dunk-diplomacy/ at NKNews.org From the Atlantic Magazine: On Mar 4, 2013 3:27 PM, “olga khazan” <okhazan@theatlantic.com> wrote: Hi there — I’m the global editor for the Atlantic, and I’m trying to reach Nate Thayer to see if he’d be interested in repurposing his recent basketball diplomacy post on our site. Could someone connect me with him, please? thanks, Olga Khazan okhazan@theatlantic.com From the head of NK News, who originally published the piece this morning: Hi that piece is copy right to NK News, so please engage us mutually. Thanks, tad From the Atlantic: Sure. Thanks Nate and Tad…I was just wondering if you’d be interested in adapting a version of that for the Atlantic. Let me know if you’d be interested. thanks, Olga From me: Hi Olga: Give me a shout at 443 205 9162 in D.C. and I’d be delighted to see whether we can work something out. Best, Nate Thayer From the Atlantic: Sure, I’ll call you in a few minutes. After a brief phone call where no specifics were really discussed, and she requested I email her: Hi Olga: What did you have in mind for length, storyline, deadline, and fees for the basketball diplomacy piece. Or any other specifics. I think we can work something out, but I want to make sure I have the time to do it properly to meet your deadline, so give me a shout back when you have the earliest chance. best, Nate Thayer From the Atlantic: Thanks for responding. Maybe by the end of the week? 1,200 words? We unfortunately can’t pay you for it, but we do reach 13 million readers a month. I understand if that’s not a workable arrangement for you, I just wanted to see if you were interested. Thanks so much again for your time. A great piece! From me: Thanks Olga: I am a professional journalist who has made my living by writing for 25 years and am not in the habit of giving my services for free to for profit media outlets so they can make money by using my work and efforts by removing my ability to pay my bills and feed my children. I know several people who write for the Atlantic who of course get paid. I appreciate your interest, but, while I respect the Atlantic, and have several friends who write for it, I have bills to pay and cannot expect to do so by giving my work away for free to a for profit company so they can make money off of my efforts. 1200 words by the end of the week would be fine, and I can assure you it would be well received, but not for free. Frankly, I will refrain from being insulted and am perplexed how one can expect to try to retain quality professional services without compensating for them. Let me know if you have perhaps mispoken. best, Nate From the Atlantic: Hi Nate — I completely understand your position, but our rate even for original, reported stories is $100. I am out of freelance money right now, I enjoyed your post, and I thought you’d be willing to summarize it for posting for a wider audience without doing any additional legwork. Some journalists use our platform as a way to gain more exposure for whatever professional goals they might have, but that’s not right for everyone and it’s of course perfectly reasonable to decline. Thank you and I’m sorry to have offended you. Best, Olga From me: Hi Olga: No offense taken and no worries. I am sure you are aware of the changing, deteriorating condition of our profession and the difficulty for serious journalists to make a living through their work resulting in the decline of the quality of news in general. Ironically, a few years back I was offered a staff job with the Atlantic to write 6 articles a year for a retainer of $125,000, with the right to publish elsewhere in addition. The then editor, Michael Kelly, was killed while we were both in Iraq, and we both, as it were, moved on to different places. I don’t have a problem with exposure but I do with paying my bills. I am sure you can do what is the common practice these days and just have one of your interns rewrite the story as it was published elsewhere, but hopefully stating that is how the information was acquired. If you ever are interested in a quality story on North Korea and wiling to pay for it, please do give me a shout. I do enjoy reading what you put out, although I remain befuddled as to how that particular business model would be sustainable to either journalism and ultimately the owners and stockholders of the Atlantic. I understand your dilemma and it really is nothing personal, I assure you, and I wish you the best of luck. So now, for those of you remained unclear on the state of journalism in 2013, you no longer are…..They appear every time I innocently open my Facebook page. Gritty, sepia-toned photos of sweaty women dressed in booty-shorts and cut-off tank tops in what appear to be steamy dungeon gyms. Sweat glistens from every pore of their chiseled physiques while they hoist up a 70-pound kettlebell. Plastered over the images are words of inspiration such as “Squat Like Your Ass Depends on It” or “Go Hard or Go Home.” These types of “fitspiration” images (or “fitspo” as I’ve been told they’re now dubbed) are shared daily by fellow fitness professionals (both men and women alike) in an effort to encourage clients or other trainers to utilize heavy weights and big movements when training their female clients. And while the idea of getting women to train heavy is smart, the strategies they’re using to convince them of that could not be more dumb. Let me get one thing off my chest. I am a huge believer in my female clients utilizing compound movements (squats, deadlifts, chin ups, overhead press, to name a few) with relatively heavy load. It is a very effective method of training for various reasons which I outline below. But the thing that we, as fitness professionals, are getting wrong is how we deliver that message. It occurs to me that we do it in one of two ways. First are the images mentioned above. That somehow lifting heavy weights gets you one step away from looking like Jenna Jameson preparing for her next close-up. Or we go to the complete opposite end of the spectrum, discussing hormonal function and how women don’t have the proper testosterone-to-estrogen ratio to effectively put on slabs of muscle mass (preventing them from ultimately looking like the second coming of Arnold). Through my experience working with many female trainees, the reason neither of these rationales tends to work has become evident to me. Women (probably more so than men) will convince themselves that they are genetic outliers. They understand the "hormone argument" but have convinced themselves that, while it’s true for other women, “all the women on my Mom’s side of the family tend to be stocky so I put on muscle really, really easily.” And, maybe more than anything else, I’ve found that my female clients really want to be listened to and heard. And when we cut them off from telling us about their fear of looking like a linebacker on their wedding day, we are usually too busy telling them “it’s impossible” and not addressing their concerns. So, as a bald, 225-pound muscle-bound personal trainer who has had to convince his female clients that they will not end up looking like yours truly, allow me to give you real, relatable rationale as to why women should be training big movements with relatively heavy weights. Reason 1: It’s Empowering There is nothing that can compare to deadlifting 200-pounds, bench pressing your bodyweight, or reaching any other strength goal you set for yourself. Not only will you feel stronger in the gym, you’ll be stronger in every other aspect of your life. It may be hard to imagine how a heavy squat can translate to a happier relationship or better performance at work, but I’ve seen it happen time and time again. There is something transformative about being able to do something that seemed impossible a few short weeks before. And once you realize achieving those milestones is possible, everything else in life seems possible. And I guarantee you that belief is much more appealing to women than having to train with pink dumbbells in the “Women’s Only” section of their gym because they’re afraid of getting stared at on the main floor. Reason 2: It Will Improve Body Composition Katlyn was probably the best female lifter (and maybe the best lifter, period) I have ever had the pleasure of training. She was also the sweetest person you could ever meet. She would bop into the gym, a huge smile on her face, and ask me about my weekend. But when it was time to lift, she would get pretty darn intense. One second she’d be asking me if I’d seen such-and-such a movie, and the next second, she’d step up to the bar and totally transform. But once the barbell hit the ground she would go back to being all sunshine and rainbows. It was something to watch. In our time together Katlyn worked up to a 296-pound deadlift and set a PR of 23 pull-ups. When she would bang out reps, jaws would drop to the floor—not only because she had the strength to move that type of weight, but because she had the toned, lean look female clients were sweating their butts off on the treadmill trying to attain. The fact Katlyn took her strength training seriously and also had the best body composition of any female client I have trained is not a coincidence. In fact, I would say there is a direct correlation between the number of pounds my clients can squat, pull, and press, and what they look like in a strapless dress. And since so many female clients are training to improve body composition, I always like to mention that. Reason 3: It’s Not the Same Old, Same Old It stands to reason that if you do the same thing over and over (and over) again, you will probably get very, very good at that thing. And that’s great if you want to become a chess master or play the clarinet. When it comes to fitness, repeating the same exercise protocols ad nauseam also leads to getting very efficient at those programs. Unfortunately, exercise efficiency is the enemy of adaptation and body composition improvements. To put it simply, if you get very comfortable with your workout routine, you are not challenging your body to produce change. There is a famous saying that the definition of the term “crazy” is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. So if you’ve been banging out 20 reps of incline press with 7-pound dumbbells for the past six months, chances are your body’s not
the ground at full speed -- no air-borne explosions as witnesses reported and no "shoot-down" by an F-16) being found as far from the crash site as one mile. Not "Huh?" but "How?" My doctorate in math and my training in engineering and physics is challenged. (once again...) (Huh?) 74. Chance of as many as six of the Saudis (who comprised 15 of the 19 terrorists supposedly aboard the four ill-fated aircraft) and one non-Saudi being reported "alive, but frightened" by their families and/or close friends within three weeks after the 9-11 tragedy. (Huh?) 75. Chance of bin Laden family members residing in the US being flown hastily out of the US during the days following 9-11 while all commercial flights were "grounded." (Hmmm...) 76. Chance of President Bush's Secret Service not having hustled the president to safety immediately after it was clear that "America was under attack" (being told directly to the president). It was later stated that this action was not accomplished so as "not to frighten the children." (Huh?) 77. Chance of paper documents incriminating Osama bin Laden being found intact and unburned at the WTC site, yet the black boxes and most everything else there being pulverized. (Huh?) 78. Chance of news cameramen being prevented for several days after the attack from photographing the site from certain angles. (Why?) 79. Chance of a clear discrepancy of as many as 34 names between the published passenger lists and the official list of those killed on the four flights. In fact, almost nothing really matched. (Huh?) 80. Chance of the New York Police Department liaison to the FBI being told he must discontinue in that capacity because he was a "security risk." (Hmmm) 81. Chance of a sophisticated terrorist plan such as 9-11 had to be -- most likely involving dozens of persons other than those aboard the airplanes -- not being noticed by the FBI, CIA, NSA, etc., etc., etc.(Huh?) 82. Chance of witnesses claiming to have heard additional explosions within the buildings -- including the persons, a New York fireman among them, who were miraculously rescued from the "bubble" buried in the debris. (Huh?) 83. Chance of the FBI acknowledging that the names of the hijackers might indeed be falsified -- yet picture IDs were required, I believe, to board the aircraft. (Huh?) That might explain why so many of the "hijackers" were reported to be "alive and scared" afterwards (see #74, above). 84. Chance of Al-Quaida "network" of terrorist operatives [and no argument about them in other activities!] being almost instantly (within 24 hours) being identified and blamed for 9-11, yet no shred of tangible evidence being presented to the American people. [How could there be? There hasn't even been an inquest yet, only two overseas wars plus the "War on Terror"... as of this event being written.] (Huh?) 85. Chance of the FBI identifying the full contingent of Arabic hijackers from the non-Arabic names on the planes' manifests. (Huh?) 86. Chance of the seat numbers identified by the FBI as the seat numbers of the hijackers not matching up with the seats supposedly cell-phoned to authorities by Flight Attendant Amy Sweeney. (Huh?) 87. Chance of the FBI not updating their list on the basis of evidence given them by the Saudi Arabian Foreign Minister -- relating to the still living "hijackers". (Huh?) 88. Chance of the supposedly fundamentalist (Islamic) suicide terrorists carousing and searching for prostitutes the evening before 9-11 in Boston. (Huh?) 89. Chance of a hijacker leaving an incriminating note in the car at Boston's Logan Airport. (Huh?) Did they want Al-Quaida to be quickly identified and attacked? [Maybe... yes!] 90. Chance of the terrorists having top secret codes relating to both the White House and Air Force One -- the reason given for taking the President hop, skipping and jumping all over the country on 9-11 --once he left the schoolhouse.(Huh?) 91. Chance of no additional evidence having been found relating to the 9-11 attacks since the day of the attacks -- and that after hundreds of arrests and a half million (the last time I read a number) tips. (Huh?) 92. Chance of hundreds of foreigners being held by the US in Cuba without criminal charges being pressed nor indictments prosecuted -- all relating to the 9-11 events, but still being held more than a year later. (Hmmm... ironic choice of the Island of Cuba for our detention camp, I think...) 93. Chance of Flight 93 flying straight into the ground, yet having eye-witnesses who stated that they "saw" explosions and falling burning debris -- assuming as we've been told that there were no on-board explosions and no shoot-down. (Huh?) 94. Chance of Flight 93 not having been shot down with eye-witnesses having stated that they saw an F-16 following the plane -- and in fact maneuvering in circles around the plane -- prior to the crash.(Huh?) 95. Chance of knife-slitting, screaming, threats and other blood-curdling events having occurred, yet afterwards, having a passenger state on a cell phone that the hijackers "are being kind." (Huh?) This could be stated in reverse... chance of that same soothing phone call after the hijacking and after the box-cutters were used in such a terrible manner. 96. Chance of the New York City's bomb-proof and disaster-proof Command Post (on the 23rd floor of Building #7) not even being activated during New York's worst disaster since its construction. (Huh?) 97. Chance of the New York City's bomb-proof and disaster-proof Command Post (on the 23rd floor of Building #7) being perfectly located in the trajectory of the first aircraft (the one that struck Tower #1) and in the curved trajectory (but further along that projected trajectory) of the second aircraft (the one that struck Tower #2). (Hmmm...) Holy Schmolie! If you folks continue to send emails (some have interesting links to incredible URLs), this list will go into three digits soon... 98. Chance of the New York City's bomb-proof and disaster-proof Command Post (on the 23rd floor of Building #7) being largely "pulverized" and its reinforced steel remains being shipped to China and India for "recycling" before investigators and the New York City Fire Department itself could examine the remains for possible evidence. (Huh?) 99. Chance of five former Israeli Army veterans who were witnessed (and photographed) across the river in New Jersey at the time of the tragedy dancing and giving 'high-fives'... having box-cutters (huh?), almost $5000 hidden in a sock and European passports (according to ABC's 20/20). [Why were they so happy after such a tragedy anyway?] (Hmmm...) 100. Chance of some of the hijackers leaving Arabic-language flight manuals and a Koran in a parked car at one of the "take-off" airports. Didn't they need the flight manuals -- and want the Koran? (Huh?) 101. Chance of FBI Director Robert Mueller openly admitting that some of the identities of the hijackers "are in question because of identity theft," then no more about that since -- that is, since about two weeks after 9-11. The same 19 persons' pictures continued to be posted as being the culprits until... well, until the time that I wrote this "event." (Huh?) 102. Chance of an Israeli instant messaging company, Odigo, receiving instant message warnings only two hours before the attacks themselves. Odigo was reported to have offices in New York City at the time of the airing of this information. (Huh?) 103. Chance of Louie Cacchioli, a Harlem firefighter, saying (and I repeat the reported quote) "I was taking firefighters up in the elevator to the 24th floor to get in position to evacuate workers. On the last trip, a bomb went off. We think there were bombs set in the building." [This might explain the first, second and third time in the history of the world that tall buildings were said to have collapsed vertically... due to... fire!] (Yes, right.) 104. Chance of the media stating that fire caused the buildings to collapse when (1) it has never before happened in the history of the world (repeated, I know) and (2) no physical evidence, such as the melted steel, was retained for investigation or scientific inquiry. (Huh?) 105. Chance of Tom Ridge, the fairly new Director of Homeland Security and an extremely intelligent person in my opinion, lamenting that he "had no idea" why not one of the 1300 (the count at that time some weeks after 9-11) persons arrested was an Al-Quaida operative nor had they (again, at that time -- and even now as far as I know) found a single Al-Quaida cell operating in the US. (Huh?) 106. Chance of John O'Neill, head of WTC Security on the day of the attacks -- and who was killed at that time -- having left his FBI job only two weeks prior to 9-11 because persons from "higher up the chain of command" were interfering with his ongoing investigation of Islamic terrorists in America. (Hmmm...) 107. Chance of the put options (mentioned above) on United Airlines stock being handled by a firm previously managed by the #3 Executive Director of the CIA (on the day of the attacks). (Huh?) 108. Chance of $2.5 million in profits (from the put options on UAL stock) never being picked up (huh?) after 9-11 and after a mention in the mainstream media about those options. [Depending upon how one views this "event," it might have a probability of 0.9 -- still below 1.0, however.] 109. Chance of the FBI requesting the airlines to keep the names of the suspected hijackers "quiet for now" [and this request remains in effect even today] because of the uncertainties as to their identities -- yet providing the newspapers and other media the full names and photos of the nineteen hijackers (no suggestion of uncertainty) within 48 hours and never retracting the list or updating it. (Huh?) 110. Chance of not one of the alleged phone calls (cell calls and back-of-seat phones) from the three aircraft that crashed into buildings -- seven or eight in all -- mentioning that the hijackers were of Middle Eastern descent (or at least mentioning that they were olive-to-dark skinned). One of those passengers involved in these particular calls was Barbara Olson, a relatively well-known journalist who would, it would seem to me, be unlikely to neglect mentioning something as important as that fact. (Hmmm...) 111. Chance of copies of the "final letter of instruction" being found in specific locations that tied the plot to three of the crashed aircraft -- one accidentally left behind (off-board the aircraft) when the aircraft took of, one intact at the crash site of Flight 93 and one in a garbage can in an airport parking lot. (Hmmm...) 112. Chance of that document (mentioned just above) beginning with the words "In the Name of God, the most merciful, the most compassionate -- in the name of God, of myself and my family..." I lived in the Middle East for the better part of a decade and believe that Muslims always mention the Prophet Mohammed immediately after Allah in all of their prayers. (Huh?) 113. Chance of the Arabic text of the above letter not being released by the FBI -- even until now, more than a year later. (Hmmm...) 114. Chance of the two F-15s that took off from Otis ANG Base flying at an average speed of 720 miles per hour towards New York prior to the second aircraft impacting the WTC at 9:02 a.m. Otis to NYC is 190 miles; planes took off at 8:52 a.m. and we are told they were still 70 miles from the WTC at the time of the impact ten minutes after the F-15s took off. Admittedly, this is a corrected item inasmuch as, although 720 mph is about half the max speed of an F-15, the 720 mph is within a reasonable "expected" average speed. I had previously computed the speed to be twelve miles per hour or less than the stall speed of an F-15 -- applying what I had called "simple arithmetic." Paint me "embarrassed." (Thanks, Alex!) I'd give this one a probability of 0.5 based upon my USAF years. 115. Chance of the President of the United States of America boarding Air Force One (after finally leaving the school building in Florida after continuing to read to the children for a half an hour) and then not returning to the nation's Capitol, Washington, DC, until 7:00 p.m. -- more than ten hours after the attacks began that morning. It was reported to the press later that he was routed and rerouted to numerous stops including Louisiana and Nebraska because the terrorists were known to have the codes to Air Force One, the President's aircraft. (Hmmm...) 116. Chance of the Arab terrorists, including the 15 Saudis who allegedly died in the four crashes, having access to the 'Special Access Required' Top Secret codes [meaning higher than Top Secret] relating to Air Force One and Presidential procedures during a time of national emergency. (Hmmm...) [Makes one wonder who all was involved and who all was/were ultimately targeted, doesn't it?] 117. Chance of the air space over Washington, DC being considered unsafe for Air Force One under any conditions for several hours after a major terrorist attack and a shutdown of commercial aircraft nationwide. (huh?) [This seems highly related to the fact that no USAF fighter aircraft were positioned to stop Flight 77 from attacking the Pentagon a full hour and a half after the first plane impacted the North Tower of the World Trade Center -- but then, who knows, right?] 118. Chance of the final "we really don't know" story from the White House about the terrorists intentions vis-á-vis attacking Air Force One being buried back on page eight and page twelve (Huh?) of the two largest US newspapers. [Most newspapers didn't even carry the story -- and most Americans still don't know why the President was very wisely moving from one Command Post to another across the country during the hours after the 9-11 attacks.] 119. Chance of the FBI Director (Robert Mueller) stating in April 2002 after seven months of exhaustive investigation after the 9-11 tragedy that the 19 alleged hijackers "left no paper trail" and to have said further that, "in our investigation, we have not uncovered a single piece of paper--either here or in the treasure trove of information that has turned up in Afghanistan and elsewhere--that mentioned any aspect of the September 11 plot." (Whew!) [Recall that these same terrorists were reported to have left behind instruction letters, prayers, Korans, passports and other incriminating evidence at airports, etc.--which leads one to speculate just who were the 19 "Arab" persons aboard the aircraft if not the persons associated with the 19 pictures published in US newspapers immediately after 9-11--with complete names--that we've come to know so well?] 120. Chance of fewer than 25,000 of our weakest and most vulnerable souls on earth having died of starvation on 11 September 2001. Since the average has been computed to be 35,615 deaths by starvation daily, the chance that fewer than 25,000 would have died of starvation on 9-11 is about one in a million using a Gaussian Distribution. Just pen this one in and take my word for it. [no "Huh?" about it! Admittedly, there is some bias showing through on my part here and you may skip this item if you don't share my concern about the issue of starvation worldwide.] 121. Chance of fewer than 500 species of plants and animals having become extinct on 11 September 2001. Since the average number of plants and animals becoming extinct daily, 365 days a year -- not just on 11 September 2001 -- has been estimated at 578, we're still on the track of very low chances of this event occurring as stated. And before I get back to the miniscule chances of various 9-11 related events, it might be worth mentioning that more than 150,000 acres of rainforests were destroyed by mankind on 9-11 too. Yes, I have a fixation on the incredibly unlikely occurrence of a number of events directly or indirectly associated with the terrible events in New York on 9-11; but it puts things in perspective a little to reflect on these past two "chance of" events/truths, doesn't it? [no "Huh?" here either... again, one of my personal biases is showing through here and this item can be skipped by those who don't share my personal concerns about the rapid decline in species due to the carelessness of one of them. And yes, many species do die out for purely natural reasons too; I know that.] But getting back to the main thrust of this list... (and to summarize some of the points above in a slightly different manner so as to make your job easier in establishing the chances of the events actually occurring...) 122. Chance of a full 35 minutes elapsing between the time that the FAA was notified that Flight 77 "was probably hijacked" and then (the FAA) notifying NORAD that something was amiss. Standard SOP says to do so instantly! (Huh?) 123. Chance of a full 24 minutes elapsing between the time that radio-transponder communications with Flight 11 was lost and the order for the scrambling of jets to occur. Standard SOP calls for instant scrambling of jets when any commercial aircraft is off course. (Huh?) 124. Chance of not a single fighter interceptor being in the vicinity of Flight 93 a full 50 minutes after it was declared hijacked. (Huh?) ... and completing this slightly different view of the time elapsed and the "empty" skies -- empty of USAF assets anyway... 125. Chance of NORAD refusing to use the (many) bases closer to Flights 11, 77 and 175 (the ones that crashed into buildings) that had combat-ready squadrons ready to fly. Or alternatively stated... chance of NORAD choosing to scramble jets from as far as 130 and 200 miles away from the aircraft that were hijacked -- when, for example, both Andrews AFB and Langley AFB are nearby with combat-ready fighters and are specifically charged with protecting the very airspace being used by the hijackers! (Huh?) 126. Chance of the entire civilian and military air defenses of the Unites States of America collapsing entirely within one month of two meetings wherein all top chiefs of all US intelligence agencies and the President of the United States were explicitly warned that hijacking of commercial aircraft was "likely" in the very near future. (Whew!) 127. Chance of my asking a random sample of ten persons -- all of higher than average intelligence and reasonably well read -- what they know about "Building #7 at the World Trade Center" -- and having all ten respond as if they had never really ever even heard of "Building #7 at the World Trade Center." Under normal circumstances, that should be about one in a billion since that building's perfectly vertical collapse (implosion) due to fire was the first of its kind in the history of the world. (Be sure to purchase the Commemorative film for the New York Fire Department and see Building #7 slowly collapse and disintegrate.) I indeed sampled ten persons and not one of them knew one thing about Building #7. (Did you, prior to reading #1 of this list?) In any event, that provided me with an excellent indication of just how well hidden so many of the actual facts associated with 9-11 have been for the past year and a half. Some are buried in the back pages of old newspapers, but many have simply not been mentioned at all by the major media or the Government. (Why?) 128. Chance of all of the load bearing supports on the ground floor of Building #7 failing at exactly the same time. (Huh?) And since we're reexamining Building #7's strange vertical collapse and implosion, what would be the chance of a fire caused by stored diesel fuel (again... huh?... and why?) burning so as to be equally distributed throughout the entire first floor? Oh yes, notice that these last two "events" are closely related to each other and to #1, for that matter. Fine. Before continuing with the list it might be worthwhile to include a short lesson in Probability Theory for those who may be bothered by my including dependent or "not mutually exclusive" events. A well-known theorem is P(A Ç B) = P(A/B) * P (B) where P(A/B) is the conditional probability of A given that B occurs and P(A Ç B) is the probability that both A and B occur. Thus the probability that Building #7 collapsed perfectly vertically and that the intense fire on its first floor was uniformly distributed therein (the "official" story) is equal to the probability of having such an intense fire burning uniformly on the first floor which I think is a chance of about one in a million multiplied by the chance of the building collapsing vertically (without explosives to assist in the destruction of the building) given that the fire was uniformly intense at the location of each load-bearing support -- still a chance of one in 10, I would guess -- assuming the intensity was sufficient to melt steel, which is highly improbable. Thus the probability of both events (the official story) would be a chance of about one in ten million! And that is a conservative number. And that's only referencing Building #7. There are Buildings #1, #2 and #6 which should be included separately. I hope that helps. I knew there was a reason way back in the 60's for taking some time out to earn an extra masters degree -- a Masters in Experimental Statistics at N.C. State -- before going on to get my doctorate. Well, back to the growing list... 129. Chance of not a single one of the firemen in the lobby nearby the elevator (shaft) in the North Tower (Building #1) shown in the marvelous documentary film commemorating the firemen's bravery... even mildly complaining about a fire burning nearby in the building with a heat that was estimated (later) by FEMA to have been 900 - 1100 degrees Celsius -- that is, more than 1700 degrees Fahrenheit, a temperature sufficient to (naturally) melt the steel beams and support structures -- as well as (not mentioned by FEMA) casting aluminum and/or glazing pottery. 130. Chance of Vice President Cheney and his staff being administered Cipro (the specific antibiotic for Anthrax) on the morning of September 11, 2001 -- almost a month before the first Anthrax mailing in early October. (Huh?) Back to the age-old question: Who knew what -- and when? 131. Chance of the 1/118th Infantry Battalion of the South Carolina National Guard reporting for duty in July, 2001, and being unexpectedly informed that all of their activities (which had already been planned) for the next two months would be suspended so that they could prepare for a mobilization exercise scheduled for mid-September, 2001! 132. Chance of Bush's national security leadership meeting between 90 and 100 times in the months immediately prior to the 9-11 attacks, yet discussing terrorism only twice during those meetings. This was the "principals committee" of the National Security Council. Despite the discussion of an impending attack using commercial airliners only one month earlier, the Bush staff defended the lack of concern towards terrorism as a result of only "scattered hints" of Al-Quaida activities. (Huh?) 133. Chance of the banking confidentiality laws being strong enough to keep secret the names of individuals and organizations who placed the "put" options on American Airlines and United Airlines just prior to 9-11 -- more than a year and a half later! (Huh?) [... and the clock is still ticking in June of 2003 as this "event" is being posted.] 134. Chance of even one cell phone (let alone between 13 and 30) with a max power of five watts (most cell phones have three or four) being capable of even making the "handshake" required to make a call with a ground-based transponder. Add the following facts to your analysis before making the estimate of the chance of this "handshake" occurring: The planes were at an altitude of at least 5,000 feet, the planes were traveling at 450 miles per hour -- or faster, the electronic "handshake" takes roughly 45 seconds for a cell out of five-watt range, etc. A plane traveling at 450 mph is traveling at three times the max range of a cell phone's transmitter before such a "handshake" could occur. All of the following have to occur for the "handshake" to be successful: (1) contact must be made, (2) the tower must know "who" (including the provider) the cell phone is, (3) the tower must know the precise mode of the call, and (4) it must be established that it is indeed in a roaming area. This can be accomplished upon take-off and landing, but at 5000-plus feet and in a commercial airliner with its aluminum skin -- whew! Notice how little press the cell phone calls received after the second week or so. Wonder why? 135. Chance of George W. Bush's advisors insisting that he remain in an unprotected school on a known intersection reading to the children when the Secret Service desperately wanted to transfer Mr. Bush to Cheyenne Mountain, protected by hundreds of tons of granite, during this very uncertain period just after the second plane crashed into the South Tower. (Huh?) 136. Chance of a large 6,000 gallon (partially filled) tank of diesel (heating?) fuel being stored in an exposed location at 15 feet above the floor level in Building #7 of the World Trade Center... on 9-11. (Huh?) 137. Chance of there being no passengers in the subway below the World Trade Center at the time of the crashes and activities above. (Huh?) 138. Chance of there being no security guard at the gold reservoir (i.e., fairly large vaults) under the World Trade Center at the time of the crashes and activities above. (Huh?) 139. Chance of more than 40,000 visitors, clients and employees of/at the World Trade Center not showing up for work or appointments on 9-11-2001 by 8:30 a.m. (Huh?) All of the news reports during the day on 9-11 -- and continuing for a couple of days -- spoke of more than 50,000 persons usually inside the buildings at the time of the attacks. It was estimated by the New York Fire Department that fewer than 5,000 escaped from the buildings alive. The arithmetic simply doesn't "add up." 140. Chance of Huffman Aviation in Florida receiving notification from the INS six months to the day after 9-11 that both Mohammad Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi (alleged pilots of two of the hijacked aircraft) had had their visas upgraded from "tourist" to "student pilot." (Double Huh?) 141. Chance of an FBI Agent in Phoenix urging the bureau headquarters to investigate "Middle Eastern men enrolled in American flight schools." This was during the previous summer (a year before 9-11) and that agent also cited Osama bin Laden by name when expressing his concerns about terrorist activities. 142. Chance of a forty year-old FAA rule allowing commercial airline pilots to be armed being rescinded only two months prior to the 9-11 terrorist attacks. (Huh?) [To my knowledge, the airlines never permitted their pilots to be armed anyway, but the rules were already in place until two months before 9-11.] The rule allowing the pilots to be armed was instituted in 1961 after the Cuban missile crisis and then abolished two months before 9-11. Convenient, huh? These next few were phoned to me some weeks back, but it took a bit of work to double-check their authenticity. Thanks CBS News! 143. Chance of virtually no preventive measures being taken by the US Government prior to 9-11 after receiving very specific warnings from the German, Israeli, Russian and Canadian governments. How specific? Well, for starters, the German BND warned both Israel and our own CIA in June of 2001 that Middle Eastern terrorists associated with Al Quaida were planning to hijack commercial airliners and attack "high profile" commercial and cultural targets. The WTC was specifically cited. Izvetia (Russian intelligence) warned of as many as 25 hijackers at airports -- specifically citing Boston's Logan Airport -- and provided additional specifics that would at least have had air cover in New York on 9-11. Canada? Well, the story of the former navy intelligence officer (Delmart "Mike" Vreeland) who wrote a very specific warning from his jail cell in Canada is now almost legendary. [The story of his two blue pens will make a great movie someday.] We might ask what the chance is of a former Navy intelligence officer asking for political asylum in Canada in the 21st Century. The Israeli warnings were less specific, but aimed directly at targets in New York and Washington, DC and on the date: September 11, 2001. (Huh?) [Of course, the instant messaging service, Odigo, received warnings only two hours prior to the attacks (previous item in this list), so this is old hat, right?] 144. Chance of virtually no preventive measures being taken by the US Government prior to 9-11 after receiving very specific warnings and indications from its own intelligence agencies (CIA and FBI, in particular) that Middle Eastern terrorists whom they had been tracking were taking flying lessons and making peculiar trips here and there about the East Coast. James Woods (actor) reported (a specific warning and the FAA received his warning) about Middle Eastern men acting "very suspicious" on a flight on which he was a passenger. He later identified two of the terrorists from the pictures published by the FBI. (huh?) 145. Chance of the German police eavesdropping on a telephone call of an jailed Iranian who was telephoning US Government intelligence agencies in the summer of 2001 to warn of an imminent attack on the WTC in the week of September 9. -- and no action being taken after this information was passed to US Government authorities. (huh?) I could write much more about the "Echelon" program which allows for electronic eavesdropping of cell phone calls by a number of "friendly" European countries. Partner countries share the information that is so "tapped." 'Nuff said. 246. Chance of the US Government passing a law making it nearly impossible (but not quite) for relatives of the 9-11 terrorists to sue anyone but the terrorists. (Huh? I'm confused by this one.) The next couple or so are from the same source as above three items; however the specificity of the next couple of items in this list, in particular, really make the probabilities (chances of them having happened under the "standard" assumptions) even more remote than earlier references to the same activities. Subject: Insider trading just prior to 9-11. 147. Chance of the "puts" -- and other inside trading -- that occurred during the two weeks prior to 9-11 only involving companies that lost (big time!) as a result of the attacks. The specific companies were: United Airlines (of course!), American Airlines (of course!), Axa Reinsurance, Marsh & McLennan, Merrill-Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Munich Reinsurance, Swiss Reinsurance and Citigroup. (No "Huh?" needed here) 148. Chance of no alarm bells going off within the US Government's intelligence agencies with trading anomalies such as the following: (1) an increase in United Airlines (UAL) Put Options of ninety times -- not 90 shares or 90 percent, but a multiple of ninety! -- above the normal between 6 and 10 September 2001, (2) an increase in UAL Put Options of 285 times -- that's more than 28,000 percent! -- on the Thursday before the attack, (3) an increase in American Airlines Put Options of sixty times the normal -- again, not 60 shares or 60% but a multiple of sixty! -- on the day before the attacks, (4) nothing like such increases for any other airlines according to the Bloomberg Business Report, and (5) similar increases in Put Options for both Morgan Stanley and Merrill-Lynch (27 times and 12 times the normal, respectively). (Wow!) [To make your estimate of the "chance of" a little easier on this one, consider that Dylan Ratigan of Bloomberg Business Report said the following on Good Morning Texas, "This would be one of the most extraordinary coincidences in the history of mankind, if it were a coincidence." How does one in a hundred million sound?] 149. Chance of no fighter cover over the White House on 9-11, yet 24-hour fighter coverage over the President's ranch in Crawford, Texas during the weeks preceding 9-11. 150. Chance of the FBI having an informant living with two of the alleged hijackers in the days preceding 9-11, yet not knowing anything helpful until it was too late. (Huh?) 151. Chance of the Bush Administration vigorously opposing Congressional Hearings that might investigate details relating to the attacks on 9-11 -- details that largely remain hidden even today almost two years after 9-11 -- details similar to those in this list for which we are estimating their likelihood of having occurred. For that matter, what is the chance that persons who wish to examine these details would be characterized as "unpatriotic" by many in Congress, and (specifically) that a Georgia Senator (Zell Miller) would have characterized former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney's call for such hearings as "dangerous, loony and irresponsible"? [You may paint me "loony" -- but NOT unpatriotic or irresponsible! Please!] 152. Chance of General Richard Myers, USAF, being confirmed as Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff after answering "Sir, I don't know the answer to that question," or "I can get that for you!" to such questions as, "Was the Defense Department contacted by the FAA or the FBI or any other agency after the first two hijacked aircraft crashed into the World Trade Center, prior to the time the Pentagon was hit?" or "The time we don't have is when the Pentagon was notified, if they were, by the FAA or the FBI or any other agency relative to any potential threat..." etc., etc., etc. at the confirmation hearings on the 13th of September, 2001 -- only two days after 9-11 at which time General Myers was at the Pentagon in the Crisis Command Post. (Huh?) His memory was interesting to say the least. [Incidentally, General Myers is one of the very finest USAF generals who has ever served. It's only his confirmation hearing that seemed strange in retrospect.] 153. Chance of the Air Defense Intercept Zone (ADIZ) just off-shore over the Atlantic Ocean not being patrolled during the time of the 9/11 attacks. It is ordinarily patrolled -- most heavily in the mornings -- by fighter aircraft 365 days a year. These aircraft could vector onto a target instantly without even having to scramble and take off from an air base. Where were they? 154. Chance of the New York Fire Department's warnings to both the mayor and the Port Authority (New York and New Jersey) about the danger of having a large diesel fuel tank just above the first floor of a skyscraper... being ignored, despite the fact that it grossly violated the fire code. (Huh?) [See Item #136, above.] This diesel fuel was stored for the purpose of fueling generators needed by the command bunker (on the 23rd floor???) that was never used during the attacks on New York -- at least not by the mayor! [I wouldn't occupy a 23rd floor Command Bunker during an attack on New York either. Why on earth was it built there?] 155. Chance of roughly one in every three email (and phone call) responses to this list/webpage being something like "Forget it Joe; what good does it do to dig up old crap that isn't even relevant any more. Let's get on with life!" On the other hand, someone recently wrote, "... the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates taught his students that the pursuit of truth can only begin once they start to question and analyze every belief that they ever held dear. If a certain belief passes the tests of evidence, deduction, and logic, it should be kept. If it doesn't, the belief should not only be discarded, but the thinker must also question why he was led to believe the erroneous information in the first place." [Paint me an elementary school "student thinker" who is wondering why I was led to believe so very much relating to 9-11 in the first place. At least that's where I am after reading #1 through #154.] 156. Chance of the 177th Air National Guard stationed at Pomona, New Jersey being instructed to cease normal sorties two weeks prior to 9-11. This would have been another source of potential interceptors providing coverage for both New York and Washington, D.C. (Hmmm...) 157. Chance of the Andrews Air Base website being changed just after 9-11 so as to erase mention of its combat readiness. It was there on 9-12 and gone on 9-13. (Huh?) Of course, it was picked up by persons like myself in cache files, but... The answer as to "why?" may be in the next item below. 158. Chance of Andrews Air Base with the 121st Fighter Squadron of the 113th Fighter Wing (USAF F-16s), the 321st Marine Fighter Squadron (with super F/A-18 Hornets yet) and the 49th Marine Air Guard all stationed there... not getting a single aircraft in the air until after the Pentagon was struck. Andrews AFB is between 11 and 14 miles from the Pentagon depending upon the runway and direction of take-off (i.e., the wind direction). Langley AFB is 140
check that it exists is a waste, and this is arguably the reason why other solutions are both much slower and do not scale so well. Also, the preprocessing step, while rather costly (takes about 6 seconds on my machine), has to be done only once, to initialize the "boggle engine" (moreover, the resulting trie can be stored in e.g..mx file for later reuse, avoiding this overhead for subsequent uses), while in other posted solutions some preprocessing has to be done for every particular board. The main message I want to deliver is that, for the top-level Mathematica code, the choice of efficient data structures is crucial. Our Mathematica programming instincts demand that we reuse as much of the built-in functionality as possible, but one always has to question how well the existing functionality matches the problem. In this particular case, my opinion is that neither the built-in Graph - related functions nor the DictionaryLookup with patterns bring much to the table. To the opposite, these functions force us to use unnatural for this problem data representations and/or algorithms, and this is what leads to the slowdowns. I may be over-emphasizing this point, but this was exactly the essence of the question. Now, some timing comparisons (note that for the solution of @R.M., I had to include the pieces defining adjnodes, letters and dict variables, into the timing measurements): Board 4x4 (the original one): Pillsy 3.3 sec R.M. 1.4 sec L.S. 0.04 sec Board 5x5: "E I S H R B D O I O T R O E X Z U Y Q S I A S U M" Pillsy 18.8 sec R.M. 7.6 sec L.S. 0.05 sec Board 7x7 "E I E G E O T A O B A U R A N E I P L A Y O O I I C A T I I F U N L A S T I N G E W U H L E O X S" Pillsy 373.8 sec R.M. 191.5 sec L.S. 0.18 sec So, you can see that for larger boards, the difference between the running times is even more dramatic, hinting that the solutions have different computational complexities. I took the trouble to perform and present all these timings because I think that this problem is an important counterexample to the "conventional wisdom" to favor shorter implementations utilizing built-ins over the hand-written top-level mma code. While I agree that in general this is a good strategy, one has to always examine the case at hand. To my mind, this problem presents one notable exception to this rule. Implementation The following solution will not use Mathematica graphs, but will be about 100 times faster (than the timings you cite), and will rely on this post. I will borrow a function which builds the word tree from there: ClearAll[makeTree]; makeTree[wrds : {__String}] := makeTree[Characters[wrds]]; makeTree[wrds_ /; MemberQ[wrds, {}]] := Prepend[makeTree[DeleteCases[wrds, {}]], {} -> {}]; makeTree[wrds_] := Reap[If[# =!= {}, Sow[Rest[#], First@#]] & /@ wrds, _, #1 -> makeTree[#2] &][[2]] Its use is detailed in the mentioned post. Now, here is a helper function which will produce rules for vertex number to letter conversion, and adjacency rules: Clear[getLetterAndAdjacencyRules]; getLetterAndAdjacencyRules[letterMatrix_?(MatrixQ[#, StringQ] &)] := Module[{a, lrules, p, adjRules}, lrules = Thread[Range[Length[#]] -> #] &@Flatten[letterMatrix]; p = ArrayPad[ Partition[Array[a, Length[lrules]], Last@Dimensions@letterMatrix], 1 ]; adjRules = Flatten[ ListConvolve[{{1, 1, 1}, {1, 2, 1}, {1, 1, 1}}, p] /. Plus -> List /. {left___, 2v_, right___} :> {v -> {left, right}} /. a[x_] :> x]; Map[Dispatch, {lrules, adjRules}] ]; It is pretty ugly but it does the job. Next comes the main function, which will find all vertex sequences which result in valid dictionary words: EDIT Apparently, there is a problem with Module -generated inner functions. I used Module in getVertexSequences initially, but, because in my benchmarks I happened to use a previous incarnation of it with a different name (where I did not yet modularize the inner functions), I did not see the difference. The difference is an order of magnitude slow-down. Therefore, I switched to Block, to get back the performance I claimed (You can replace back the Block with Module to observe the effect). This is likely related to this issue, and is something anyone should be aware of IMO, since this is quite insidious. END EDIT Clear[getVertexSequences]; getVertexSequences[adjrules_, letterRules_, allTree_, n_] := Block[{subF, f, getWordsForStartingVertex}, ( A function to extract a sub-tree ) subF[v_, tree_] := With[{letter = v /. letterRules}, With[{res = letter /. tree}, res /; res =!= letter]]; subF[_, _] := {}; ( Main function to do the recursive traversal ) f[vvlist_, {{} -> {}, rest___}] := f[Sow[vvlist], {rest}]; f[_, {}] := Null; f[vvlist : {last_, prev_List}, subTree_] := Scan[ f[{#, vvlist}, subF[#, subTree]] &, Complement[last /. adjrules, Flatten[vvlist]] ]; ( Function to post-process the result ) getWordsForStartingVertex[v_] := If[# === {}, #, Reverse[Map[Flatten, First@#], 2] ] &@Reap[f[{v, {}}, subF[v, allTree]]][[2]]; ( Call the function on every vertex ) Flatten[Map[getWordsForStartingVertex, Range[n]], 1] ] At the heart of it, there is a recursive function f, which acts very simply. The vvlist variable is a linked list of already visited vertices. The second argument is a sub-tree of the main word tree, which corresponds to the sequence of already visited vertices (converted to letters. To understand better what the sub-tree is, see the mentioned post). When the sub-tree starts with {} -> {}, this means (by the way word tree is constructed), that the sequence of vertices corresponds to a valid word, so we record it. In any case, if the subtree is not {}, we Scan our function recursively on adjacent vertices, removing from them those we already visited. The final functions we need are the one to convert vertex sequences to words, and the one to construct the trie data structure. Here they are: Clear[wordsFromVertexSequences]; wordsFromVertexSequences[vseqs_List, letterRules_] := Map[StringJoin, vseqs /. letterRules]; ClearAll[getWordTree]; getWordTree[minLen_Integer: 1, maxLen : (_Integer \| Infinity) : Infinity] := makeTree[ Select[ToLowerCase@DictionaryLookup[""], minLen <= StringLength[#] <= maxLen &]]; The function to bring this all together: ClearAll[getWords]; getWords[board_String, wordTree_] := getWords[ToLowerCase@ImportString@board, wordTree]; getWords[lboard_, wordTree_] := Module[{lrules, adjrules}, {lrules, adjrules} = getLetterAndAdjacencyRules[lboard ]; wordsFromVertexSequences[ getVertexSequences[adjrules, lrules, wordTree, Times @@ Dimensions[lboard]], lrules ] ]; Illustration First, construct a full tree of all words in a dictionary. This preprocessing step can take a little while: largeTree = getWordTree[]; Now, construct the word matrix: wmat = ToLowerCase@ImportString@ "F X I E A M L O E W B X A S T U" {{"f", "x", "i", "e"}, {"a", "m", "l", "o"}, {"e", "w", "b","x"}, {"a", "s", "t", "u"}} Next, construct the rules for vertex-to-letter conversion and adjacency rules: ({lrules,adjrules} = getLetterAndAdjacencyRules[wmat])//Short[#,3]& {Dispatch[{1->f,2->x,3->i,4->e,5->a,6->m,7->l,8->o,9->e,10->w,11->b, 12->x,13->a,14->s,15->t,16->u},-DispatchTables-], Dispatch[{1->{2,5,6},<<14>>,16->{11,12,15}},<<1>>]} We are now ready to use our function: (seqs = getVertexSequences[adjrules,lrules,largeTree,16])//Short//AbsoluteTiming {0.0185547,{{1,5},{1,5,2},{1,5,6,9},{1,6},<<89>>,{15,14}, {15,16,11},{15,16,11,14},{15,16,12}}} Note that it took very little time to get the result. We can finally convert it to words: wordsFromVertexSequences[seqs,lrules]//Short {fa,fax,fame,fm,xi,xml,xl,<<84>>,twas,tb,ts,tub,tubs,tux} The way to call a final function: (* Do this only once per session *) $largeTree = getWordTree[3]; board = ToLowerCase@ImportString@"F X I E A M L O E W B X A S T U" getWords[board, $largeTree] {fax,fame,xml,imf,eli,elm,elma,<<59>>,stub,twa,twa,twas,tub,tubs,tux} (note that the result differs from that in illustration section, since I am now using the word tree with words with less than 3 letters excluded - using the $largeTree rather than largeTree now). Discussion Of course, I was a bit cheating in the sense that the preprocessing time takes a while, but this has to be done only once. My main point is that I think, the Trie data structure (my interpretation of it) is the right one here, and coupled with linked lists and hash tables ( Dispatch -ed rules), it leads to a rather simple solution. The essence of the solution is expressed in function f, which is just a few lines long and more or less self-documenting. And, also, the solution itself turns out quite fast (especially given that this uses just the top-level mma, no packed arrays, Compile, etc). EDIT 2 To address the question in your edit, and generally the question on applicability of Mathematica's new Graph functionality to this problem: I think, that while you can use new Graphs to solve the problem, it is not a natural choice here. I may be wrong, of course, but these are my reasons: The graph traversal you need for this problem does not fit directly into either one of DepthFirstScan and BreadthFirstScan built-in graph-traversal functions. Rather, it is a kind of enumeration of all possible depth-first traversals starting at a given vertex. and built-in graph-traversal functions. Rather, it is a kind of enumeration of all possible depth-first traversals starting at a given vertex. Those traversals should stop as soon as it becomes clear that no words can be constructed by going to any of the adjacent vertices. This can be also achieved in DepthFirstScan through the use of Catch and Throw, but it is rather inelegant, and will also induce an overhead. through the use of and, but it is rather inelegant, and will also induce an overhead. The general ideology of DepthFirstScan and BreadthFirstScan is somewhat similar to a visitor design pattern used for a tree traversal. The idea is that the traversal is done for you, while you have to supply the functions to be called on tree (or graph) nodes. This approach works well when your traversal matches exactly the one implemented by the pattern. For example, most of the time, a tree is traversed depth-first. However, I had many chances to observe (in other languages) that as soon as I have to modify the traversal even slightly, using the tools like that creates more problems than it solves. The main question to ask yourself is this: does you traversal (sequence of visited vertices) depend on the content of the vertices (information you get during the traversal)? If yes, then it is more than likely that custom general traversal functions will not give you a good solution, because you then need more control over the way traversal is performed. The whole idea of visitor pattern (used for tree traversals) and the like is that you can separate the traversal itself from the information-processing during the traversal, and it's just not true for data-dependent traversals, where you can not really decouple traversal from the data-processing of the tree (or graph) nodes. I think that we should separate cases where graphs represent just a useful abstraction to think about the problem, from those where the problem can be solved by means of more or less standard graph-theoretical functionality (in particular that present in Mathematica), once it is reformulated in an appropriate way. The case at hand clearly looks to me like belonging to the first category.Why Michael Weatherly Decided To Leave NCIS By Conner Schwerdtfeger Random Article Blend Michael Weatherly revealed that his decision to leave NCIS stemmed from a combination of the recent departure of Cote de Pablo from the series, as well as his desire to branch out professionally. Here's how he put it to Their great dynamic, the badinage and sparring and flirting between [Tony and de Pablo's Ziva] and how they would swing from siblings to near lovers and back to buddies, that was gone, and then I got to the point where I felt I’d stayed at the party for too long. I would look around the room and other people were really in sync and having fun. The show was a huge success, but I just suddenly realized that I probably had other things that I should be doing. And then the wanderlust set in. I directed a documentary. I have a production company. And I wanted to spend time with my family. So it seems that one of the biggest reasons for his departure from the series came when We cannot exactly say we blame him for wanting to find a new gig for himself, though. 13 years in the same job would be enough to make anyone stir crazy. Weatherly got a taste of creative freedom by directing a documentary and establishing his own production company, so in the end, he just came to the realization that it might finally be time to retire Agent Tony DiNozzo and let the man behind the agent branch out more. However, the fact that he decided to leave the series does not mean that he made the decision lightly. Later in his interview, Michael Weatherly admitted that his departure from NCIS was a tearful one, and it took all of his acting chops to keep it together during a number of his scenes. Although he takes solace knowing he will spend more time with his family at home, it's clear that he understands that also means leaving another family behind. With that in mind, if you’re a longtime fan of NCIS, prepare yourselves for a rather emotional finale to a beloved character arc. Michael Weatherly will don his badge and gun as Tony DiNozzo for the final time when NCIS airs on May 17. In the 13 years that the NCIS team has been taking down bad guys on a weekly basis, many agents have come and gone under the command of Mark Harmon ’s Agent Gibbs. However, one of the most consistent factors on the show has come in the form of Michael Weatherly’s Tony DiNozzo. Part team hunk and part comic relief, the character always brought a particular light-heartedness to even the most violent and somber of criminal cases. However, Weatherly recently made the decision to retire from the series, and he has finally opened up about the rationale behind that decision.Michael Weatherly revealed that his decision to leave NCIS stemmed from a combination of the recent departure of Cote de Pablo from the series, as well as his desire to branch out professionally. Here's how he put it to TV Insider So it seems that one of the biggest reasons for his departure from the series came when Cote de Pablo ’s Ziva also left the CBS drama in Season 11. With that specific relationship no longer in play on the series, Michael Weatherly began to feel like Tony DiNozzo’s time on NCIS had more or less run its course. There's something so sad about him likening his recent time on the show as staying at a party too long. Parties aren't supposed to get old, and DiNozzo isn't supposed to be bored.We cannot exactly say we blame him for wanting to find a new gig for himself, though. 13 years in the same job would be enough to make anyone stir crazy. Weatherly got a taste of creative freedom by directing a documentary and establishing his own production company, so in the end, he just came to the realization that it might finally be time to retire Agent Tony DiNozzo and let the man behind the agent branch out more.However, the fact that he decided to leave the series does not mean that he made the decision lightly. Later in his interview, Michael Weatherly admitted that his departure from NCIS was a tearful one, and it took all of his acting chops to keep it together during a number of his scenes. Although he takes solace knowing he will spend more time with his family at home, it's clear that he understands that also means leaving another family behind.With that in mind, if you’re a longtime fan of NCIS, prepare yourselves for a rather emotional finale to a beloved character arc. Michael Weatherly will don his badge and gun as Tony DiNozzo for the final time when NCIS airs on May 17. Will Ziva Return to NCIS? Blended From Around The Web Facebook Back to topFrom remote farms to rural health centers, one thing is transforming how even the world's poorest people live: the mobile phone. Cellphone use in the developing world has climbed to nearly 5 billion mobile subscriptions, and three-quarters of the world now has access to mobile networks. This technology is reshaping the way individuals and communities manage their finances, monitor weather, engage with government, and earn a living, according to the recent World Bank Maximizing Mobile report. “People are going from zero to 60. It is huge to go from no phone at all to a cellphone,” says Anne Nelson, international media development specialist and adjunct professor at Columbia University. “The rapid penetration of cellphones in developing countries is changing lives dramatically.” Mobile devices in regions like Africa are largely limited to voice and Short Message Service texting, but even the most basic mobile communications can increase school attendance, facilitate banking or cash transfers, create jobs, measure health indicators, accelerate disaster response, and fuel citizen engagement in governance and democracy. For example, in Niger, access to cellphones has allowed grain traders to compare market prices across the country, cutting the cost of traveling to different markets and resulting in profit improvements of nearly 30 percent for traders. In Kenya, a program sent text messages to rural patients with AIDS, reminding them to take their antiretroviral drugs. It was found that sending these messages was not only more affordable than in-person reminders, but those receiving SMS messages showed higher rates of taking their meds than those who did not receive them. Mobile technology has also been lauded in the recent democratic uprisings in the Middle East. In Egypt, only about 10 percent of the population had landlines a decade ago, leaving much of the population without any phone access at all. Today, there are 82 million mobile phones in circulation, and the numbers are constantly growing. The phones were “game changers” during the Arab uprisings, not necessarily because of Twitter or Facebook – many cellphones in Egypt, as in many rural parts of the developing world, don't have broadband access. Instead, “for the first time, people were able to call or text each other and say ‘Hey, let’s meet and go down to the square.’ That wasn’t possible before,” says Ms. Nelson. Despite the implications for easing poverty, the motivation for purchasing a mobile device is not necessarily linked to improved social services. Many people buy mobile phones to stay connected to friends and family, or for entertainment purposes, Nelson says. But connectivity has become such a priority that in Asia, South America, and Africa some people spend between 5 and 15 percent of their disposable income on telecommunications services, according to a 2010 study by Ericsson. Other experts estimate investment in cellular technology can reach up to 30 percent of income. According to the World Bank, as phones become cheaper and more robust and networks double their bandwidth almost every year and a half, more people have access to mobile devices than they do clean drinking water or electricity in some countries. However, “technology won’t create development instruments by itself,” says Nelson. And both multinational institutions and international development agencies are acknowledging this: As of 2011, nearly 75 percent of all World Bank investment lending projects had an Information and Communication Technology component, and more than $4 billion was invested in the ICT sector between 2003 and 2010. International organizations are increasingly partnering with the private sector to improve new technology, create sustainable ICT-based programming, and design relevant mobile applications. As with all development work, acknowledging unique factors across different cultures – such as gender breakdown of mobile-phone ownership – is paramount in creating successful initiatives. A mobile application designed to ease reporting on violence against women will likely fall short if men are the primary users of mobile devices in the target community. The “mobile revolution” is still in its beginning stages. Get the Monitor Stories you care about delivered to your inbox. By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Policy “The challenge now is to enable people, businesses, and governments in developing countries to develop their own locally relevant mobile applications so they can take full advantage of these opportunities,” said Rachel Kyte, vice president for sustainable development at the World Bank. Already many mobile innovations, including low-cost recharges and mobile payments, originate in poorer countries and spread from there. As developing countries continue to play a leading role in mobile-device subscription and innovation, the development of mobile applications targeted at rural communities with limited access to health services or banking could gain a broader international reach. And as some applications gain success and are tweaked and replicated, their presence in developed countries could multiply as well.Massive Attack Massive Attack, an English trip hop group, is one of the most influential groups of their generation known for their hypnotic sound. Formed back in 1988, the group consists of Grant “Daddy G” Marshall and Robert “3D” Del Naja along with Andy “Mushroom” Vowles, their former member. They were one of their generation’s most innovative groups displaying a fusion of sensual, dark and cinematic sounds. Their music style is notable for its intensely distinctive and moody dynamics, especially their songs without choruses. Although they were formed in 1988, the group’s history dates back earlier to 1983 with the Wild Bunch. They were one of the most successful sound systems and DJ collections in the early U.K. music scene. Two of its members, “Mushroom” and “Daddy G” teamed with 3D, a local graffiti artist forming Massive Attack, after the group folded. They also collaborated with Nellee Hopper, an alum of Wild Bunch. The group releases their first single Daydreaming in 1990 featuring the vocals of singer Shara Nelson with raps by Tricky, one of their Wild Bunch collaborators. Following their first single are more music Unfinished Sympathy and Safe from Harm that is now considered classic. It was 1991 when Massive Attack finally releases their debut LP Blue Lines. The album was a massive commercial success met with major critical praise and labeled an instant classic. Soon after, Nelson who was in many of the memorable tracks of Massive Attack’s albums exited to focus on his solo career. It was also around that time when the group changed their name to simply “Massive” due to the U.N.’s policy regarding Iraq. Three years after with the group’s name properly reinstated, they resurfaced with another album Protection. Just like before, they worked together with Tricky, Hooper and now with vocalist Nicolette and Tracery Thorn of Everything But the Girl. Mad Professor also remixed the entirety of three singles from their LP – Sly, Karmacoma and the title track Protection, then rereleased as No Protection. For the following years, most of the group’s work is into creating remixes for other artists such as Garbage, Madonna, and Marvin Gaye. In the summer of 1997, they issued their EP Risingson promotion for their appearance at Glastonbury music festival. In 1998, they released their third full-length album Mezzanine in collaboration with Horace Andy, Elizabeth Fraser of the Cocteau and Sara Jay. It was a massive success with the group touring all over America and Europe to promote it. Sadly, Vowles left the group then because of a disagreement with Mezzanine’s artistic direction. Their fans were able to listen to their music again after waiting 5 years when they released 100th Window, their fourth album. The album includes collaborations with their support Horace Andy and Sinéad O’Connor. Massive Attack released Danny the Dog in 2004. This marked the group’s entry in working with film scores. From then on, the group worked on scoring several films including In Prison My Whole Life, Trouble the Water, and Battle in Seattle. Their work in film scores earned their Oscar nomination but the credit was not to Massive Attack but their real names. The group released their fifth album Heligoland in 2010. In 2011, Burial remixed their unreleased songs as well as their latest album’s Paradise Circus for a limited release. Massive Attack returned to the music scene in 2016 when they released their EP, Ritual Spirit. It was a four-track album where they worked together with several collaborators including Tricky, Del Naja, Roots Manuva, Young Fathers, and Euan Dickinson, which they worked together with Heligoland. Partners: https://www.tunonconoscilsud.it & https://starpool.pl/de/ & http://www.dolceescorts.co.uk & Imprumuturi rapide & medibondIt has entered into motor sport legend that Achille Varzi conspired with others, including Tazio Nuvolari, to ‘fix’ the 1933 Tripoli GP – but the true story is far more subtle and complex Colonel Don Capps is a US Army Vietnam veteran, a lifelong motor racing fan, and a serious historian. Twelve years ago this magazine ran a story on the 1933 Tripoli GP. Nobody’s perfect – I can say that since just for once I had absolutely nothing to do with it – but that story was largely misleading. In effect it was a re-hash of a legend apparently initiated by that wonderful old windbag and Mercedes-Benz team manager, Alfred Neubauer. The legend involves the Italian national lottery built around the Corsa dei Milioni, aka the Tripoli Grand Prix, run on the Mellaha circuit in the Italian colony of Tripolitania (Libya). Tickets were sold for just 12 lire (some reports say 11 lire). An initial lottery draw the week before the race produced 30 lucky winners, each of whom then drew another ticket corresponding to a driver on the 30-strong starting grid. The winning driver on race day would then earn his ticket holder 7.5 million lire, then around £80,000 – a staggering fortune by 1933 standards. With a week elapsing between the initial draw and the race, can you spot the flaw? According to Neubauer in his ghosted autobiography Manner, Frauen und Motoren or Speed Was My Life, on the eve of the race a timber merchant from Pisa named Enrico Rivio contacted Achille Varzi at his hotel in Tripoli. Rivio explained that he had drawn Varzi’s ticket, and he offered to split the lottery prize 50:50 with Varzi should he win. The inference is that he was asking Varzi somehow to secure the best possible chance of winning. Varzi accordingly telephoned Tazio Nuvolari, and – allegedly – the plotting began. In the race Nuvolari then led from a delayed Varzi until he had to make a very late fuel stop which enabled Varzi to catch up and pass for a sensational victory by two-tenths of a second, from Nuvolari, with ‘Tim’ Birkin third in Bernard Rubin’s Maserati 8C. Other drivers complicit in rigging this result, according to Neubauer, had been Louis Chiron and Baconin Borzacchini. Varzi, exhausted, was lifted from his car and borne shoulder-high to the podium. One of the first to congratulate him was a stout, baldheaded stranger to the racing world – ticket holder Enrico Rivio. And that evening, as Varzi, Nuvolari and Borzacchini celebrated sharing out their bonus, rumours of scandal gained ground. Next morning an RACI meeting was convened in special session, charging that certain drivers had agreed pre-race that Varzi should win. The President named Varzi, Nuvolari and Borzacchini as the main culprits, with Campari and Chiron (according to Neubauer) as strong suspects. He demanded immediate disqualification of all five and cancellation of their racing licences. This would have eviscerated European motor racing at its highest level, so the motion didn’t even reach a vote. Instead each driver was merely “warned regarding his future conduct”. After publication of Neubauer’s book, this ‘fixed’ lottery GP at Tripoli ’33 became fixed in motor racing folklore. It took a contrarian to challenge it – Bill Boddy in this magazine, September 1969 issue. Using the contemporary race report published in Motor Sport’s June 1933 issue The Bod expressed serious doubt about the legendary scandal. Was that race really fixed? Oh, and Chiron wasn’t even there… This triggered Don Capps’ interest, but it wasn’t until 1992, when Betty Sheldon quoted her detailed Italian researches on the event in her husband Dr Paul Sheldon’s A Record of Grand Prix and Voiturette Racing, Volume 3: 1932 – 1936, that Don dug deeper. Italian journalist Giovanni Canestrini was editor of La Gazzetta dello Sport, the leading Italian sporting newspaper. He had proposed that a national lottery like the Irish Sweepstakes could fund the expensively developing Mellaha circuit, finance the Automobile Club di Tripoli, and publicise not only the Grand Prix itself but also encourage colonial settlement in Libya. Egidio Sforzini, President of the AC di Tripoli took Canestrini’s notion to Governor Emilio de Bono, who forwarded it to Il Duce, Mussolini. On August 13, 1932, Royal Decree 1147 was signed by King Vittorio Emanuele III authorizing the Lottery. The first tickets went on sale in October 1932. Closing date was April 16, 1933. Demand in motor racing-minded Italy was immense, and it is thought at least 15 million lire was raised. Canestrini reported that 1.2 million covered the Tripoli club’s expenses; 550,000 provided starting and prize money; while six million was prize money for the top three finishers’ ticket holders – three million for first place, two million second and one million third. Meanwhile the actual race winner would trouser 550,000 lire. And the balance of the claimed 15 million raised? Don’t ask, this was Italy. The Corsa dei Milioni focused all minds… The initial draw was then held on Saturday, April 29, 1933, actually eight days before the race, supervised by new Governor Pietro Badoglio. Next day, back on the Italian mainland, the Alessandria GP was run. Achille Varzi’s entry there had arrived too late, and although he was allowed to practice he was not then permitted to start, which denied him even start money. Hardly a sunny individual at the best of times, he wasn’t a happy camper… The following weekend’s lottery race was of course on everyone’s mind, and at Alessandria Canestrini and Nuvolari met with Varzi and Borzacchini, ostensibly to finalise travel plans to Tripoli. Varzi, however, was more eager to discuss the lottery, and on the Monday evening, before leaving for Libya, he, Nuvolari and Borzacchini met their three ticket holders in Rome’s Hotel Massimo D’Azeglio owned by fellow racing driver Ettore Bettoja. Canestrini also attended, and he negotiated an agreement between the ticket holders and the drivers. According to Italian historian Valerio Moretti, Nuvolari’s ticket holder was Alberto Donati, of Teramo. Varzi’s was not Enrico Rivio from Pisa as quoted by Neubauer, but Arduino Sampoli from Siena, while Borzacchini’s name was held by Alessandro Rosina of Piacenza. The group discussed how “to find a formula which did not contravene the sporting rules,” dividing the Lottery money among what became known as ‘The Six’. They finally agreed a scheme reputedly suggested by Donati, forming a syndicate which – as long as one of the three drivers won the race – would pool the Lottery prize money to be split equally between them. The three drivers would split half of the syndicate’s winnings, plus all their prize money from the race, while the ticket holders would each draw one-third of half the Lottery money. Canestrini typed up the agreement and ‘The Six’ all signed it. It was notarised and then deposited in the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro for safekeeping. Most significantly, there was no pre-arrangement of the race result, merely a legal agreement to share out the prize money. And was this get-together secret? Hardly. The May 15, 1933 issue of Motori, Aero, Cicli e Sport reported it in some detail. About the only sporting newspaper to keep schtum was Canestrini’s own La Gazzetta dello Sport. Yet while the entire deal was perfectly legal, Nuvolari’s entrant, Enzo Ferrari of Scuderia Ferrari, was not a party to it. One can imagine his displeasure, and Moretti relates that on May 15 Nuvolari had to issue a statement declaring that “...the Scuderia Ferrari was extraneous to the agreement with the ticket-holder paired with his name.” Once in Tripoli, Varzi, Nuvolari and Borzacchini then found such rivals as Campari and Fagioli especially hostile and more determined than ever to beat them in the race. Campari for one had been rejected when he proposed a similar split to his ticket holder, and he had then agreed with ‘Tim’ Birkin to team up on race day against “the coalition”. Canestrini later recalled that Varzi was well aware that Campari and others were confident that the heated rivalry between himself and Nuvolari would probably see them take each other out. Canestrini, supposedly then convened another meeting between the two in which the toss of a coin indicated that Varzi should win – since the financial agreement with the ticket holders far outweighed winning the race itself. Now if true, this coin-toss would surely have been unethical and would have constituted race-fixing. Twenty-nine starters finally faced Governor Badoglio as he activated the Mellaha’s ultra-modern starting lights. Varzi’s Bugatti stammered onto seven cylinders due to his mechanics topping up the engine oil at the last minute and overfilling the system. Varzi realized the excess would surely burn off so he pressed on regardless until, sure enough, the engine finally chimed in on all eight. The still seething Campari’s Maserati retired after numerous problems, leaving Nuvolari leading from Varzi who was to run non-stop, thanks to a subsidiary long-range fuel tank. After 23 laps Nuvolari refuelled, then set out to chase down the Bugatti. Varzi had difficulty switching to his spare tank, and Nuvolari caught him to take the lead. Into the final half-lap Nuvolari and Varzi were almost side-by-side, but out of the final curve Varzi slipstreamed Nuvolari, ducked out approaching the line and won by 0.2 seconds. Moretti believed that Nuvolari backed off to allow Varzi his win. Canestrini’s report disagrees. But the truth is that whichever of them won it did not matter financially. While there was much grumbling and grousing by the other drivers and ticket holders, ‘The Six’ (apart from the alleged coin-toss between ‘The Two’) had acted within the rules as well as the law. The cash-strapped Borzacchini’s joy at his financial windfall was “a pleasure to witness” according to Johnny Lurani – only for him to die with Campari in an appalling multiple crash at Monza that September. But Italy’s Fascist government was not so thrilled, and quiet measures ensured there would be no repeat. For the 1934 Corsa dei Milioni, new Libya Governor Marshal Italo Balbo delayed the lottery ticket draw until just 30 minutes before the start, with the cars already on the grid… So the truth of that 1933 race was far more complex than a simple shady deal between a lottery ticket holder and world-class sporting superstars willing to sell their self-respect, and to deceive the sporting public. Considering the coin-toss between Varzi and Nuvolari I’m not inclined to claim they were pure as the driven snow, but the tabloid Neubauer legend is plainly just that – a myth, and little more.“There are really big privacy and constitutional due-process concerns with the use of this technology,” a state lawmaker said. The Texas National Guard last year spent more than $373,000
they want. The Children believe nuclear war was a good and necessary thing, and every day for them is like being plutonium-raptured anew. A similar sentiment pervades J.G. Ballard’s 1962 novel, The Drowned World. The year is 2145. Solar radiation has melted the ice caps and flooded much of North America and Europe, turning the former first world into a string of pre-historic tropical lagoons. Dr. Kerans and his fellow scientists have been sent to study the rapidly evolving (devolving?) flora and fauna but find themselves gradually losing their grip on rational thought. Kerans eventually abandons science in favor of a return to primal normalcy for a species too long alienated by science and technology. Humans are no longer at the top of the food chain, and that suits Kerans just fine. Advertisement Outside of Megaton’s walls, it’s much the same. Bloatflies, radscorpions, and rampaging mutant behemoths have effectively pushed mankind from its perch at the top of nature’s hierarchy. The citizens of Megaton have accepted this state of affairs, and therein lies their salvation. Mankind must not seek to dominate or supplant the bloatfly. Mankind must themselves become the bloatfly. This is all to say, despite its obvious drawbacks, Megaton isn’t all that bad. It’s certainly better than a place like The Republic Of Dave, with its ever-shifting systems of governance, or Rivet City, with its class antagonisms. Megaton and the vault represent two competing visions of society. If the parallels in our own pre-apocalyptic world are obvious, they’re still worth pointing out. Amid revelations of rampant data collection by the NSA, men held indefinitely without trial at black sites run by the CIA, and general Orwellian grotesqueries perpetrated in the name of security, are we not essentially vault dwellers ourselves? What actions can’t be justified in the name of illusory safety? Advertisement I’ll leave that question to better minds. What I do know is this: I’d rather be hoisting a lukewarm mug of Nuka-Cola and eating bloatfly steaks with the weirdos in Megaton than hiding from the world inside the vault, choking down plastery Soylent paste, and pretending the world outside is a bad dream. I imagine there’s something empowering about waking up every day to see a warhead parked on Main Street. If you’re okay with that, what else is there to be afraid of?INDORE: Joining the ranks of ‘self-appointed’ guardians of public morality, BJP’s Rajya Sabha member and Madhya Pradesh party vice-president Raghunandan Sharma has come up with bizarre suggestions to check crime against women: Girls shouldn’t be allowed to use mobile phones before marriage and women shouldn’t wear jeans Sharma’s gave vent to his thoughts while addressing a meeting of Brahmins in Ratlam district on Sunday. He termed cellphone usage by students, particularly young girls, as a big menace and the genesis of other evils. The BJP leader lambasted girls wearing jeans, saying it was the attire of American cowboys and in no way gelled with the Indian culture.When contacted by TOI over phone on Monday, Sharma stood by his statements, but said these were his individual views and in no way reflected the BJP’s official line.The Congress and National Commission for Women have condemned the statements. Commission’s chairperson Mamta Sharma said it seems that the politician still wants women to live in the ancient era. “This leader must be deplored by all women.”The Congress demanded a public apology from Sharma as well as the BJP. “These statements have once again proved beyond doubt the double standards in the ruling party in MP. While chief minister Shivraj Singh Chauhan tom-toms his pro-women schemes, senior leaders of his party like Vijay Shah, Babulal Gaur, Kailash Vijayvargiya and Raghunandan Sharma by their statements have revealed the anti-women face of the party. We demand a public apology not only by Sharma, but even his party over his statements,” state Congress spokesperson Narendra Singh Saluja said.Thousands of Japanese antiwar protesters took to the streets outside of parliament today in Tokyo, slamming the new “war legislation,” which effectively abandons Japan’s post WW2 status of pacifism, and allows the Japanese military to be deployed abroad “even in situations when Japan is not under direct attack.” The legislation, passed in September amid similar protests, went into effect today, the culmination of the long-standing ambitions of Prime Minister Abe Shinzo to allow Japan to participate in overseas US military operations. Though presented by politicians as merely allowing the military to engage in collective self-defense, military officials conceded that the law allows their military to do virtually anything under the guise of defensive operations. Abe insisted in comments today that the new legislation will “prevent wars,” claiming rising threats from North Korea and China justify the move. US officials, who envision this as giving them another sidekick for their assorted future wars, have loudly backed the effort. Last 5 posts by Jason DitzAccording to Ian Rapoport, don't count out DeMeco Ryans returning to Philadelphia in 2015. The NFL reporter had the following to say about the Eagles veteran linebacker on Wednesday evening. Might re-do salary tho RT @AroundTheNFL: DeMeco Ryans is due $7M coming off Achilles surgery, but @RapSheet expects him to stay with Eagles — Ian Rapoport (@RapSheet) March 5, 2015 Jeff McLane of the Philadelphia Inquirer echoed Rapoport's sentiment earlier on Wednesday. Not totally convinced DeMeco Ryans is odd ILB out. Chip on Mufasa: "We need DeMeco.... Just a matter of getting DeMeco healthy again." — Jeff McLane (@Jeff_McLane) March 4, 2015 For those asking, DeMeco Ryans' rehab is progressing as expected. He was recently cleared to start running and is full go in weight room. — Jeff McLane (@Jeff_McLane) March 4, 2015 Ryans' 2015 cap figure is $6.9 million and the Eagles can save all of that money with no penalty by cutting him. The 30-year-old veteran is still recovering from an Achilles injury that ended his 2014 season in early November. It was the second torn Achilles tendon Ryans has suffered in his nine-year career. Despite this, the Eagles seem intent on keeping him. Perhaps the two sides can agree to a pay cut, or maybe an extension that shuffles the money around in his deal. As McLane noted, Chip Kelly clearly values Ryans. This is what the Eagles coach said about him in his final press conference of the 2014 season: "But we need DeMeco. I'm a big DeMeco fan. As a group, he really sets the tone for everybody on the defense side of the ball. So it's just a matter of getting DeMeco healthy again." The timing of this report is curious. Many assumed Ryans would be the odd man out when news of Kiko Alonso being traded to Philadelphia emerged on Tuesday. Does this mean Alonso will play at outside linebacker, where he has some experience? That seems unlikely. Will there be some kind of rotation with Ryans coming off the bench? Also doesn't seem incredibly likely. So is there another possibility? McLane had some interesting thoughts on how the return of Ryans could impact young stud Mychal Kendricks. RE: Mychal Kendricks. Way early, but #Eagles haven't approached him about extension. If ever in plans, doesn't seem likely now with Alonso. — Jeff McLane (@Jeff_McLane) March 4, 2015 And when I say "if ever in plans," I'm referring to a contract extension for Kendricks this offseason. — Jeff McLane (@Jeff_McLane) March 4, 2015 There's nothing really concrete or immediate there. But if Ryans is staying and the team just acquired Alonso, could Kendricks be the odd man out? If so, that would seem pretty crazy because Kendricks is only 24 and very talented. Kendricks is set to play on the final year of his rookie deal in 2015, so it's not like he's expensive yet. My speculation: could Kendricks be part of a trade to help bring Marcus Mariota to Philadelphia? I don't know. We'll see. I'm just trying to make sense of how the pieces would fit if Ryans returns. Something to keep an eye on moving forward.Business trip expenses are a major issue for many companies, especially today with a globalized scenario. Where national and international trips are available so that executives can remain in contact with all members of the supply chain, from suppliers to customers, partners to competitors, and also connect with stakeholders, often in person, face to face. To ensure efficient management of business trip expenses the best solution is to use BPM tools, ensuring quickness, lower costs, traceability and many other benefits. Check out some of them now. The Business Trip: a tool, not an end. Companies should focus its energies, talents, and resources on its core business. And if corporate travel is not part of its business portfolio, this issue should not be taking up the valuable time of its employees. One way to do this is to eliminate filling out forms on paper, contained in e-mail exchanges, telephone calls, etc. With BPM your company will have: Quickness in service Lower business trip expenses Up to date information always Monitoring and assignment of responsibility BPM Facilitates Requests for Business Trip Expenses Imagine the onset of a business trip, when the request must be registered and authorized. A good tool would allow the completion of a form via the web, including mobile devices, enabling online consultation. The approval also occurs in a virtual environment (web, tablets, and smartphones), with the advantage of being able to change fields during the process and send alerts. See also: Fast and Efficient Service Financial and administrative teams are always aware of each step of the process and application deadlines for each task (communicating with each other without failure), they will be better able to meet the demands as they arise, and have greater control, see some benefits: Reservation vouchers and other documents are attached immediately The applicant is communicated about the progress of the application (i.e. hotel booking) The application deadline and the execution of each task is clear and available Facilitates control of business trip expense accounts (and others) Learn more: Find out how to cut costs in companies using BPM. With all of this, the manager will always be aware of your teams needs and can measure the quality of the business trip process through a satisfaction survey. Benefits of Management and Monitoring The manager can retrieve data by request, validate quotations, view the cost center or any other field that is used in the forms. Reports are generated ready for use, and allow the creation of monitoring boards so that management can view the process. If you would like to learn more about the benefits of BPM – see 5 benefits of business process management here.To see what's included in the booklet, take a look at our 18650 battery safety infographic For retailers selling 18650 batteries: Prevent accidents before they happen. Instantly increase battery sales and protect yourself from liability with 18650 safety booklets. Customers ignorant to battery safety are not likely to purchase batteries or upgrade to MODs which require 18650s. You, the store owner can show your customers your shop cares about their safety. Simple bundle our safety booklets with the batteries you sell. 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Our batteries are authentic, Grade A cells.The Diamond Lane, published in May 1991, was my second novel, and what is most striking about the difference between the publishing process 23 years ago and now is not that the book was written on a Kaypro, Xeroxed at Kinko's, and sent overnight in a FedEx box to G. P. Putnam's Sons, but that after the manuscript was accepted and given a pub date, I asked my esteemed editor, "What should I do now?" and she said, "Just write the next one." Before I get too far down the road extolling the good old days, let me say that I'm not particularly nostalgic by nature, that Xeroxing manuscripts and sending them FedEx was a pain in the ass, as was hanging around the house waiting for your editor to call, which felt exactly like waiting for a boy to call in 8th grade; that I love my Kindle, enjoy a lively love/hate relationship with social media, admire the pioneering souls that have forged the way for quality self-publishing, and have no desire to hop in the way-back machine. That said, in 1991, the main job of a writer was to just write the next one. Publicity-wise, you were expected to be able to show up to a reading (arranged by your more charming publicist) and read from your own work in a manner that didn't put people to sleep. You were expected to be socially awkward, possibly unkempt, and a little wild-eyed — bonus points awarded for not being falling down drunk. After your book tour, whether large or small, you were expected to disappear into your scribe-cave. This division of labor made sense. My literary brother, the inestimable Tom Spanbauer (our first and second books were published by the same editor at Putnam's in the '90s, and we've each had a title reissued by Hawthorne Books Rediscovery Series), once said, "A writer is someone who wasn't invited to the party." He means, of course, that writers are outsiders, and usually not by their own choosing. It's why they're writers. If they didn't feel alienated from human experience, they wouldn't feel so drawn to writing to make sense of their lives. It's not the outsider's facility for language that makes her a writer — many a student body president or homecoming queen can turn a phrase — but her ability to howl at the moon, on the page. To bring all his anguish, anger, sense of injustice, and loneliness to his work. This is true even for those of us who've been accused of being funny; in my case I wasn't invited to the party, and was also the smart aleck at the back of the classroom. In 2014, the landscape of a writer's life is so different as to be unrecognizable. Every writer, whether legacy or self-published, is expected to be capable of launching a sophisticated, far-ranging, full-throttle, buzz-generating, platform-building, unending branding extravaganza. To do this, you must be charismatic, witty, attractive, selfiegenic, while also possessing the marketing chops of the team who rolled out the iPod, thus saving Apple from impending bankruptcy. That the time-consuming, solitary indwelling required to build a world in your head and put it on paper and the zippity-do-dah extroverted glad-handing required to be a successful promoter of, well, anything rarely exist inside the same human being is immaterial. Publishers have always wanted to sell books, but historically they've tended to acquire books they believed they could sell; now we've entered an age where they acquire books which they believe the writer can sell. It's a little like signing a player to the NBA based on his marketing plan to boost concession stand sales during half-time, and incidentally, his field goal percentage. Still, we try. We try very hard. (I think we may mistake the push to self-promote as a party invitation.) And it has made trying to make a life as a writer incredibly complicated. In 1991, this is what could prevent you from having a successful writing career: You fail to finish your novel. Your novels don't sell. In 2014, this is what could prevent you from having a successful writing career: You think platforms are shoes. You think branding is best left to cattle. You look like a basset hound on Skype and thus shun the all-important Skype book club appearances. You have less than 3,000 Twitter followers. Your Facebook author page has less than 1,000 followers. Your LinkedIn... fuck, you don't even know what that is. You are too moody, and thus lack the ability to express the amount of gratitude and enthusiasm required by social media. You are slightly homely, and not in a geek chic sort of way, and thus avoid having your picture taken. The food you eat is not photogenic. You never go on vacation. You lack the proper amount of guile to promote yourself at all hours of the day and night without seeming to promote yourself. Your website is always three years out of date. You fail to finish your novel. Your novels don't sell. I can't complain (a lie: my loved ones will tell you I've made complaining an art form). My personality, about one tick into extroversion, makes all the modern self-marketing folderol less onerous than it might be for someone else. But only when I'm in the mood. And that's the key: being in the mood. If I'm deep in the writing of my next book, I am never in the mood. When I am writing, I'm as antisocial as Kafka on a bad day. I'm worried that very soon the marketing tail will wag the literary dog. That the Ed boards of legacy publishers will find themselves signing up a mediocre novel over a great one because Crappy Novel comes equipped with 3,000 Twitter followers (which, by the way, don't translate to book sales in any measurable way). What will happen to the bona fide iconoclasts (not just the ones who play iconoclasts on social media)? The singular voices who don't possess the ability to crack wise on Twitter, shy away from the camera, aren't eager to share? The glorious, disorganized lunatics and visionaries and people who simply can't keep track of their WordPress password? The Kafkas, the Prousts, the Rilkes? The Kerouac, who famously said, "The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars." I recently posted this quote on Facebook, and my writer friends were quick to Like it, longing, I suppose, to log off and burn, burn, burn.The University of New South Wales (UNSW) officially opened its new Centre for Quantum Computation and Communications Technology (CQC2T), as teams of engineers prepare to secure their spot as the global pioneers of quantum computing. Officially opening the CQC2T at the university's Sydney campus, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull declared that there was no bolder idea than quantum computing, saying it is a technology that revolutionises computing. "A truly super computer. A quantum computer with a processing power hitherto unimagined, and certainly not realised," he said. "This lab is up to 10 years ahead of any other in the world." Impressed with the work CQC2T director Professor Michelle Simmons has achieved with her team thus far, Turnbull said UNSW's engineers are doing the best work in the world in this field. "Right here around us is the world's leading research in that area. If we look at the memory time [in silicon] that has been achieved here, it's a million times more than is being achieved in other labs around the world," he said. "There has never been a more exciting time to be in quantum computing than right here. This is not just a great position to be in, this is truly a superposition." The new laboratory complex will eventually house six new scanning tunnelling microscopes that can be used to precisely position individual atoms within silicon. This now allows a faster production time for researchers, with testing performed at a fraction of the previous rate, and with multiple tests running concurrently. Additionally, the CQC2T facility will also house six new ultra-cold dilution refrigerators which sit at around four degrees kelvin to allow researchers to measure and demonstrate quantum logic operations of qubits and the atomic-scale circuits they create. With these new facilities at their disposal, Simmons and her teams have set themselves a seemingly unachievable goal, to build a 10-quantum bit (qubit) chip within the next five years. "In addition to our fundamental research agenda, we now have an ambitious and targeted program to build a 10-qubit prototype quantum integrated circuit within five years," she said. "By mapping the evolution of classical computing devices over the last century, we would expect commercial quantum computing devices to appear within five to 10 years of that milestone." Well on their way, a team of UNSW's engineers already unlocked the key to enabling quantum computer coding in silicon, announcing in November that the team had the capability to write and manipulate a quantum version of computer code using two quantum bits in a silicon microchip. According to UNSW, in achieving this breakthrough the team has removed lingering doubts that such operations can be made reliably enough to allow powerful quantum computers to become a reality. The breakthrough followed on from an announcement made in October, when another team of engineers from the university built a quantum logic gate in silicon, which made calculations between two qubits of information possible. At the time, Andrew Dzurak, scientia professor at the university, said it was a landmark result not only for Australia but for the world, as until now it had not been possible to make two quantum bits "talk" to each other and create a logic gate using silicon. "This result means that all of the fundamental building blocks that are required to make a full-scale silicon processor chip are now in place," Dzurak said. "We're ready to move from this scientific research phase into the engineering stage and the manufacturing stage." Following the advancements UNSW has achieved in quantum computing, the federal government allocated AU$26 million of its AU$500 million science funding to support its work in quantum computing. The science funding forms part of Australia's AU$1.1 billion National Innovation and Science Agenda that was unveiled in December. Within 48 hours of the cash injection from Turnbull, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia pledged AU$10 million over five years to support the university's researchers. Telstra then matched CommBank's efforts, also pledging AU$10 million over five years, to boost UNSW's capacity to develop the world's first silicon-based quantum computer. Eager to add more equipment to the laboratories, Simmons said the AU$46 million has yet to reach the university.Car Poolers 2011-2012. Alejandro Cartagena/Courtesy of Artist and Kopeikin Gallery. Sometimes you have to look down to see what’s right in front of you. Alejandro Cartagena did just that while working on a commission from a research institute about how people use the streets in Monterrey, Mexico. “Construction workers were buying houses an hour or more away from where they worked and there is no public transportation for them, so I started documenting how people used their cars,” explained Cartagena about the project, “how they drive to work or drive home, how they personalize their cars based on the neighborhoods in which they lived, and I started looking down from buildings and bridges to see how cars looked. It’s not uncommon to see the carpoolers, but I had never seen them from that perspective.” Cartagena’s vision from above started a yearlong project in the summer of 2011 that became “Car Poolers.” The series will be shown at the Kopeikin Gallery in Los Angeles from Feb. 23 through April 6. Car Poolers 2011-2012. Alejandro Cartagena/Courtesy of Artist and Kopeikin Gallery. Car Poolers 2011-2012. Alejandro Cartagena/Courtesy of Artist and Kopeikin Gallery. Since he started showing “Car Poolers” last year, Cartagena has been overwhelmed by the reaction. After being recognized at the Sony World Photography Awards in 2012, Cartagena said everything blew up. “To be honest I thought it would be just another thing from Latin America,” he said. “I guess people responded favorably because there are so many things represented in the pictures. … People think the men are crossing the border illegally or there are dead bodies in the trucks.” Getting material for the project was a very slow process. Cartagena spent a day or two a week documenting the cars, some days getting only one image, other days capturing five. “Typically Thursday and Friday were the best because it’s payday so you get a lot of people going to work,” noted Cartagena with a laugh. More of a traditionalist—Cartagena likes to shoot film with a 4-by-5 plate camera and a medium format camera—he was forced to shoot the project with a digital camera due to finances and logistics. “Normally I like the slower process and I don’t have ‘digital diarrhea,’ where I like to just shoot and shoot, but it can cost between $5 and $10 with film per shot, and with all of the various speeds of the cars and the camera shutter speed (to capture the images), it would have been difficult to do it with film,” said Cartagena. Car Poolers 2011-2012. Alejandro Cartagena/Courtesy of Artist and Kopeikin Gallery. Car Poolers 2011-2012. Alejandro Cartagena/Courtesy of Artist and Kopeikin Gallery. He struggled with the uniformity of images because they forced him to create a series of identical shapes. “It took me a while to accept that the variety of the series was in the different subjects found in the images.” But he soon began to see their variety and depth: “I think there are so many interpretations because the images are so simple. There is no condemnation of what’s happening, no closed interpretations: There are people in the backs of trucks! There is a bit of humor to a social issue, a lightness where you can also wonder what is really happening. It’s also an intimate space: They’re reading papers, sleeping, chatting with friends. It’s kind of a living room on the back of a truck—things are happening in a living room, but it’s also in a public space.” Car Poolers 2011-2012. Alejandro Cartagena/Courtesy of Artist and Kopeikin Gallery. Car Poolers 2011-2012. Alejandro Cartagena/Courtesy of Artist and Kopeikin Gallery.Key goals in the race to The Championship appear in the latest Plays of the Week Photo credit: Rob Kinnan/Carolina RailHawks The postseason chase took another twist in Week 13 and several of the key goals are included in the NASL Plays of the Week. Austin da Luz kept the Carolina RailHawks moving forward at home with a game-winning goal, while Giuseppe Gentile scored the equalizer en route to Ottawa Fury FC's important win over Minnesota United. In Indy Eleven's dominant home performance, Dylan Mares capped off the proceedings with a fine goal as Charles Eloiundou's individual effort helped earn Jacksonville Armada FC a draw. Puerto Rico FC earned a first road win, in large part to the play of goalkeeper Trevor Spangenberg, who made several top-notch saces, with one included in the Plays of the Week. Watch the video above and vote for your top choice below:Some of you have noticed that right under the title of individual entries is a very small “Readability” link. It takes you to the entry with larger font and a distraction-free setting. Safari users have this option for nearly any site: there’s an “Enter Reader” option in their “View” menu. (If you’re interested, I use and recommend Firefox 4, which is really very fast and has quite a few neat options). In any case, I’m very happy with the “Readability” plug-in, and I wanted to thank Piotr Sochalewski for being responsive to issues I had (I wanted it to work better with blockquotes and bullet-points). I encourage you to visit the download page for “Readability” and consider using it if you use WordPress. Perhaps even give his page a stumble if you use Stumbleupon, or put it on reddit…BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — For over six years, Roger Shuler has hounded figures of the state legal and political establishment on his blog, Legal Schnauzer, a hothouse of furious but often fuzzily sourced allegations of deep corruption and wide-ranging conspiracy. Some of these allegations he has tested in court, having sued his neighbor, his neighbor’s lawyer, his former employer, the Police Department, the Sheriff’s Department, the Alabama State Bar and two county circuit judges, among others. Mostly, he has lost. But even those who longed for his muzzling, and there are many, did not see it coming like this: with Mr. Shuler sitting in jail indefinitely, and now on the list of imprisoned journalists worldwide kept by the Committee to Protect Journalists. There, in the company of jailed reporters in China, Iran and Egypt, is Mr. Shuler, the only person on the list in the Western Hemisphere. A former sports reporter and a former employee in a university’s publications department, Mr. Shuler, 57, was arrested in late October on a contempt charge in connection with a defamation lawsuit filed by the son of a former governor. The circumstances surrounding that arrest, including a judge’s order that many legal experts described as unconstitutional and behavior by Mr. Shuler that some of the same experts described as self-defeating posturing, have made for an exceptionally messy test of constitutional law. “You’ve got a situation where sometimes there’s no good guys,” said Ken White, a former federal prosecutor in Los Angeles who writes about and practices First Amendment law.Homeland will be dealing with the world of the racist movement known as the “alt-right” when it returns in January. According to Entertainment Weekly, the show has cast actor Jake Weber to play a Steve Bannon-type named Brett O’Keefe, described as an “an alt-right media personality, who is described as combative yet charismatic.” Really, however, we should just take the Associated Press’ advice and call it like it is: He’s a white supremacist. The sixth season of the show takes place in New York, and finds Claire Danes’ Carrie Mathison working at an organization that helps Muslims. Per EW, the action will occur between the election and inauguration of the president played by Elizabeth Marvel. Danes once described Marvel’s character as “a composite of all the different candidates.” This is all a little unnervingly timely, if you ask us. Submit your Newswire tips here.More than 500 religious leaders nationwide—including a Texas Baptist seminary professor—have endorsed a petition seeking a new trial for Texas death row inmate Christopher Young because a prospective juror was excluded on the basis of her church membership. Christopher Young In 2006, Young was sentenced to death for the November 2004 fatal shooting of Hasmukh Patel during a robbery at a San Antonio convenience store. Young’s attorneys are challenging the conviction and seeking a new trial based on what they consider a violation of his rights under the “free exercise” clause of the First Amendment and “equal protection” clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. During jury selection, Myrtlene Williams, an African-American member of the jury panel, was struck from service based on her religious affiliation and association with the outreach ministries program at Calvary Baptist Church in San Antonio. Although other members of the program ministered to prisoners, the prospective juror was not involved in that aspect of ministry. Last August, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit denied Young’s claim. On Nov. 29, 2016, Young’s attorneys filed a petition with the U.S. Supreme Court, and the justices are scheduled to confer on the case March 3. “Unfortunately, the state court issued a ruling saying it is acceptable to exclude someone from serving as a juror in a death penalty trial merely because of the church that person belongs to,” said David R. Dow, Young’s attorney. “We hope the Supreme Court will agree to review the case and reaffirm that our Constitution and our nation’s commitment to religious liberty means that an individual’s membership in a church does not automatically disqualify that person from acting as a juror.” Call for a new trial Texas Baptists who signed the statement seeking a new trial for Young include Roger Olson, the Foy Valentine Professor of Christian Theology and Ethics at Baylor University’s Truett Theological Seminary, and Jerry Dailey, pastor of Macedonia Missionary Baptist Church in San Antonio. Other signatories include David Gushee, ethics professor and director of the Center for Theology and Public Life at Mercer University; Frederick Douglass Haynes III, senior pastor of Friendship-West Baptist Church in Dallas; Shane Claiborne, leader of Red Letter Christians and The Simple Way; Joel Hunter, senior pastor of Northland, A Church Distributed, in Florida; author and columnist Jonathan Merritt of Brooklyn, N.Y.; and author Brian McLaren of Ocala, Fla. Some religious leaders endorsed the statement due to a general objection to capital punishment or the manner in which it is carried out in the United States. “I will sign any petition to save someone from the death penalty, as I do not think the death penalty is ever either just or Christian,” Olson said. Others signed the statement out of concern regarding religious discrimination. “It is absolutely unacceptable to strike a juror based on her affiliation with her church,” Hunter said. Concerns about religious discrimination The petition state membership in a church or involvement with a specific ministry “is not a fair basis for preventing someone from carrying out her civic duty as a juror” and violates the First Amendment’s “free exercise” clause. The petition makes no statement about Young’s guilt or innocence, but it asserts his sentencing was “tainted by the decision of the government to strike a juror, not because of her personal beliefs, but solely because she was affiliated with a ministry that works to improve the lives of the poor, the elderly and the incarcerated.” “Indeed, the government struck this juror even though she did not personally work with prisoners; she was removed, in short, because of her mere association with a church that pursued its mission of aiding the weak,” the petition continues. “We call on the state of Texas to disavow this discrimination on the basis of religious affiliation, and to give Mr. Young a new trial untainted by discrimination against jurors of faith.”Welcome to the second Blind Pumpkin Beer Taste Test, 2014 edition. Taste in beer is very subjective. For example, the popular Southern Tier Pumpking is either loved or strongly disliked. Some people really enjoy the unique sweetness that resembles a pumpkin pie in their beer. Others have different ideas of what a beer should be like. There is no right answer! But it’s still fun to try and rank ’em! Which beer won this year? Similar to last year’s post, an array of pumpkin beers were purchased, score sheets were made, and one individual poured one beer at a time into 9 glasses (there were 9 of us) and brought them into the living room for all of the guests to try out. The guests did not know which beer it was, except for a corresponding number to identify the beer. The judges. Unlike last year, the 9 of us were basically all peers of similar ages. Yet, there was an appropriate spectrum of tastes/experiences with beer. For example: One tester brews his own beer and has been for a while. He knows the ins and outs. He even contributed two homemade pumpkin beers for this taste test party. One tester loves beer but HATES pumpkin beers. We all knew this going in. Two testers barely drink, let alone beer. They prefer wine. Yet they were probably some of the most sophisticated cooks in the group. One tester is mostly familiar with German beer (she has a PhD in German) and has lived in Vienna and other parts of Europe, so she prefers beers on that side of the pond. The youngest tester is not even 23 yet, so her palate (and wallet) probably did not align with craft beer. This type of thing was very new to her. The categories. There were many (some would say too many) categories this year. Underneath each one are some descriptors or questions that would help the taste tester rate the beer in that category. The categories I chose were: Appearance “Visual appeal? Head longevity, lacing, clarity, carbonation. Does this beer say “pick me up and drink me!”? Pumpkin Aroma “Does it taste like pumpkin should? Does it remind you of this season, in a good way? Are the pumpkin spices pleasant?” Overall Aroma “How would this smell affect you if this was just a normal beer?” Palate The “feel” of the beer inside your mouth and as you swallow. Smooth or harsh? Heavy or watery? Balanced or one-dimensional? Strength “How strong/weak is it for you? Does the alcohol/lack thereof get in the way of the taste?” Pumpkin Taste “How many spices can you identify? How does the flavor vary from start, middle and finish, and then the after taste? Is this what pumpkin beer should taste like?” Overall Taste “Sweet, acidic, bitter, sour, salty? Overall does this beer taste good?” Drinkability “Would you drink this beer again? Would you drink a full glass of this, or just sips? The rating system was a 1 through 5 system. 1 being “Awful”, 2 being “Not super”, 3 being “Neutral/OK”, 4 being “Good” and 5, the best, being “YUM!” The beers. In order of tasting them, this year we tried: We all got pretty tired of trying beers by this point. The others that we had but did not try were: Some thoughts on a blind taste test party. These two beer taste test parties were very different. Last year was in the middle of the day, more relaxed, over a long period of time, and the beer was not the focus (actually watching Mariano Rivera’s last home game at Yankee Stadium was the
Bug fix when teleporting a PC when they’re currently going through a door or climbing a ladder Created an atlas for the item sparkle effect. Conversation when all keyboard input is going to the keyword typing-input bar Changed party selection with Fn keys to not try to toggle selection (as that was causing a bug causing it to do nothing sometimes). It only selects now Added an application target frame rate of 60fps so video cards don’t overheat Added a flag to tell whether a PC has committed points after leveling up. Head look doesn’t follow animations when aiming anymore Adjusted look point so it’s aiming at center of chest instead of waist on human targets Turning to target also calls a head look when finished turning Fix null ref when dictionary to save is null. Fix loot distance checking to check at time loot is about to be transferred as target could have moved out of range in that time. Make sure loot is targeted to pc leader. Update the loot target selection whenever pc leader changes to be the pc leader. Anti-aliasing is now only set by the post process on the camera. Disabled Quality setting AntiAliasing because it doesn’t appear to do anything Miscellaneous: Killing innocent civilians will now step through several warning barks from Angela or Rose before they both leave. This only ever barked once before, but they would never leave. Logbook & Radio: Make Ag Center and Highpool discoverable from the start of the game Prison can now be accessed on the world map from the start of the game. Fixed up Rick’s quest line. Made sure it all worked and added some new journal entries for him. Had to make a new location for the journals as Darwin Village wasn’t listed. Level Design, Balance, Reactivity: Ag Center: Make impossible safe possible Ag Center: Clean up Peter interactions Ag Center: Add injection sfx to curing Matt Ag Center: More goop has been added Ag Center: Kathy radio cleanup Ag Center: Fixing up numerous navmesh issues. Ag Center: Kathy Destroyed logic Ag Center: Clean up safes in CB Ag Center: Fix a broken keyword for Patrick Ag Center: Use correct event for Skinner leaving level Ag Center: Party members should no longer be blocked from combat Ag Center: Pod people should properly reinforce their brethren Ag Center: Cut Kathy’s call about Rachel Ag Center: Clean up some encounters if you kill innocents Ag Center: Reconnect lost item reference Ag Center: Fixed duplicate cmd.say() statements in Kathy. Ag Center: Give Skinner some more combat barks Ag Center: Patrick logic Ag Center: Make Larson look at you before attacking Ag Center: Pod examine edit Ag Center: Fixed a save load issue with Skinner if he’s already following you and you move to his exit trigger. Ag Center: AZ01 Central Complex Destroyed full ambient sfx pass Ag Center: Killing Fields Destroyed full ambient sfx pass, check on pod explosions (someone is triggering a grenade sound there too!) Ag Center: New Patrick Larson explosion Ag Center: Better descritpion for destroyed pods Ag Center: Fixed issue with instigate points on weak walls in central basement. Ag Center: Temp remove audio from Kathy Lawson Destroyed Ag Center: Fix issue with Skinner keywords Ag Center: Turn off Debug object in CB Ag Center: Honeydew description fix Ag Center: Made pod fragments stackable. Readded pods to proper dropset. Ag Center: Infected station: remove some unwanted props Ag Center: Remove unused highlight from plants Ag Center: Big ol’ pass on removing NMOs. Redoing brambles to use OMLs instead. Atchison Camp: Fixed one of the sombat zones was disabled. Atchison Camp: Balanced items and dropsets Atchison Camp: Fixed Bug 9010 fixed an AI’s patrol path from walking to the wrong spot. Highpool: Fixed a BUG in the ROACH footfall names (GET IT!?)( Highpool: Clean up how Wrecker Stronghold is revealed Highpool: Tweaked cover spots and AI Highpool: Fixed graphical error with floating water in Highpool Highpool: Tweaked Pistoleer AI. Moved some cover peices closer to eachother. Highpool: Dr. Scott’s medical supplies can only be stolen if the medical crate has been unlocked Highpool: Added trash bag behind Jack’s place. Had to recut nav and rebuild Highpool: Booby trap setttings Highpool: Make sure Kate disappears at the right time. Highpool: Patient behavior cleanup Highpool: Wreckers fire mortar before players stop them. Highpool: Cleanup new propane/mortar elements Highpool: Tier 2 townies don’t run after fight Highpool: demote importance of Garoof quest Highpool: Give mortar display name. Highpool: Make dead synth behave like the one in AZ10 Highpool: Change burning house valve desc text to be less obvious about skill use Highpool: Bergin fights! Highpool: Kate Preston topside cleanup Highpool: Make underground doorways work better Highpool: Reattach Bergin and guards’ wait triggers Highpool Destroyed: Fixed bug where combat was calling in an extra group when it shouldn’t have. Highpool Underground - 2nd audio ambience pass (full) Highpool Saved & Destroyed: Tweak melee AI templates. Infested Pump Station’s waterfalls fixed Leve L’Upe Mine: Fixed Bug 9502 added instigate points to the TNT. Prison : Added encounters of Red Scorpions for the return visit also added cover. Prison: Heavy machine gun foreman should be targetable in combat Prison: Balanced items and dropsets Prison: Fixed Bug 9379 fixed combat path. Prison: Better responses to breaking the well. Prison: Changed drama sequence so running pigs will start back up where they left off if level is saved and reloaded. Prison: Pitbull radio trigger fixed so it doesn’t trigger no matter if it should. Prison: Ma/Pa/Hole digger combat grouping in Prison Prison: Fix issue where Gladys disappeared too soon Prison: Rev Thomas encounter, Johnie and Dweezle encounter and Tonza cleanup. Prison: Fixed character falling through terrain sort of. Their feet will clip through at a couple spots but this is as good as its going to get this is a Unity bug and we can only do so much with it. Prison: Attended two informative meetings on the dialogue and quest systems for Tides. Prison: Don’t trigger cutscene if participants are dead Prison: Tweaked the AI in Prison maps and silo maps. Added some cover and moved around some AI positions. Prison: Fixed characters falling through objects Radio Tower: Obtaining log page one now correctly unlocks the ability to obtain Ace’s Log book Radio Tower: Fixed Bug 9131 collider blocking mouse click Radio Tower: Fixed Bug 5183 fixed a bug where the map could be clicked a second time even though it was picked up. Radio Tower: Reduced duration of Murder Site radio call Rail Nomads: Balanced drops Rail Nomad: Tweak Junkie AI. Fixed special attack Rail Nomads: Hobos in Rail Nomads now attack you if you’ve killed the Hobo King Rail Nomads: Hobos at Gorky’s Distillery now flee if you kill the Truck Driver Rail Nomads: Samuel Haas drops Ace’s Log Book if it has not already been obtained Rail Nomads: Fixed missing examine text for casey’s arm. Rail Nomads: Fixed player falling through bridge. Rail Nomads: Doubled the wander radius on waste wolves. Rail Nomads: Fix issue with big combat at end of scene Rail Nomads: Demote blown-up Topekan journal entry Rail Nomads: New population sign for Rail Nomads Rail Nomads: Fixed an issue wherein Ralphy would enter an empty conversation when approaching the museum in Ranger Citadel. Rail Nomads: Fixed an issue wherein Jessie would enter the incorrect state if the player interacted with the bicycle in the playground. Rail Nomads: Fixed an issue wherein the Injured Topekan journal entry did not resolve. Rail Nomads: Anna has a change of heart and seeks out a new lifestyle if peace is achieved in Rail Nomads. Rail Nomads: The Calvin family has new dialog if peace is obtained. Rail Nomads: Gorkinovich has new dialog if peace is obtained. Rail Nomads: Fixed an issue wherein Choppers did not reappear after the peace ceremony. Rail Nomads: The female Topekan oracle worshiper has new dialog if peace is obtained. Rail Nomads: Mrs. Parker’s dialog changes if peace is compelete. Rail Nomads: Added a unique dropset for Mrs. Parker. Rail Nomads: Fix generator so it doesn’t trigger the alarm after you attach the coupler Rail Nomads: Hooked up new population sign art for Rail Nomads Rail Nomads: Mr Holliday has new dialog if peace is compelete. Rail Nomads: Casey now agrees to lose his left arm. Rail Nomads: Anti-Atchisons radio calls no longer occur if peace is complete. Rail Nomads: Quarex’s dialog changes if peace is complete. Rail Nomads: All hanging bodies and Atchison warning signs will now disappear following the peace ceremony. Rail Nomads: Casey James and his Atchison crew no longer appear at the Atchisons entrace after the peace ceremony has completed. Random Encounter: Fixed missing clothes on RSM Random Encounter: Removed weapons from cowering civilians in random encounters Random Encounter Venders: Gave venders 1000 scrap Random Map 3: Fixed Bug 9623 level bound was to small. Random Map 3: Fixed Bug 9622 stopped characters from falling through ramps. Ranger Citadel: Making sure NPCs sit on their chairs Ranger Citadel: Nur gives updated weapon Ranger Citadel: Funeral ranger pathing cleanup Ranger Citadel: Drill Team cleanup Ranger Citadel: Clean up Solveig conv Ranger Citadel: Removing duplicate player starts that were causing trouble Ranger Citadel: Fixing Vargas movement points for LA Briefing Ranger Citadel: Cleanup Baychowski wake up sequence Ranger Citadel: Make sure Nur doesn’t welcome you when you’re leaving Ranger Citadel: Fix med bay layout, some spawner issues with Tideman Ranger Citadel: Fixed an issue wherein you could not discuss Ace’s Log Book if you exited the conversation too soon. Ranger Citadel: Convert Rick Baychowski from CNPC to follower Ranger Citadel: Improvements to Drill CNPC 3, descriptor for gate Ranger Citadel: Better text for cancer journal Ranger Citadel: Add new CNPC rejoins Ranger Citadel: Adding drop to the toaster in the museum Ranger Citadel: Trigger Rick “ask to leave” conversation at the RV map Ranger Citadel: Polish items Ranger Citadel: Only one success on Finster head Rick’s RV: Fix party bark issue and mark second bark as NPC Robots! Slicer dicer now explodes when killed and does not leave a corpse Robots!: Rearranged Slicer Dicer positions Robots: Fixed Bug 9274 Changed Robots! To Abandoned Railway.Stop Suicide through Marketing: Samsung Life’s “ Bridge of Life” Campaign couple walking on the “Bridge of Life”; the LED panel reads “Are you worried about something?” It’s common topic among Koreans that Korea’s suicidal rate ranks highest among all countries, specifically 1st among OECD nations. Falling off a bridge is also a common method of suicide. Samsung Life’s (Life insurance company under Samsung) “Bridge of Life” campaign is a CSR campaign in partnership with Seoul City that tries to prevent future suicides. It also exemplifies the profound impact of CSR on marketing and branding. INSIGHT Korea ranks 1st among all OECD nations for highest number of suicides 17% of the suicide takes place on Mapo Bridge (one of the bridge that goes across Han River) GOAL Create a campaign that stops suicide from a fundamental/emotional level [as oppose to technical ways such as installing more CCTV, making the bridge less accessible to pedestrians etc.] METHOD Through extensive interviews and research into suicide psychology, developed a list of phrases that allows readers to reconsider their thoughts of suicide Used high-tech senor system and 2,200 LED light panels to cover 2.2 km of the bridge. With every step one takes on the bridge, a LED light panel switches on, along with a message. Youtube Video to document how this campaign came to be “It would be great if even one life can be saved” “It would be great if even one life can be saved” Art installation with the message “You are not alone,” and SOS Phone service installed on bridge SOS Phone Booth with buttons that call 119 (911 in Korea) and a suicide hot-line Photos of “good things in life.” There are also photos of animals and such. “Aren’t you craving them?” (right after the series of photos of food) “If you live, one day you will~,” part of a lyric of a popular song in Korea that speaks about hope. “Although I’m not perfect” Art Installation This campaign ended up winning four marketing awards and also re-created a depressing, gloomy bridge into a colorful, heart-felt attraction. Hopefully, people that come to Mapo Bridge with thoughts of ending their lives will find hope from these uplifting messages, turn their steps, and go back to their families. You can visit their campaign site to have a virtual tour of the bridge! Press the triangular play button on the right to start walking on the bridge. READ 5 Game-changing Korean Marketing Campaigns of 2012!For a quarterback who hasn’t been in Denver all that long, Peyton Manning sure has gone through his share of starting running backs. Willis McGahee. Knowshon Moreno. Montee Ball. Ronnie Hillman. Wait a minute. Ronnie Hillman? “Ronnie has played at different times, in different amounts, but when you’re the starting back and running out there in pregame warm-ups as a starting back, it’s a different hat that you wear,” said Manning, who is but a quarter of the way through his third season in Denver. “There’s no question he has a burst that is pretty unique when he gets the ball in his hands. It’s our job to give him space.” Hillman has taken a while to get his career going since he was a third-round pick in the 2012 draft, but he has come a long way since he was deactivated from the Broncos’ Super Bowl loss Feb. 2 at New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium. That same venue will mark Hillman’s first NFL start Sunday against the New York Jets. “Any competitive person, their patience will be tested when they’re not playing as much as they want to,” Hillman said Wednesday before a media throng in front of his locker. He is starting partly because Ball went down with a groin injury Sunday against Arizona. But Hillman also earned his start through a strong second-half performance. Through halftime of the Broncos’ fourth game, Hillman had 1 yard rushing on three carries. He was plenty busy in the second half of Game 4 on Sunday, though, with 14 carries for 65 yards. He needed that game. For many reasons, Hillman has been slow to develop into the kind of change-of-pace back the Broncos envisioned when they drafted him out of San Diego State, where he averaged 1,622 yards per season as a freshman and a sophomore. “He’s chronologically young,” Broncos coach John Fox said of Hillman, 23. “He’s probably one of the younger players still. And offensively we’re not the easiest system. There’s so much more to it than running the ball. Playing receiver is so much more than just good hands. Playing quarterback is about so much more than a strong arm. He’s learning.” Hillman didn’t play as a rookie because he was a rookie. But after running for a career-best 83 yards in the Broncos’ frigid playoff game against Baltimore, he was expected to start in his second season of 2013. It didn’t happen. A fumble at the goal line in a preseason game at Seattle followed by Moreno’s career year again left Hillman on the sideline — often in street clothes. Hillman was supposed to open this season as Ball’s backup, but he fell ill after the Broncos’ final preseason game in Dallas and didn’t get his first carry until the Broncos’ third game at Seattle. Finally, in the Broncos’ 41st game (counting playoffs) since he was drafted, Hillman will be Manning’s starting running back. “You feel a little more responsibility to go out there and perform right away, not watching somebody else go out there,” Hillman said. Initially, the Broncos thought Ball was headed for injured reserve with a designation to return after eight games. That’s why the team brought in veteran running backs Mikel Leshoure and LaRod Stephens-Howling for workouts Tuesday. But a magnetic resonance imaging exam offered hope Ball might miss only a month or so with his groin strain. The Broncos added running back depth Wednesday by signing former Oakland Raider Jeremy Stewart to their practice squad, but otherwise the team is planning on going with Hillman, C.J. Anderson and Juwan Thompson until further notice. Thompson, a rookie, sat out practice Wednesday with a sore left knee. “You can’t do it with just one back in today’s game, so we expect C.J. to do his job, Juwan to be ready,” Manning said. “Those guys are both young backs, but both act like older players. I think we’ll need the whole committee against these guys, and we’re trying to get that running game going.” Mike Klis: mklis@denverpost.com or twitter.com/mikeklisHere's one thing that can, plainly, be said about the controversy over Rand Paul and the Civil Rights Act: this is exactly what Democrats hoped would happen. The Democratic campaign and message apparatus has been banking, for months, on the rightward tilt of the Tea Party to damage the Republican Party in November's midterm elections. They put out a strategy memo to this effect in January. The idea is, basically: Tea Partiers are crazy, right-wing extremists. If the Republican Party elects them to run in November, the Republican Party will lose. Democrats have been saying this for months. Paul's statements about the Civil Rights Act, brought up last night by Rachel Maddow and discussed at length, in an interview, have dominated the news cycle today. It has not looked good for Paul, or for the Tea Party. Just to be clear what we're talking about, Paul does not oppose the 1964 Civil Rights Act on the whole. He disagrees with the provision that required businesses to serve people equally. He says this is a matter of speech, and that to support such limitations on private business--as opposed to statutory desegregation of public institutions like schools, which Paul supports--one has to accept that what the government has done is tell a private business owner how to run his private business. He opposes that. On the question of whether he would have voted for it, Paul seems to indicate that, supporting 9/10 of its statutes, he probably would have, but he leaves the question open, and says that, had be been in the Senate at the time, there would have been "some discussion" about the provision that desegregated private businesses. When Maddow asked Paul, point-blank, whether lunch counters in the South should have been allowed to keep serving whites only, Paul would not answer the question in a "yes" or "no," as Maddow implored him to. Paul has warned repeatedly that this is an abstract debate that will be oversimplified and used against him by political opponents. So far, the latter is certainly true. Ta-Nehisi, earlier today, chided Paul for his proud ignorance and for not simply settling down to make the case for private-sector discrimination. There is an argument there, and there are some valid points in its favor. Paul makes some of them. Here's the interview segment: Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy Whether this proves that Democrats were right all along, and that Tea Partiers are not viable candidates for office at all, remains to be seen. Rand Paul is a prized candidate of the Tea Party movement; this is an early problem for him, which has sprung up less than a day after he won his party's nomination. Before that, he and the movement were both riding high. A Tea Party organizer I talked to today said the whole thing has been blown out of proportion. He had no problem with anything Paul had said. One thing's for certain, in all this: other Tea Party-backed candidates will be asked, by Democratic campaigns and by debate moderators, what they think of desegregating private businesses. Part of the Democratic plan has been to ask Tea Party-backed candidates about controversial views and get them on the record. Paul's stance has become a big enough story, however, that the media will probably do this on its own. Depending on what Tea Partiers say about Paul's statements, and how the public debate over Paul plays out, this moment has a chance to further alienate the movement as a whole from the mainstream. That said, it's not the end of the movement, as Democrats would very much like it to be. If Richard Blumenthal can overcome questions about his portrayal of Vietnam service, surely Paul and the Tea Partiers can get over this. As Ta-Nehisi points out, there are better ways to argue Paul's stance. There are probably more caveats to offer, too. Other Tea Party candidates--Florida's Marco Rubio, Nevada's Sharron Angle, and Utah's Mike Lee and Tim Bridgewater, for instance--ought to be working out their stances on the Civil Rights Act as we speak. Because the questions are coming, and some talking points are needed. Whether this proves that Democrats were right all along, and that Tea Partiers are not viable candidates for office at all, remains to be seen. Rand Paul is a prized candidate of the Tea Party movement; this is an early problem for him, which has sprung up less than a day after he won his party's nomination. Before that, he and the movement were both riding high. We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.An upcoming edition of its al-Qaeda’s English-language terror magazine, INSPIRE is headlining “Train Derail Operations,” where they spell out ways to create rail disasters in a transportation system that lacks the stiff security procedures of airline travel. Washington Times It’s competing Sunni extremists group, the Islamic State, for more than a year has advocated using vehicles to mow down innocents with cars and trucks. Its murderous followers have weaponized vehicles in Nice, Berlin and London, creating hundred of deaths and injuries. Adding trains to the terrorist’s priority list would put at risk virtually every mode of transportation and placed added pressure on the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) put out a report on Friday saying al-Qaeda has teased the Inspire articles with a trailer appearing on Telegram app channels operated by its fans. “The trailer highlights that derailments are simple to design using easily available materials, that such a planned attack can be hard to detect, and that the outcome can substantially damage a country’s transportation sector and the Western economy in general,” MEMRI said. The U.S. maintains over 100,000 miles of rail. But the trailer features scenes of just one system, the subway. Its shows cars flashing through urban tunnels. It quotes from U.S. Government Accountability Office reports on the vulnerability of rail lines to sabotage. It then shows what appear to be rudimentary devices that can be clamped onto a line to cause a derailment. “Simple to design,” the promo says in English script, mentioning “America” several times. “Made from readily available materials. Hard to be detached. Cause great destruction to the Western economy and transportation sector.” Al-qaeda in recent months has depicted itself as making a comeback from its headquarters in Yemen. It has created new alliances in North Africa, is using social media to attract adherence and has not given up the idea of another mass-casualty attack such as its commandeered airliner strike on New York and the Pentagon in 2001. Osama bin-Laden’s son, Hamza, steps into his father’s sandals as al-Qaeda tries to make a comeback. Washington Post The voice is that of a soft-spoken 28-year-old, but the message is vintage Osama bin Laden, giving orders to kill. When the audio recording began turning up on jihadist websites two weeks ago, it was as if the dead terrorist was channeling himself through his favorite son. “Prepare diligently to inflict crippling losses on those who have disbelieved,” Hamza bin Laden, scion of the Sept. 11, 2001, mastermind, says in a thin baritone that eerily echoes his father. “Follow in the footsteps of martyrdom-seekers before you.” The recording, first aired May 13, is one in a string of recent pronouncements by the man who many terrorism experts regard as the crown prince of al-Qaeda’s global network. Posted just two weeks before Monday’s suicide bombing in Manchester, England, the message includes a specific call for attacks on European and North American cities to avenge the deaths of Syrian children killed in airstrikes.Looking for news you can trust? Subscribe to our free newsletters. On Tuesday, President Obama proposed a “starter” retirement account for folks who don’t have IRAs or 401(k)s. Like a lot of people, I was pretty unimpressed. Today, Matt Bruenig reminds us of another reason to be unimpressed: we already spend a helluva lot of money on tax-favored retirement accounts, and nearly all of the benefit goes to the well off: The richest fifth pulled down 66 percent of them, while the poorest fifth pulled down just 2 percent of them….Needless to say, this system of retirement tax subsidies is totally ridiculous and is just another of the submerged ways that we funnel huge sums of money to the rich in this country. If we really want to pump up the retirement savings of the poor, one obvious way to start is to take the next decade’s $1.4 trillion of retirement tax expenditures and distribute them in a different way than the manner detailed in the graph above. And what might that “different way” be? Unlike Atrios, I’m not yet convinced that it’s fair to describe the 401(k) system as a “failure which offers some nice tax breaks to relatively wealthy people and hasn’t led to sufficient retirement savings for everybody else.” The thing is, the old-school pension system that we all profess to miss so much also benefited primarily the well off and also provided insufficient retirement savings for everyone else. And it was doomed anyway, thanks to increasing investment risk in the post-Bretton Woods era and lack of portability between jobs in an era when fewer and fewer people work for the same company their entire careers. What’s more, I honestly don’t know if the current system is better or worse. I would love, love, love for someone to produce a reliable distributional estimate of defined-benefit pensions circa 1975 to defined-contribution pensions circa today.1 This would give us an idea of how much things have changed and who’s benefited the most from these changes. Unfortunately, no one seems to have done this. Maybe the data just isn’t there and it can’t be done. I don’t know. But at this point it’s all but impossible to say that our current DC pension system is really any worse than the old DB pension system. That said, one thing is pretty easy to agree on: our pension system is, and always has been, miserly toward the poor. That’s true of Social Security; it’s true of old-school pensions; and it’s true of 401(k)s. If we want to reform our pension system, we should reform Social Security in a way that increases benefits for the folks at the bottom of the scale who are trying to scrounge a living on $1,100 a month. That probably means cutting benefit growth for those above the median, and it also means phasing in higher Social Security revenues over the next two or three decades. Unfortunately, although that would be the decent thing to do, it might mean that America’s best off have to pay slightly more in taxes by the time 2030 rolls around. And we can’t have that, can we? LINGO DIGRESSION: “Defined benefit” refers to an old-school pension. Those are the ones where your monthly retirement benefit was guaranteed regardless of how much you contributed to it. “Defined contribution” is what most of us have now. We make specific contributions to personal accounts, and the payout during retirement depends on how well our investments do.V/H/S/2 (originally titled S-VHS) guarantees a lot of blood, screams, aliens, some spooky creatures and… well, you’ll just have to watch the first red-band trailer for the whole thing to see what I’m talking about. Definitely looks promising, head inside to find the video, as well as some new images and poster for the upcoming anthology horror film. First of all, let me remind you that V/H/S/2 is the sequel to the last year’s V/H/S and features a series of found-footage shorts directed by Gareth Huw Evans (The Raid), Simon Barrett (A Horrible Way To Die), Adam Wingard (You’re Next), Edúardo Sanchez (Lovely Molly), Gregg Hale (The Blair Witch Project), Timo Tjahjanto (The ABCs Of Death), and Jason Eisener (Hobo With A Shotgun). This follow-up ventures even further down the demented path blazed by its predecessor, discovering new and terrifying territory in the genre. It’s a modern horror at its most inventive, shrewdly subverting our expectations about viral videos in ways that are just as satisfying as they are sadistic. The result is the rarest of all tapes—a second generation with no loss of quality. Inside a darkened house looms a column of TVs littered with VHS tapes, a pagan shrine to forgotten analog gods. The screens crackle and pop endlessly with monochrome vistas of static—white noise permeating the brain and fogging concentration. But you must fight the urge to relax: this is no mere movie night. Those obsolete spools contain more than just magnetic tape. They are imprinted with the very soul of evil. Starring Kelsy Abbott, Hannah Al Rashid, Fachry Albar, Oka Antara, Devon Brookshire and more, V/H/S/2 will be on iTunes/On Demand June 6th, 2013, and is set to hit theaters on July 12th, 2013.on • Imagine a person who feels completely healthy, completely free of all illness, sickness and physical disability. Wouldn’t it be ridiculous for that person to get medicine? What would be the point of that? What would be the rationale in getting medicine when you feel completely healthy? Those people who don’t see any problems, who are not aware of any dukkha, unsatisfactoriness, in their lives, what would be the point in their attempting to study the dhamma and to practise meditation? If you are new to this thing called ‘dhamma’, and new to meditation, then you are not expected to immediately agree that you have all sorts of problems and are suffering from many burdens in life. However, if you are not completely sure that your health is perfect, you could examine yourself, you could get to know yourself and find out what kind of shape you are in. An absolutely essential condition for the proper study of dhamma is the desire to be free of dukkha, to be free of suffering. Without this desire and intention to be free of all unsatisfactory mind states and all dissatisfying conditions, we really won’t know what we are doing, and we shall just be muddling about. It is absolutely essential, therefore, to have this need to end dukkha. Otherwise, the desire to meditate and study the dhamma may just be the desire to follow a current fashion, or a crowd of people who happened to have wandered over from the beach! It is quite amusing and quite sad that most people seem to wander through life in a little cloud, as if nothing were wrong. And then, when something is obviously wrong, they pretend it isn’t. People rarely develop the keen and powerful urge to be free of all the dukkha, of all the problems and burdens that torment life. But without that desire, we cannot practise dhamma. Do you want to be healthy, or not? This isn’t an intellectual consideration. Most people will say quite readily, ‘Oh, sure, I want to be healthy!’ But is there a deep-seated urge that is beginning to work in you and beginning to take over your life? Is your life becoming oriented to being healthy, spiritually healthy, free of dukkha! If someone threw you into the ocean and held your head under the water for a couple of minutes, or so, what kind of desire would there be in you to get out of the water? The Buddha spoke of the feeling one would have if one’s hair were on fire. If your hair were burning, if the flames were shooting up from your head, would you sit around twiddling your thumbs? Or would there be a desire to do something about it? Do you have the desire to extinguish dukkha to the same extent that you would have if your hair were on fire? Is your desire that strong? The majority of people have no awareness of dukkha within their minds. They may have many opinions drawn from books and conversations, but most do not have a clear realization within their own minds that there is dukkha. In spite of this, some come here in order to extinguish it! They are not aware of dukkha and yet they want to get rid of it! You have come to Suan Mokh. Have you come because dukkha has driven you here? Has the whip of dukkha driven you to this place like a herd of frightened cattle? Or have you come out of curiosity, because you’re travelling around Thailand and this is another place in the guide book? Why are you here? Take a look at yourself and see what influence dukkha has within your own life. Until you see that dukkha is central to what you do, what you say, what you think, then you will never have the desire to understand it and to take it apart so that you know the escape from it. Until you truly see this dukkha, you will never have the desire to be free of it. In its most favourable light, we can say that dukkha is both friend and enemy. It is dukkha that makes us clever and intelligent, and it is only through dukkha that we learn. We don’t learn from being happy! We learn from mistakes and problems. Dukkha is what causes us to grow in wisdom. To whatever degree human consciousness has developed, it has only done so because of dukkha — dukkha, the friend. On the other hand, dukkha bites; it slaps, is painful, and torments us. In this way dukkha is also an enemy. We are always trying to be free of it, whether we realize it, or not. We are always trying to run away and escape this enemy of ours. If we conceive both of these aspects of dukkha — as friend and enemy — then we shall begin to understand it on a profound level; we shall see dukkha on the level of mindful-wisdom, satipanna. This is knowledge that is based in awareness — self-awareness and an understanding of life. This is the opposite of stupidity. If our understanding of dukkha is foolish and childish, it will be of no use to us. By making use of what dukkha offers us, we can develop the mind and grow in wisdom and understanding. By using dukkha as a friend, there is less opportunity for it being an enemy. Dukkha, unsatisfactoriness, will then not bite, claw, scratch and torment us so much. This is a mindful and wise approach to dukkha. Don’t let it go by itself, don’t leave it on its own where it will remain an enemy! Buddhadasa Bhikkhu Read more by Buddhadasa Bhikkhu From the February 1995 Buddhism Now Categories: Buddhadasa Bhikkhu, Buddhist meditation, TheravadaThe FA have received the backing of Germany to host the 2030 World Cup The surprise endorsement from their rivals comes without any negotiations There is still no decision by the FA about whether to put their hat in the ring ITV and FA will be relieved that 1m-plus TV viewers returned for Germany game The FA have remarkably received the backing of arch rivals Germany for England to host the 2030 World Cup — without any negotiations. There is still no decision by the FA, still bruised from the 2018 bid debacle, about whether to put their hat in the ring for 2030, when the World Cup is expected to be staged in Europe again. ADVERTISEMENT Yet German federation president Reinhard Grindel announced at the official function before the international friendly on Friday that his country would fully support England as the UEFA candidate. The FA have received the backing of Germany for England to host the 2030 World Cup This premature endorsement is all the more surprising considering the history of tournament bidding rivalry between the nations, including the disputed gentlemen's agreement that the FA would support Germany for the 2006 World Cup in return for their backing around Euro 96 — the last big football tournament held here. The FA welcomed Germany's support over 2030, but there is going to be no reciprocal backing for their ambition to host the Euros in 2024. Also in England's corner for 2030 is UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin, who wants only one candidate from Europe and strongly believes that it is England's turn. Reinhard Grindel announced his country would fully support England as the UEFA candidate ITV Sport and the FA will be relieved that the 1m-plus TV viewers who deserted England for the dead rubber in Lithuania last month switched on for the draw against Germany that attracted a peak of 6.3m. Chelsea have removed a major obstacle to their plans for a new stadium by agreeing a deal for former owner Ken Bates to move out of his penthouse flat at Stamford Bridge. Bates was understood to be the last resident left who hadn't agreed removal terms with the club. Now that he has, Chelsea can knock down the hotel and
so bad we wonder if they have ever practiced medicine.” Norman Ward, Saskatchewan’s most prominent political scientist at the time, asserted that the medical hierarchy “betrayed an ignorance of democratic processes in general, and Saskatchewan politics in particular, that would have been excessive in a gaggle of high school freshmen.” The effectiveness of the anti-Medicare campaign can be judged by the results of the June 8, 1960 election. The CCF won 42 percent of the vote in a four-way race and 37 of the 54 seats in the legislature. The government interpreted the results, as did most academics and other neutral observers and even much of the media outside the province, as a mandate to proceed with a universal medical plan. A renewed assault on Medicare It appeared momentarily that democracy would prevail and the medical hierarchy would accept the decision of the electorate. Such optimism proved to be a chimera as the medical hierarchy and their friends in the provincial business class and local media elite prepared for a bitter assault on the principles of responsible government. They were assisted in this campaign by the local Liberal Party and by an array of obscurantist reactionaries who were mobilized for the occasion. The initial purpose of the anti-Medicare campaign was to force the CCF government to go back on their election promise and stay out of the medical insurance field altogether. When it became clear that the CCF would do no such thing, the fallback position was trying to force them to water down government involvement, limiting it to subsidizing existing medical insurance schemes controlled by organized private medicine. Tommy Douglas himself could be considered the first political casualty. He had become the first leader of the newly founded NDP in the fall of 1961, and was replaced by Woodrow Lloyd as provincial leader and premier. Douglas was defeated in a Regina constituency in the federal election of June 1962. The defeat was attributed partly to the campaign against Medicare. The doctors’ strike This article cannot do justice to the infamous doctors’ strike of July 1–23, 1962. Entire books have been devoted to it. It was the most polarized Saskatchewan battle of the 20th century and it divided the population into warring camps which brought the province to the brink of a civil war. The campaign, which included most of the local media, was based on outrageous lies about the intent of Medicare, racial slurs, red-baiting, acts of violence and threats of blood in the streets. One of the most infamous statements was made by the right-wing priest Athol Murray to an anti-Medicare rally, broadcast by radio to thousands more: “This thing may break into violence and bloodshed any day now, and God help us if it doesn’t.” This was merely one of the incendiary speeches Murray had been making throughout the province, and the Catholic Church to its credit ordered him out of Saskatchewan for the duration. The anti-Medicare campaign gave rise to a right-wing movement known as the Keep Our Doctors (KOD) Committee. The KOD movement had many similarities to today’s rabid Tea Party movement in the United States. It was composed of an active, ignorant and misinformed rank and file, led by manipulative leaders with a right-wing political agenda. Prominent doctors and businessmen and leading lights of the local Liberal Party appeared on platforms with these fanatics. The interests behind the KOD were bent not only on stopping “socialized medicine” but in ridding the province of “socialism.” The Lloyd government held firm despite tremendous pressure, and stared down the North America medical-industrial complex for 23 anxious days. This was made possible by the dedication of CCF rank and file activists and a dedicated core of socialists, trade unionists, agrarian radicals, and of a small minority of courageous doctors who defied the ostracism of their colleagues. They built community clinics with the initial aim of employing doctors who defied the strike. Their long-range aim was to provide a consumer-controlled alternative to entrepreneurial fee-for-service medicine. It was the possibility that the community clinics might become really widespread and popular that really frightened the medical establishment. The same people who organized the community clinics also organized such groups as Citizens in Defense of Medicare and Citizens for a Free Press to counter the anti-Medicare propaganda. Public opinion swung against the anti-Medicare lobby partly due to the work of the pro-Medicare committees with much help from the Saskatchewan Farmers’ Union and the trade union movement, and partly because of a popular backlash against the excesses of the KOD. The College of Physicians and Surgeons was forced to call off the strike after an arrangement with the government, known as the Saskatoon Agreement, was made on July 23, 1962. The agreement included some compromises and ambiguities which allowed the College to continue harassing community clinic doctors and to hinder the growth of alternatives to fee-for-service entrepreneurial medicine. However, the main point of the agreement was that medical insurance would remain government-controlled, compulsory, universal and reasonably comprehensive. An important beachhead with national significance had been established, and the plan immediately became popular. Unfortunately for Woodrow Lloyd and his government, they did not reap the immediate political benefits. Ross Thatcher, Liberal leader, had used the Medicare crisis to consolidate the disparate right-wing forces of the province around his leadership. The Liberals narrowly defeated the NDP in the provincial election of 1964. But to do so they had to promise to continue the medical care plan as it was. Henceforth no serious Saskatchewan politician could openly attack the principle of government-controlled universal Medicare. How Medicare went national That Medicare would spread so rapidly from Saskatchewan to the national level has often puzzled observers. It can be explained mainly by two factors: a miscalculation by the CMA, and the configuration of national political forces in the 1960s. By 1960 the CMA could see that Medicare would soon become a national issue. It hoped to stop any move towards what it called “socialized medicine” by making the case for a continuation of the existing doctor-sponsored medical insurance plans, subsidized by the state if necessary but controlled by the medical establishment. Consequently it pressed the Diefenbaker government to appoint a Royal Commission to examine the whole issue of the medical system. The CMA strategy backfired. Diefenbaker appointed fellow Conservative and old seat-mate from law school, Mr. Justice Emmett Hall, to chair the Royal Commission. The Commission was intended to examine all aspects of Canadian health care. However, the public hearings overlapped with the debate then raging in Saskatchewan that was becoming a major issue in the House of Commons and beyond. Dennis Gruending, in his superb biography of Emmett Hall, describes the excitement around the hearings, which played to packed houses around the country. Labour and farm organizations, consumer groups, community associations and many churches recommended a public plan similar to the one introduced in Saskatchewan in the midst of such controversy. The CMA, the private insurance industry and their business allies wanted the government to endorse the plans already operating under the auspices of organized medicine and the insurance companies. People could pay their own premiums, with the government subsidizing the premiums of the poor based on means tests. Gruending points out that Hall examined the evidence objectively and came down on the side of public Medicare, and then convinced those who were skeptical to go along with it. The first volume of the commission report, issued in June 1964, came out in favour of a comprehensive health insurance program to be jointly financed by the federal and provincial governments. “Although he didn’t admit it in the report, Hall’s proposal was essentially the Saskatchewan model on a national scale,” Gruending wrote. The reaction to the Hall Report could probably best be summed up with the expression “all hell broke loose.” The usual suspects mounted a rhetorical battle on a national scale, generally divided along class and ideological lines. Emmett Hall, by now elevated to the Supreme Court, threw himself into the debate in favour of public Medicare, an unprecedented move for a Supreme Court Justice and Chairman of a Royal Commission. By 1964 the pro-Medicare forces in the country were riding the crest of public opinion during a period when the political culture was moving to the left. The political alignment of national parties saw six years of minority governments over three elections between 1962 and 1968, and this favoured those political forces attempting to move the country in a more progressive direction. The NDP was growing and this strengthened left Liberals who argued that their party must protect their left flank. This in turn encouraged the red Tories within the Progressive Conservatives, who argued that the party must move left to remain electorally competitive. All of this was occurring during a minority situation when an election might occur at any time and no party wanted to be caught on the wrong side of a popular issue like public Medicare. It took fierce struggles within both the Liberal and Progressive Conservative parliamentary parties, but in the end the party whips forced the right wing into submission. The National Medical Care Insurance Act was passed in the House of Commons on December 8, 1966, by an overwhelming vote of 177 to 2. The starting date was July 1, 1968, and the Act provided that the federal government would pay about half of Medicare costs in any province with insurance plans that met the criteria of being universal, publicly administered, portable and comprehensive. By 1971 all provinces had established plans which met the criteria. Forty-five years later, the right to universal and equitable Medicare is now in perhaps the greatest danger it has faced since 1970. The political culture has lurched dangerously to the right and the Harper government has essentially declared that it has no intention of enforcing the Canada Health Act. The popular forces which made Medicare possible will have to be revitalized if we are to preserve the achievements which took decades of struggle to accomplish.Nerdy Show Review: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them Posted by NerdyShow on November 17, 2016 When The Nerdy Show Network’s flagship podcast isn’t unloading on the latest geek news and happenings, we’re diving deep into super-specific discussions and interviews. In this case the specific discussion at hand is a stand-alone film review of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them – the first film set in J. K. Rowling’s Wizarding World not revolving around Harry Potter. You might recall back in 2013, our lukewarm feelings towards a film adaptation of the in-universe textbook, followed by a rising enthusiasm earlier this year when details of a more elaborate story came into view and the article series History of Magic in North America began its release, leading up to the film. Join Doug and Nina as they share their feelings on the film, fresh from an early screening – opening with a spoiler-free review and then switching gears to unrestricted discussions about what transpires and modern film’s ever present nemesis: the clunky third act. Download from the player above \| Subscribe via iTunes Support Nerdy Show!Story highlights The National Education Association is the largest labor union in the U.S. The American Federation of Teachers also endorsed Clinton over the summer Washington (CNN) The nation's largest teachers union is backing Hillary Clinton for president. The National Education Association, which has 3 million members, announced its support Saturday for the former secretary of state. Clinton accepted the endorsement in person after speaking earlier in the day to the Human Rights Campaign in Washington. "As a lifelong fighter for children and families, I am deeply honored to have earned the endorsement of the National Education Association and their nearly 3 million members," Clinton said in a statement Saturday. "The teachers and educators of the NEA shape our future. NEA members work hard every day to provide the education and support our children need to grow and prosper." Clinton highlighted her efforts helping create a new teacher recruitment program in the Senate in announcing her NEA endorsement. Read MoreA Final Testimony by Hugh B. Brown 16 November 2018 (c) 2018 There seems today to be a tendency toward flippant thinking, a lack of thought. There seems to be a tendency to belittle what our fathers and mothers thought because we feel we have made some progress scientifically. We are to ready to conclude that everything from past generations is now folly and that our main duty today, as far as the past is concerned, is to get away from it. There is not enough of the attitude of the sincere investigator among us. When we come into a new field of research that will challenge our due and honest consideration, we should be warned against coming too quickly to a conclusion, of forming a decision too hastily. We should be scientific -- that is, open-minded, approaching new problems without prejudice, deferring a decision until all the facts are in. Some say that the open-minded leave room for doubt. But I believe we should doubt some of the things we hear. Doubt has a place if it can stir in one an interest to go out and find the truth for one's self. I should like to awaken in everyone a desire to investigate, to make an independent study of religion, and to know for themselves whether or not the teachings of the Mormon church are true. I should like to see everyone prepared to defend the religion of his or her parents, not because it was the religion of our fathers and mothers but because they have found it to be the true religion. If one approaches it with an open mind, with a desire to know the truth, and if one questions with a sincere heart what one hears from time to time, he or she will be on the road to growth and service. There are altogether too many people in the world who are willing to accept as true whatever is printed in a book or delivered from a pulpit. Their faith never goes below the surface soil of authority. I plead with everyone I meet that they may drive their faith down through that soil and get hold of the solid truth, that they may be able to withstand the winds and storm of indecision and of doubt, of opposition and persecution. Then, and only then, will we be able to defend our religion successfully. When I speak of defending our religion, I do not mean such defense as an army makes on the battlefield but the defense of a clean and upright and virtuous life lived in harmony with an intelligent belief and understanding of the gospel. As Mormons, we should do with religion as we do with music, not defend it but simply render it. It needs no defense. The living of religion is, after all, the greatest sermon, and if all of us would live it, we would create a symphony which would be appreciated by all. There are many churches in the world today, and in those churches are many people and many kinds of theology. I would like to distinguish between theology and religion. Religion is my preference. Someone has said, "I hate botany, but I love flowers." I would say that I do not care for theology, but I love religion. In my travels I have found a great many people who have had some rather perverted ideas about Mormons. Frequently during my army days I was asked, "How many wives do you have?" And I would say, "Well, I live in a country where we have all the wives we want." Of course, I was immediately met with a knowing smile, and some of my army friends would comment, "I would like to live in a country like that." I would answer, "Don't you live in a country where you have all the wives you want? We have all the wives we want in Utah, but we only want one each." The Mormon church has a religion aside from its theology, which, if followed, dominates the life of individuals and leads them up out of the grueling surroundings which life may have placed them in, and teaches them that they are children of God and that being children of God they are of royal blood. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has this practical view of religion: that religion should help us here and now; that we should not have to wait until after we are dead to get any benefits; that religion as understood and applied makes men and women more successful, happier, more contented, gives them aspiration and hope; that religion is the vitalizing force, religion is that which gives men and women an ideal, an ideal so high that it may be seen from both sides of the valley of life. The religion of the Latter-day Saints teaches youth that as children of God, they are expected to acquire experience as they go through life and that experience will ripen into knowledge, that knowledge will ripen into wisdom and intelligence, and that their greatness will be in proportion to their intelligence. So the religion of the Latter-day Saints is not just theory from a book or taught in church. The gospel is a plan of which God is the author, a plan of which we are all necessary parts. My religion sweetens my life. My religion, if properly lived, helps me to be a better friend to my associates, a better neighbor, a better citizen, a better father, a better man. If I am sincere in it, my religion forbids me to do to my neighbors what I would not want them to do to me, either in word or act. My religion, in other words, is that which is the greatest part of me. I have been very grateful that the freedom, dignity, and integrity of the individual are basic in church doctrine. We are free to think and express our opinions in the church. Fear will not stifle thought. God himself refuses to trammel free agency even though its exercise sometimes teaches painful lessons. Both creative science and revealed religion find their fullest and truest expression in the climate of freedom. As we all proceed to make our individual "declarations of independence," I hope we can distinguish between liberty and license, that we can realize that freedom is only a blessing if it is accompanied by wisdom and intelligence. At the same time, we all need to resist the down-drag of mental laziness which sometimes leads to the premature hardening of the intellectual arteries. And I would especially urge all of us to avoid sluggishness of spirit, which is the worst kind of lethargy. Some people are phlegmatic to a degree that would make a turtle seem intolerably vivacious. I admire men and women who have developed the questing spirit, who are unafraid of new ideas as stepping stones to progress. We should, of course, respect the opinions of others, but we should also be unafraid to dissent -- if we are informed. Thoughts and expressions compete in the marketplace of thought, and in that competition truth emerges triumphant. Only error fears freedom of expression. Both science and religion beget humility. Scientists and teachers of religion disagree among themselves on theological and other subjects. Even in our own church men and women take issue with one another and contend for their own interpretations. This free exchange of ideas is not to be deplored as long as men and women remain humble and teachable. Neither fear of consequence or any kind of coercion should ever be used to secure uniformity of thought in the church. People should express their problems and opinions and be unafraid to think without fear of ill consequences. We should all be interested in academic research. We must go out on the research front and continue to explore the vast unknown. We should be in the forefront of learning in all fields, for revelation does not come only through the prophet of God nor only directly from heaven in visions or dreams. Revelation may come in the laboratory, out of the test tube, out of the thinking mind and the inquiring soul, out of search and research and prayer and inspiration. We must be unafraid to contend for what we are thinking and to combat error with truth in this divided and imperiled world, and we must do it with the unfaltering faith that God is still in his heaven even though all is not well with the world. We should be dauntless in our pursuit of truth and resist all demands for unthinking conformity. No one would have us become mere tape recorders of other people's thoughts. We should be modest and teachable and seek to know the truth by study and faith. There have been times when progress was halted by thought control. Tolerance and truth demand that all be heard and that competing ideas be tested against each other so that the best, which might not always be our own, can prevail. Knowledge is the most complete and dependable when all points of view are heard. We are in a world of restlessness and skepticism, where old things are not only challenged but often disappear, but also a world of miraculous achievement, undreamed of accomplishment, and terrifying power. Science offers wonderful tools for helping to create the brotherhood of humanity on earth, but the cement of brotherhood does not come from any laboratory. It must come from the heart and mind and spirit of men and women. Peace and brotherhood can be achieved when the two most potent forces in civilization -- religion and science -- join to create one world in its truest and greatest sense. We should continue to become acquainted with human experience through history and philosophy, science and poetry, art and religion. Every discovery of science reveals clearly the divine plan in nature. The remarkable harmony in the physical laws and processes of the universe, from the infinitesimal to the infinite, surpasses mortal understanding and implies a supreme architect, and the beauty and symmetry of God's handiwork inspire reverence. One of the most important things in the world is freedom of the mind; from this all other freedoms spring. Such freedom is necessarily dangerous, for one cannot think right without running the risk of thinking wrong, but generally more thinking is the antidote for the evils that spring from wrong thinking. More thinking is required, and we should all exercise our God-given right to think and be unafraid to express our opinions, with proper respect for those to whom we talk and proper acknowledgment of our own shortcomings. We must preserve freedom of the mind in the church and resist all efforts to suppress it. The church is not so much concerned with whether the thoughts of its members are orthodox or heterodox as it is that they shall have thoughts. One may memorize much without learning anything. In this age of speed there seems to be little time for meditation. While speak of independence and the right to think, to agree or disagree, to examine and question, I need to remind myself not to forget that fixed and unchanging laws govern all God's creation, whether the vastness of the starry heavens or the minute revolving universe of the atom or human relationships. All is law. All is cause and effect, and God's laws are universal. God has no favorites; no one is immune from either life's temptations or the consequences of his or her deeds. God is not capricious. An individual's reactions to the ever-changing impacts of life will depend upon his or her goals and ideals. Every life revolves around certain fundamental core ideas, whether we realize it or not, and herein lies the chief value of religion. But while I believe all that God has revealed, I am not quite sure I understand what he has revealed, and the fact that God has promised further revelation is to me a challenge to keep an open mind and be prepared to follow wherever my search for truth may lead. We Mormons have been blessed with much knowledge by revelation from God which, in some part, the world lacks. But there is an incomprehensibly greater part of truth yet to be discovered. Revealed insights should leave us stricken with the knowledge of how little we really know. It should never lead to an emotional arrogance based upon a false assumption that we somehow have all the answers -- that we in fact have a corner on truth. For we do not. And while all members should respect, support, and heed the teachings of the authorities of the church, no one should accept a statement and base his or her testimony upon it, no matter who makes it, until he or she has, under mature examination, found it to be true and worthwhile; then one's logical deductions may be confirmed by the spirit of revelation to his or her spirit, because real conversion must come from within. I hope that the spirit of the Holy Ghost rests upon everyone and leads us all back into the presence of our heavenly parents. I hope that everyone might conduct his or her life in such a manner as to be worthy of God's continued blessings. And I especially hope that we might all be able, as we go forward, to walk figuratively and almost literally with our hand in God's hand and to feel the effect of God's presence in our lives, doing everything in Jesus' name and with God's blessings.The Broncos are an offensive passing juggernaut on a historic level. Maybe you realize this as someone who's followed them closely this season. Maybe you've just heard some of the hype about it as a fan of another team, but that's the only way to describe this team. It's why they're in the Super Bowl. They scored 161 more points than the second-best scoring team. That's 10 more points per game than the next team. Absurd. Peyton Manning threw 55 touchdown passes. That's an NFL record. He threw for 5,477 yards. That's an NFL record. To say the Broncos are a passing juggernaut is probably an understatement. They're the best passing offense in history. It's only fitting that their opponent in the Super Bowl, the Seattle Seahawks, had the NFL's best pass defense this season, and perhaps, one of the best pass defenses in history. With three All-Pros patrolling the secondary, the Seahawks gave up the fewest pass yards per game and fewest yards per pass attempt -- not to mention the fewest points, fewest yards per play, fewest yards per game, and had the most interceptions and forced fumbles. The Broncos had four pass catchers who scored 10 or more touchdowns through the air this season. The Seahawks gave up 16 passing touchdowns, total. Super Bowl XLVIII is truly a strength-on-strength matchup. It'll be fun finding out who's better at what they do best. The Broncos' scary-ass passing game I could write about the Seahawks' defense and how it helped get them to the Super Bowl all day, but today's column is about the Broncos. At the center of everything is a guy you might've heard about, Peyton Manning. Manning is 37 years old, two years removed from major neck surgery, and he just wrapped up the best regular season for any quarterback ever... in his 16th season in the league. How did this happen? Well, Manning is obviously very good, but he has some help. The Broncos' somewhat unique and potent combination of skill players came together to create a cauldron of efficiency and talent like the league's never seen. The 30,000-foot view is that Peyton Manning is the chess master, and he's got bigger, faster, stronger and smarter pawns than you. As for the closer-up perspective, it boils down to creating and exploiting matchups. This is an approach that's been taken by some of the best offenses in recent memory. These teams had a versatile and talented nucleus of players whose sum was greater than its parts. It's all about creating matchups -- how do you scare opposing coordinators? When you think about the Saints, you think Drew Brees, Jimmy Graham, Marques Colston and Darren Sproles. Graham's a moveable chess piece at tight end, Colston a huge slot receiver, Sproles a hybrid receiver/running back who can run routes or rush from the backfield. A defense has to pick its poison. They all present matchup issues. Things have changed, obviously, but up until this season, when you'd think of the Patriots, you'd think about Tom Brady with Rob Gronkowski, Aaron Hernandez and Wes Welker. You'd picture their seemingly indefensible offense, characterized by those two tight ends, and their ability to create mismatches and disguise intentions. When you think about the Packers of recent years, you picture Aaron Rodgers with an arsenal that included Jordy Nelson, Greg Jennings, the joker Jermichael Finley and the X-factor Randall Cobb. Matchup nightmare-type athletes who can play multiple spots and win wherever they're asked to line up. For the Broncos, their offense is designed around five skill players -- Demaryius Thomas, Eric Decker, Wes Welker, Julius Thomas and Knowshon Moreno -- and all play a role in the scheme. For this specific offensive attack, it's overwhelmingly done out of "11" personnel, or three receivers, one tight end and one back, and there's no end to the combination of how they're used. Terminology: The X, (slot) and Y - Z The mnemonic phrase that I've seen thrown out to help you remember the different wide receiver positions as coaches would refer to them is: "X and Y Z". In general terms, when you're talking about playbook terminology, the X receiver (also known as the split end) is on the line and aligned wide, away from the formation. The "and" in the phrase represents the offensive line, leaving "Y Z" on the other side. So that means again, generally, you find the Z receiver (also known as the flanker) aligned outside the tight end (Y), off the line of scrimmage. This phrase doesn't account for slot receivers, because they're wild cards who can be aligned anywhere (and often moving around). In Seattle, former NFL vet Hugh Millen, who does regular radio analysis, took the time to break down, in detail, the different receiver positions on the air last year (download here). I found it very illuminating. "I think it's a lot like in baseball, you know, the difference between a second baseman and a third baseman," said Millen, in reference to the differences between X and Z. "You know, they're both infielders, but their job duties are much different... so it goes with wide receiver. It's also like in basketball -- everyone knows who the '3' and the '4' are, and that's been committed to the average fan's memory, but I always thought that X and Z would be similarly committed to memory as well." I would say that's probably not the case. "The X receiver is the split end," said Millen. "He is the widest receiver away from the tight end. What's unique about him -- as opposed to the Z receiver, who is the flanker, and the other wide receiver -- is that the X receiver, the split end, in most formations -- he is tethered to the line of scrimmage." "He's on the line of scrimmage. He cannot go in motion, and so, when he's facing a cornerback, as he almost always is, the cornerback can jam him at the line. So, your X receiver, he better have the profile of a guy that has the speed to get down the sideline, he better have the quickness to get away from the corner, and he better be good coming off a press." It's not a coincidence that in many cases, a team's X receiver is also considered its " No. 1." Why? As Millen explains, it comes down to the difficult job an X has. "Now, who is a corner?" Millen asks. "In the NFL, the corner is the guy on the playground, when you play tag, that always won. He's got that great agility. He is the cheetah running down the gazelle on the Serengeti. The corner is the best athlete on the football field, and I'll even include receivers and running backs in that group, because think about the skill set for a cornerback. He doesn't have to have great hand-eye coordination. He just has to be able to follow you. And so, those guys are hard to beat, and particularly for an X receiver, if he's getting a jam on you, you gotta have that ability to get off the line of scrimmage." In the Broncos' system, very generally, Demaryius Thomas is the X, or split end. Demaryius Thomas: 92 receptions, 1,430 yards, 15.5 yards/rec, 14 TD Thomas is the true definition of an X receiver; he's extremely difficult to defend one-on-one. The key to this particular play is getting off the line of scrimmage and getting off any jam you might encounter. Here's what the greats have to say about that: Here, Thomas channels a combination of Michael Irvin and Cris Carter to jab his cornerback outside, to get him even further out away from his help, then use a subtle push-off to gain some separation. Alfonzo Dennard never has a chance on this play from last week's AFC Championship Game. Below, Thomas uses the Irvin release, getting his arm into the shoulder of the DB to go right through him. He then leaps to make the grab with strong hands and great concentration. Thomas' physicality and size are a couple of his best attributes, and so are his strong hands. He's also a savvy and technically sound route runner. One of the best route runners of all time, Jerry Rice, explains some of the nuances of the position to DeSean Jackson below: As you can see below, even a subtle outside corner jab (the shake) gets the cornerback turned around so Thomas can run his skinny post upfield. It's all about getting the corner to think you're going one way and then go the other. Here's the thing, though: part of what makes the Broncos so dangerous on offense is that that they've got multiple players who can play the "X position" and often they'll have both of their wide receivers on the line. Opposite Demaryius Thomas is Eric Decker. Eric Decker: 87 receptions, 1,288 yards, 14.8 yards/rec, 11 TD Like Thomas, Decker is physical and quick enough to get off the line, and can win one-on-one. He could be an X in any system. Hall of Famer Michael Irvin, on "separation": "When you'[re] matched up against a great corner, you can't beat him early. You have to beat him as late as possible. So, it doesn't require you to be masterful in your feet, your ins, your cuts; it requires you to be masterful in your understanding of timing. I need to be open at the last second, when the ball's arriving, because I'm only going to be open for that second with this kind of a guy." Exhibit A: "These guys, they keep trying to run away from people and think 'I'm going to get wide open,'" says Irvin. "There is no such thing as ‘wide open' when you're playing [great]. They're always going to be tight on you. So you're complaining, because you beat them too early, and they get back there right around the time the ball is getting there. That's why you beat him late, and you're the only person there when the ball gets there. For the corner, it's too late for you to recover, because [he] pushed off at the last possible second." It also helps when your quarterback can drop the ball into a bucket 30 yards downfield. Back to the Michael Irvin school of getting off the jam: Below, Decker shows Demaryius-esque ability to set up his corner inside then get outside, controlling the boundary to reel in Manning's catch. As for the "Z" receiver, here's what Millen had to say: "Now, the Z receiver, the 'flanker,' who is on the opposite side of the split end in most formations, is going to be off the line of scrimmage a few yards. That enables the tight end to be eligible, because if the Z receiver were on the line, it would make the tight end ineligible." Super Bowl XLVIII: Seahawks vs. Broncos Be sure to bookmark SB Nation's complete coverage of Super Bowl XLVIII. Everything from the build up, to live coverage and reactions after the big game, all in one beautiful package. "That flanker, that Z receiver -- and again, those terms are synonymous -- that is still a wide receiver. He's going against cornerbacks. He has to be able to have the speed and the acceleration to beat cornerbacks. But from time to time, you can run him in motion because he's off the line of scrimmage, you can get him down in the slot and run for passes over the middle... there's a little bit of the characteristics of a slot receiver inherent in the Z receiver. But, by and large, those guys are much different than the slot receiver." As with many schemes, the Broncos heavily alternate roles, and both Thomas and Decker play the X and Z. One thing that I found when watching these guys play is that both are very strong over the middle and fearless going up to get passes in traffic. Both these characteristics are vital for the Z/flanker because he's going to be moved around and going in motion more often. The "Z" has some "characteristics of a slot receiver," as Millen says, and that's how these guys are used at times. You see a lot of drag and crossing routes, and a fair share of slants. These guys can win outside but they are also adept in the slot or over the middle. Speaking of the slot, the Broncos have one of the most prolific players at that position in NFL history. Because they're greedy. Wes Welker: 73 receptions, 778 yards, 10.7 yards/rec, 10 TD Speaking in generalities, Welker is extremely valuable on third down and near the goal line, because he has otherworldly short-area quickness, balance and agility. He's also very adept at finding soft spots in zones, exploiting mismatches, and he's very intelligent when it comes to choosing the correct option in a route. Welker is savvy, and while his controversial "pick/rub" route on Aqib Talib is at the forefront this week, most of the time when the Broncos run that type of play he does it with enough subtlety to avoid such results. Welker understands the game of football, and the little things he does to get open are what make him such a great player. Below, you can see him stalk block on the DB who's lined up across from him. This gets that DB to look into the backfield, expecting a run, and that moment of hesitation is all Welker needs. This just seems so ridiculously easy, but in reality it's a highly skilled athletic movement by Welker. That brings us to Julius Thomas -- the joker. The Y, if you're going by playbook jargon. Thomas is a key component to this system, because he's a player who Peyton Manning can move around depending on certain looks, and ultimately, Thomas plays each of the X, Z and slot receiver positions with aplomb. Check him out below. Manning and OC Adam Gase have aligned Thomas outside on the wing. Against Oakland's particular defensive personnel grouping, that means he finds himself matched up with OLB Kevin Burnett. That's a mismatch for the uber-athletic Thomas, who proceeds to do this: It just almost doesn't seem fair. How 'bout matching him up in man on the outside against one of the most athletic outside linebackers in football? I mean... what do you do? This is the constant battle for defensive coordinators. You can bring out a defensive back to match up with Thomas, but then you may see Peyton check to a run call with Thomas blocking on the edge, which gives the Broncos back the advantage. As I said, Denver likes to use
rook and Leddy-Oduya skated the entire third period, save for one brief shift for the third pairing. Oduya had his highest time on ice total as a Blackhawk with 25:25. Seabrook led all skaters with 28:04. – Jonathan Toews missed his seventh consecutive game with an upper-body injury. His presence continues to be missed, particularly in the faceoff circle where the ‘Hawks won only 43% of their draws Sunday against Detroit. – Detroit skated without captain Nicklas Lidstrom, top center Pavel Datsyuk, and defenseman Jonathan Ericsson. Kindl left the game early, leaving Detroit with five defensemen, including new faces Kyle Quincey and Brendan Smith, to shoulder the load. – The ‘Hawks will visit the St. Louis Blues Tuesday night for a 7pm central start before returning home for a three-game homestand beginning Friday. Brad Gardner In addition to covering the Blackhawks for TheThirdManIn.com, Brad is also the Blackhawks correspondent at HockeysFuture.com. **Brad Gardner will be our guest on this Wednesday night’s TTMI podcast to discuss the Blackhawks prospects up and down the organizational chart, from Rockford to junior to college hockey. Join us live at 8pm this Wednesday night March 7th at BlogTalkRadio.com/TheThirdManIn for some Puck Chatter.Hundreds, perhaps thousands of people have been killed in Egypt as the Muslim Brotherhood and the Egyptian military continue to struggle for control of the country. The Brotherhood is angry that America isn't backing its 'democratic rule' while the military is probably angry at the unleashing of the Brotherhood in the first place. Disappointment abounds. "The US has lost the Islamists, Egyptian society and the military," Geneive Abdo, a Stimson Center fellow who monitors Egypt says. That kind of makes you wonder who's left on the American side. But the Washington Post thinks the administration can win the Islamists back. Nothing is apparently beyond the ability of the Obama administration. Not even the ability to make enemies of everyone, a feat which formerly seemed beyond the capacity of any mortal man. The WaPo warns in an editorial: "the further use of force against the Muslim Brotherhood will lead to the immediate suspension of U.S.-Egyptian military cooperation." I predict that if Egypt complies and reinstates Morsi the next WaPo editorial will read, "the further use of force by the Muslim Brotherhood against the military will lead to the immediate suspension of U.S.-Egyptian cooperation." Never mind: the rules are apparently whatever happens it's always America's fault. Were it not for the gravity of the situation it would bring to mind those Three Stooges skits where Moe hits Larry and Larry hits... Curly. The New York Times thinks the open violence between factions in Egypt "may be an ill-omen for the broader region." It explains this amazing insight. BEIRUT, Lebanon — In Libya, armed militias have filled a void left by a revolution that felled a dictator. In Syria, a popular uprising has morphed into a civil war that has left more than 100,000 dead and has provided a haven for radical jihadists. In Tunisia, increasingly bitter political divisions have delayed the drafting of a new constitution. And now in Egypt, the epicenter of the Arab World, the army and security forces have toppled the elected Islamist president, killed hundreds of his supporters, declared a state of emergency and worsened a deep polarization. It is clear that the region’s old status quo, dominated by imperious rulers who fixed elections, ruled by fiat and brutally quashed dissent, has been fundamentally damaged, if not overthrown, in the three years since the uprisings optimistically known as the Arab Spring. What is unclear, however, is the replacement model. Unfortunately the replacement is model is probably imperious rulers who fix elections, rule by fiat and brutally quash dissent. The new boss is the same as the old boss. The Times quotes a local pundit who says “the old regional order has gone, the new regional order is being drawn in blood and it is going to take a long time.” That's true insofar as it goes but the NYT analysis doesn't go far enough. The problem is not just that the national arrangements that are dissolving. The regional framework has melted too. America has got out of the hegemon business. This seems to be in part a conscious decision by the Obama administration. But they didn't think it through enough. What has replaced it is what was quaintly termed a power vacuum. There are still powers in the region to be sure. Russia, Iran, the Gulf States and the ghost of the old hegemon, the United States: when it isn't worrying about gay marriage, global warming or feminist rights. But none of those powers is as yet able to fill the old position of dominance. Each has enough power to affect events but none is willing or able to determine their outcome. In other words the current actors have enough juice to cause problems but not enough to fix them. The perils of power vacuum used to well known. They are like fires with nobody to put them out. Sixty years ago as a result of the traumatic experiences of combat, the US Navy concluded with religious fervor that fire was your enemy and one never gave it the chance to get out of hand. At the first chance one flung down the fire curtains, cooled the hot spots, jettisoned the bombs, tossed the smoldering planes over the side. You did anything and everything possible to keep the conflagrations from joining up because once the flame ran together you were toast, both literally and figuratively. This lesson was apparently forgotten by the administration. It's first act was to transfer the bulk of its available forces to Afghanistan, which is landlocked. Fire brigade gone, check. The second was to take the flames of Egypt's Arab Spring and North Africa and fan them to white hot intensity in Libya, like a child fascinated by bright colors. It then blew on the coals in Syria until they leaped up into sparks. Spread democratization through the Arab world. Check. Then to cool the flames burning in the Levant it asked Jordan to open its doors and Lebanon too. Not content with this ventilation, it asked Turkey to take a hand. Keep things under control. Check. And so things spread. But to top everything off, it performed these tasks in the most opaque manner possible, under the cover of secrecy, night and disinformation, as exemplified by Benghazi. Put a blindfold on everybody. Check. Nobody knows what's going on. But never mind: trust Obama, trust Obama we are told. Why? because he grew up in Indonesia, because he's a child of the world. Yet given what is known, why trust Obama again? If Admiral Spruance had appointed Admiral Obama to command the carrier force, and Obama's first instinct was to order every bomb hit immediately doused with aviation fuel, Spruance would have reassigned him to the golf course. But we don't learn any more. It's all spin all the time. The New York Times is right: the region is ill-omened. But the reasons for this reversal of fortune are no mystery. Obama bet the farm and lost. And he bet it secretly too. Did you know that you can purchase some of these books and pamphlets by Richard Fernandez and share them with you friends? They will receive a link in their email and it will automatically give them access to a Kindle reader on their smartphone, computer or even as a web-readable document. The War of the Words for $3.99, Understanding the crisis of the early 21st century in terms of information corruption in the financial, security and political spheres Rebranding Christianity for $3.99, or why the truth shall make you free The Three Conjectures at Amazon Kindle for $1.99, reflections on terrorism and the nuclear age Storming the Castle at Amazon Kindle for $3.99, why government should get small No Way In at Amazon Kindle $8.95, print $9.99. Fiction. A flight into peril, flashbacks to underground action. Storm Over the South China Sea $0.99, how China is restarting history in the Pacific Tip Jar or Subscribe or UnsubscribeU-shaped lake formed by a cut-off meander of a river This picture of the Nowitna River, Alaska shows two oxbow lakes – a short one at the bottom of the picture and a longer, more curved one at the middle-right. Furthermore, it can be clearly seen how a third oxbow lake is in the making. The isthmus or bank in the centre of the most prominent meander is very narrow – much narrower than the width of the river. Eventually, the two sections of river on either side of the isthmus break through, and create a new, straighter course. A new river bank then starts to accumulate, sealing off the meander and leaving another oxbow lake. An oxbow lake is a U-shaped lake that forms when a wide meander from the main stem of a river is cut off, creating a free-standing body of water. This landform is so named for its distinctive curved shape, which resembles the bow pin of an oxbow. In Australia, an oxbow lake is called a billabong, from the indigenous Wiradjuri language. In south Texas, oxbows left by the Rio Grande are called resacas. The word "oxbow" can also refer to a U-shaped bend in a river or stream, whether or not it is cut off from the main stream.[1][2] Geology [ edit ] An oxbow lake forms when a river creates a meander, due to the river's eroding the bank. After a long period of time, the meander becomes very curved, and eventually the neck of the meander becomes narrower and the river cuts through the neck during a flood, cutting off the meander and forming an oxbow lake. The swirls and curves of the previous courses of the Songhua River in northeast China can easily be seen in this satellite photo When a river reaches a low-lying plain, often in its final course to the sea or a lake, it meanders widely. In the vicinity of a river bend, deposition occurs on the convex bank (the bank with the smaller radius). In contrast, both lateral erosion and undercutting occur on the cut bank or concave bank (the bank with the greater radius.) Continuous deposition on the convex bank and erosion of the concave bank of a meandering river cause the formation of a very pronounced meander with two concave banks getting closer. The narrow neck of land between the two neighboring concave banks is finally cut through, either by lateral erosion of the two concave banks or by the strong currents of a flood. When this happens a new, straighter river channel develops—and an abandoned meander loop, called a cutoff, forms. When deposition finally seals off the cutoff from the river channel, an oxbow lake forms. This process can occur over a time from a few years to several decades, and may sometimes become essentially static. Gathering of erosion products near the concave bank and transporting them to the convex bank is the work of the secondary flow across the floor of the river in the vicinity of a river bend. The process of deposition of silt, sand and gravel on the convex bank is clearly illustrated in point bars.[3] River flood plains that contain rivers with a highly sinuous platform are populated by longer oxbow lakes than those with low sinuosity. This is because rivers with high sinuosity have larger meanders, and greater opportunity for longer lakes to form. Rivers with lower sinuosity are characterized by fewer cutoffs and shorter oxbow lakes due to the shorter distance of their meanders.[4] The effect of the secondary flow can be demonstrated using a circular bowl. Partly fill the bowl with water and sprinkle dense particles such as sand or rice into the bowl. Set the water into circular motion with one hand or a spoon. The dense particles quickly sweep into a neat pile in the center of the bowl. This is the mechanism that leads to the formation of point bars and contributes to the formation of oxbow lakes. The primary flow of water in the bowl is circular and the streamlines are concentric with the side of the bowl. However, the secondary flow of the boundary layer across the floor of the bowl is inward toward the center. The primary flow might be expected to fling the dense particles to the perimeter of the bowl, but instead the secondary flow sweeps the particles toward the center.[5] The curved path of a river around a bend makes the water's surface slightly higher on the outside of the bend than on the inside. As a result, at any elevation within the river, water pressure is slightly greater near the outside of the bend than on the inside. A pressure gradient toward the convex bank provides the centripetal force necessary for each parcel of water to follow its curved path. The boundary layer that flows along the river floor does not move fast enough to balance the pressure gradient laterally across the river. It responds to this pressure gradient, and its velocity is partly downstream and partly across the river toward the convex bank.[3][6] As it flows along the floor of the river, it sweeps loose material toward the convex bank. This flow of the boundary layer is significantly different from the speed and direction of the primary flow of the river, and is part of the river's secondary flow. Early stages of formation of coastal plain oxbow lake in the Gower Peninsula of southwest Wales A Horseshoe or oxbow lake near Hughes Arkansas. The bulges in the border reflect changes in the course of the river; when the river shifted its course and cut off the former channel, the border remained unchanged. When a fluid follows a curved path, such as around a circular bowl, around a bend in a river or in a tropical cyclone, the flow is described as vortex flow: the fastest speed occurs where the radius is smallest, and the slowest speed occurs where the radius is greatest. The higher fluid pressure and slower speed where the radius is greater, and the lower pressure and faster speed where the radius is smaller, are all consistent with Bernoulli's principle. Notable examples Artificial oxbow lakes [ edit ] Oxbow lakes may be formed when a river channel is straightened artificially to improve navigation or for flood alleviation. This occurred notably on the upper Rhine in Germany in the nineteenth century.[7] An example of an entirely artificial waterway with oxbows is the Oxford Canal in England. When originally constructed, it had a very meandering course, following the contours of the land, but the northern part of the canal was straightened out between 1829 and 1834, reducing its length from approximately 91 to 77.5 miles (146 to 125 km) and creating a number of oxbow-shaped sections isolated from the new course.[8] See also [ edit ]The pictures went viral on social media Pictures of a white-bearded policeman purportedly sitting on the lap of a woman Special Police Officer (SPO) in a police station in Rajouri district has gone viral on social media, prompting authorities to suspend him.Two pictures were posted in Facebook and WhatsApp in which Head Constable Zakir Hussain was seen sitting on the lap of a woman SPO who was seated on a chair in Budhal in Police Station."The incident took place in August this year. Soon after the pictures came to our notice, we have suspended the Head Constable namely Zakir Hussain posted at Police Station Budhal and attached him to the District Police Lines for this shameful act," said AK Atri, Deputy Inspector General of Police (DIG) of the Rajouri-Poonch Range.A probe has been ordered and action has been initiated against the woman SPO and others of the department involved in the act, he said. There is zero-tolerance to such shameful acts in police, the DIG said.A Palestinian prisoner on long-term hunger strike has inked a deal with Israel which will see him freed to exile in Gaza for 10 years, a prisoners’ rights group and Israeli intelligence said Sunday. Ayman Sharawna is one of four Palestinian prisoners who have been refusing food for months over the conditions of their detention by Israel, whose cases have sparked expressions of concern from the United Nations and the European Union. “Palestinian prisoner Ayman Sharawna, who has been on hunger strike since mid-July, has reached a deal with the Israeli side under which he will be released to Gaza and exiled there for 10 years,” Qadura Fares, head of the Ramallah-based Prisoners’ Club, told AFP. Israel’s Shin Bet security service said that it had approved the deal with the Hamas activist and it would be implemented “in the near future”. “The request was approved and it was decided that after 10 years he would be able to return (to his West Bank home) if it is concluded that he has not gone back to terror activity,” it said in a statement. Sharawna, 36, is a long-term security prisoner who was arrested in 2002 and sentenced to 38 years behind bars, but released in October 2011 under terms of a prisoner swap deal. But he was rearrested three months later and charged with violating the terms of his release, although the evidence against him was kept secret. He began refusing food in July after Israel threatened to make him serve out the remainder of his original sentence. On February 28, Jaafar Ezzeddine and Tariq Qaadan, ended their three-month hunger strike after refusing food for three months, pending a hearing on their case. Both have been held without trial since November. The fourth hunger striker is Samer Issawi, a security prisoner who is currently being held at Kaplan hospital near Tel Aviv after intermittently refusing food for eight months. Like Sharawna, Issawi was freed under the 2011 swap deal but rearrested last year on charges of violating terms of his release. Last week, Israeli medics raised the alarm over his state of health, informing the Prisoners’ Club that he had suffered cardiac failure and was at risk of dying after he stopped taking liquids. [Ryan Rodrick Beiler / Shutterstock.com]Justin Fashanu, the first openly gay footballer, killed himself with his life mired in chaos and injury. As documentary Forbidden Games casts light on his tragic story, his sibling talks about their troubled relationship The story of Justin Fashanu – the world’s first £1m black footballer and Britain’s first openly gay footballer, who killed himself aged 37 in 1998 – makes a moving, challenging, troubling biopic. Forbidden Games tells how Justin and his brother John, aged four and three, were removed from their mother and three siblings, to be fostered by Barnardo’s. The more sensitive Justin could never reconcile what he perceived to be an abandonment, but John saw things differently. “No mother wants to give away her own children,” he says, “and it propelled us to become major celebrities all over the world. We made ourselves millionaires, so it couldn’t have been all that bad, could it?” John’s resulting insecurity manifested itself in shyness and a speech impediment. He clung to Justin, “the only person who could hear what I was talking about … that was part of the bonding of us at a young age”. Eventually, the brothers were fostered by a white couple in Shropham, Norfolk, where their real mother would visit once a month. They were excited by the opportunity to be part of a family, but the passage was not seamless – John struggled to sleep, so a doctor told his foster mother to hug him tight. “She used to grab me and give me a great big cuddle every morning, every evening, and that gave me a lot of security,” he recalls. “It was a lovely feeling, your whole face disappearing into Mummy’s breasts.” The boys’ colour made them outsiders in Norfolk. “If you saw a black person,” says John, “that was Michael Jackson’s picture somewhere, and maybe, maybe, if you were lucky, Muhammad Ali … they were the only black people I saw in my life till I got to 18, 19.” Facebook Twitter Pinterest Justin Fashanu playing for Nottingham Forest, 1982. Photograph: Colorsport/REX/Shutterstock Accordingly, they grew up knowing “nothing about race”; had the 16-year-old John been asked about colour, “I’d have told you I was white because the environment was white.” But his world changed when, at the age of 18 and without Justin, he visited Nigeria – his father’s homeland, and now his home. “The plane landed, and for the first time the doors opened and I just saw black people everywhere,” he says. “I was shocked! I thought: ‘Wow, wonderful!’ My own people! My God! Hallelujah! People who look like me! I can walk around the whole of Nigeria free as a black man! That was the beginning of my life as far as I was concerned.” Meanwhile Justin, though proud, was ambivalent regarding race; principally, he wanted to be left alone. Scarred by the childhood trauma from which he had protected John – he endured violent nightmares into adulthood – he was simultaneously vulnerable and charismatic, desperate for acceptance and searching for identity. Growing up where and when he did, this was not easy. “It was a racist society,” John recalls. “Times have, thank goodness, changed, but they’ve changed on our backs.” After suffering numerous beatings, the brothers took up boxing and martial arts. The single-minded John became an expert, while the impressionable Justin was dissuaded by those who deemed them dangerous – or, as John sees it: “He was always getting something and dropping it.” But his footballing excellence was unignorable. “That was the easiest way for us to make money, which we made an awful lot of,” says John. “There were no black bankers, lawyers, or anything at all. We knew the only way to make money if you were black was either to sing, dance or play football – that’s it.” Justin soon carved a niche at Norwich, before signing for Brian Clough’s Nottingham Forest in 1981. During that time, he developed a taste for big spending and fast living, also making regular appearances in Nottingham’s gay bars. Before long, Clough excommunicated him, even calling the police to the training ground on one occasion. Beset by injury, Justin’s career tailed off, while his personal life grew increasingly chaotic and his behaviour increasingly erratic. Facebook Twitter Pinterest John and Justin with their foster father. Photograph: film company handout John left Norwich in 1983 to escape his more talented brother’s shadow; he was also angry that Justin hadn’t used his influence to help him at the club or elsewhere. The man he saw as “my mother and father”, “my shining light” and “my life” became “my arch enemy”, and their relationship never recovered. In 1986, John joined Wimbledon, and was a key figure as the Crazy Gang established themselves in the top division before winning the FA Cup in 1988. In 1989, he was picked for England, and in 1990 at the Professional Footballers’ Association dinner, he was accosted in the toilet. “One of the most famous players, playing for Nottingham Forest, just said to me: ‘Hey, your brother’s gay.’ I’d heard little things, but when he said that, the first thing I was gonna do, I was gonna beat the hell out of him. I was with Vinnie Jones, and it was Vinnie who held me back … I was gonna give him a good slap because I thought he was insulting my brother.” John, “a red-blooded African man”, did not believe it – until Justin confided in him. Both their mothers were ill, and assuming that Justin was simply after money and attention, John responded angrily. “Right now, we don’t need that,” he said. “I will give you £100,000 if you just keep your mouth shut.” John was also concerned for himself: “I was worried that people would think it was me. John Fashanu, Justin Fashanu, J and J … I was the hard man, we were hard men, Vinnie Jones, John Fashanu, Dennis Wise, we were the hard team with a macho, strong image, we had a massive following of people who loved the way we played, and suddenly my brother’s coming out and saying this?” Facebook Twitter Pinterest John in action for Wimbledon, 1991. Photograph: Bob Thomas/Getty Images So to “empower” his brother, John wrote a cheque and had his agent take Justin to a hotel, only to discover that “my agent was a gay sympathiser”. In the event, Justin kept John’s money and sold the story to the Sun anyway. Justin also revealed that he had slept with a married Conservative MP and that they had kissed in the House of Commons. He later retracted the claims – despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary – but John now believes that the liaison never happened. Nor does he accept the evidence offered by a teammate at Leyton Orient that Justin would arrive at training with “rent boys”, and says that an allegation of raping a minor in the US is untrue; on the other hand, after questioning and blood testing, a warrant was issued for Justin’s arrest on charges of first- and second-degree assault and second-degree sexual assault. But he had already left for England. The last time the brothers spoke, Justin feared for his liberty, but John, despite now accepting homosexuality as “a normal thing”, was “too annoyed to understand what he was really saying” and did not believe that Justin deserved his unconditional loyalty. “There comes a time when it’s enough help,” he says. “Enough is enough. He was my older brother, not my younger brother. Why am I continually giving him money?” Three days later, John was baptising his son Amir when the police arrived, media in tow, to tell him that his brother had killed himself and asking him to identify the body. “I feel a bit cross with myself that I didn’t see these challenges Justin was having,” he says. “A little bit more understanding and a little bit more softness could’ve changed a lot of things … the misunderstanding Justin had with Mother is the same misunderstanding I had with Justin.” But even if he might have acted differently, he has no regrets: “You can’t go back and say: ‘Oh my God, how would it have been different?’ Because the whole world would have been different.” Nor does he think that things might have turned out differently had he not handled Justin’s coming out the way he did. “I think that he would have possibly committed suicide even earlier … and I now thank God I didn’t give him all the money I’d promised to give him.” Although he remembers Justin in his prayers every Sunday, he has moved on. “Put it in perspective,” he insists. “Why would I be crying after 15 years. My mother has died, my other mother has died, my father has died, people die.” He remains proud of his brother. “Whether you like him or you don’t like him, or you love him or you hate him, Justin Fashanu is a legend.” Forbidden Games, which previews on 2 May at Toronto’s Hot Docs festival, is a Fulwell73 film in association with Darke Films and Black Sun Media, produced and directed by Adam Darke and Jon CareyHi BLF guys, Great News! According to your request, we create this deal thread and much more ThorFire deals will follow on soon. Also we have a ThorFire Deals Groups on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/thorfireus/ Which is not limited to flashlight deals. 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EXPIRED Buy anything in the Hanabee store with a total order value of at least $30* and receive 6 exclusive items! (excludes shipping) How to Participate: Make a qualifying total purchase of at least $30 (excludes shipping) from the Hanabee online store. At the end of each week. At 5:00 PM on Friday. You will receive a code you can use to redeem your items listed below. Once you have your code, visit the redemption website to receive your in-game item codes and instructions. Campaign Duration: Thursday, August 25 2016 to September 30th 2016 Items Available Inferno Mask Crag Mask Butler Attire Housemaid Attire Original Fat Chocobo Mount 99x Magicked Prism (Wings) Redeeming Your In-Game Item Codes: Log into the FINAL FANTASY XIV: Mog Stationwith your Square Enix ID. You must have a European (inc. ANZ) FINAL FANTASY XIV service account to redeem these item codes. (http://sqex.to/Msp) Select the "Your Account" menu from the top of the screen. If you have multiple service accounts (represented as tabs), please select the service account you wish to redeem your code on. Select "Enter Item Code," then follow the on-screen instructions to redeem your codes. Please Note: Bonus item codes can only be redeemed once per customer. Bonus item codes are only compatible with European (inc. ANZ) service accounts and will not work on accounts from a different region. The in-game items will be granted to all characters on your service account. Bonus item codes can only be redeemed once per service account. Once registered, the item code cannot be removed from your service account. Resale of these item codes is strictly prohibited. Once you've received your code your order with Hanabee Entertainment is only available for an exchange. The item codes are valid until December 31, 2016. Available In-Game Items: 1 x Inferno Mask A mask fashioned to resemble Ifrit, the Lord of the Inferno. 1 x Crag Mask A mask fashioned to resemble Titan, the Lord of Crags. 1 x Butler Attire A butler-inspired outfit designed to be worn by male characters. 1 x Housemaid Attire A maid-inspired outfit designed to be worn by female characters. 99x Magicked Prism (Wings) This peculiar contraption creates illusions by weaving together myriad shades of light. Produces a pair of seraphic wings. 1 x Original Fat Chocobo Mount Ride atop the original fat chocobo mount and become the envy of all your friends! Related Links The Lodestone®: http://eu.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/ Official Website: www.finalfantasyxiv.com Official Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FinalFantasyXIV Official YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/FINALFANTASYXIV Official Twitter: @FF_XIV_ENYou know what Future? You can keep your flying cars and ray guns and sex bots (actually, scratch those last two) because the future that 1997 promised me is finally, actually happening. That's right—sharks with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads. Wicked Lasers is running a promotion whereby if a certain Facebook page is liked 2,000 times, the company will send a team of professional divers to "attach a fully-functional Spyder 3 laser onto a live shark in the wild." Things are guaranteed to end in fits of awesome. Advertisement Of course, the page has already garnered the requisite Likes because, I mean, c'mon, laser sharks, so this will definitely be a thing. Exactly when and where this is happening is still in the air, though. The promo runs through May 27th and then the seas should get a little more deadly. Oh, and someone wins a Spyder 3 as well. [Facebook] It will be way better than this.Researchers from the U.S. Naval Surface Warfare Center have developed malicious software that can remotely seize control of the camera on an infected smartphone and employ it to spy on the phone’s user. The malware, dubbed “PlaceRaider,” “allows remote hackers to reconstruct rich, three-dimensional models of the smartphone owner’s personal indoor spaces through completely opportunistic use of the camera,” the researchers said in a study published last week. The program uses images from the camera and positional information from the smartphone’s gyroscopic and other sensors to map spaces the phone’s user spends a lot of time in, such as a home or office. “Remote burglars” could use these three-dimensional models to “study the environment carefully and steal virtual objects [visible to the camera] … such as as financial documents [or] information on computer monitors,” the researchers reported. The program they developed for research purposes easily could be disguised by a malicious user as an app — the programs that run on smartphones — and unwittingly downloaded by victims, according to the study, which first was reported by the newsblog ThreatPost. Because users often do not realize that a smartphone is basically a small computer, and because there are few security products available, smartphones are considered highly vulnerable to hackers. Commercial software, for instance, can turn smartphones into microphones and tracking devices. But PlaceRaider is the first known example of malware developed to exploit the high-definition cameras that are now ubiquitous on smartphones. The study was a collaboration between the Navy center team and researchers from the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University. Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.On September 13th, Himanshu K. Suri aka Heems’s Greedhead Music label will release Relax, the debut full-length from Brooklyn-based rapscallions Das Racist. This builds on two celebrated mixtapes — Shut Up, Dude and Sit Down, Man — with an album cover that again features a couch, but this time it’s ON FIRE. It also builds on those collections with some new collaborative efforts (production from Yeasayer’s Anand Wilder, Blood Diamonds, Vampire Weekend’s Rostam Batmanglij, Chairlift’s Patrick Wimberly, and vocals from Punjabi-American bhangra artist Bikram Singh and Danny Brown) and DR family regulars/heavy MC talent Despot and El-P. Mark the calendars, bump “Womyn” in the interym, check the tracklist: 01. Relax (Produced by Das Racist and Patrick Wimberly) 02. Michael Jackson (Produced by Das Racist and Patrick Wimberly) 03. Brand New Dance (Produced by Patrick Wimberly) 04. Middle of The Cake (Produced by Anand Wilder) 05. Girl (Produced by Blood Diamonds) 06. Shut Up, Man feat. El-P (Produced by El-P) 07. Happy Rappy (Produced by Diplo) 08. Booty In The Air (Produced by Patrick Wimberly) 09. Power feat. Danny Brown and Despot (Produced by Dash Speaks) 10. Punjabi Song feat. Bikram Singh (Produced by J-La) 11. Selena (Produced by Patrick Wimberly) 12. Rainbow In The Dark (Produced by J-La) 13. The Trick (Produced by ROSTAM) 14. Celebration (Produced by Francis Farewell Starlite)Former UFC welterweight champion Georges St-Pierre hasn't always been keen on talk of'superfights,' but his tone has certainly softened over the past year. St-Pierre even told Ariel Helwani back in July 2013 that he was interested in the prospect, but that he was keeping his plans tightlipped. Now, with all that's transpired with him personally and professionally since last summer, St-Pierre again is stating a renewed interest in one day fighting former middleweight champion Anderson Silva. Speaking with ESPN Brazil and translated by Bloody Elbow's Fernando Arbex, St-Pierre says he'd be willing to take the fight given a number of conditions. "There were conversations before but they were talking about me going up at 185," says St-Pierre. "I weigh 190 pounds, the guy weighs 230 pounds when he is off season. I'm 190 pounds off season. Right now I'm 195 at maximum. My friends saw him and he is now 230, 235. I know people who know him. He is very big. It's not a fair fight for me. Before, Anderson Silva was in my size when he used to fight in Japan but he is very big now. "They were talking also that he was going to come in my division when I was the champion and I would have no choice. But me going up and after I fight go back down...I can't play with my weight. I can't come back and fight for the title or in a superfight. It has to respect my conditions, all I ask is a fair fight. Right now I need to take some time off. But if they have an offer with something good, maybe." Back in May 2013, St-Pierre outright dismissed any discussion of a superfight with Silva after correctly predicting his UFC 162 loss to current champion Chris Weidman. Leading up to the pair's rematch at UFC 168 in December, Silva, himself, called the very concept of superfights 'perfect bulls*t,' more or less trumping them up to cash-grabs. Soon after, UFC president Dana White called the window for any superfight to be 'dead' and 'destroyed,' saying that the era had passed. Talk of the fight ever realistically happening seemed completely dead in the water until Ed Soares, Silva's longtime manager, reintroduced the idea as a comeback fight for Silva earlier this year. "If we were able to pull something like that off, it would be a win-win for everybody - the fans, the UFC," Soares told USA Today back in January. "I think that would be awesome." With Silva now shooting for a return in mid 2015, could this be a viable option for he and St-Pierre? 5 MUST-READ STORIES Done for the year. Anderson Silva says he will not make a return to fighting in 2014 and that his 'phase as the champion is over.' Ready for five. Dan Henderson won't alter his style and play it safe just to avoid dropping a fourth-straight loss. Bang speaks. Duane Ludwig opens up about his split from Team Alpha Male. 'I've been working for other people since I was 15 years old, and now it's time for me to do something on my own.' Bellator > UFC. Emanuel Newton says the UFC's practices aren't friendly towards fighters. 'I just see Bellator definitely surpassing UFC. It's already happening.' TRT Vitor. Joe Rogan is disappointed we won't get to see Chris Weidman fight the Vitor Belfort using TRT. 'There's going to be a part of me that is sad, that TRT Vitor has to come down to an end.' MEDIA STEW TUF Nations Full Fight: Kajan Johnson vs. Chad Laprise. Pre-fight interview with Dan Henderson. Erik Perez talks growing up and training in cartel country. Din Thomas teaches the Von Flue choke. Patricky can't be happy with this voice over work. We're heavy on Hendo today but why not? (UFC Brazil has corned the market on Shogun with videos that can't be viewed in the U.S.) Long watches. Patrick Cote discusses this week's controversial episode of TUF Nations. Darce Side Radio: Pat Curran and Glory MW Wayne Barrett. TWEETS Congrats. Great day, I did new deals with @EllenbergerMMA and @JohnyHendricks today. Congrats boys pic.twitter.com/AyLyhj1x8Q — Dana White (@danawhite) March 21, 2014 Officially blue belt big thanks to coach Greg Nelson for taking my bjj to the level it is now!... http://t.co/43pbivrySJ — Rose Namajunas (@rosenamajunas) March 21, 2014 Throwback Thursday was strong. #tbt me and @JohnyHendricks johnyhendricksufc scrapping in the Big 12 Finals. Heal up Champ! http://t.co/cguxcvlTIT — Tyron T-Wood Woodley (@TWooodley) March 21, 2014 Back in Temecula for @danhendo last training camp vs Shogun Rua in 2011. Looking forward to another... http://t.co/FESS8nxbVp — Luke Rockhold (@LukeRockhold) March 20, 2014 Get well soon. Well, I'm still alive 😄 and surgery went great! Thanks to everyone for their well wishes Can't wait to get back in the gym 💪😎👊 — Davey Grant (@DaveyGrantMMA) March 20, 2014 Nice. @ChadLaprise I didnt even feel it! Literally tho I didnt feel anything I just woke up on the ground like "how did I get here?" — kajan johnson (@IamRagin) March 20, 2014 @ChadLaprise As are you my friend. I wish you nothing but the best in both your career and your life. I think that was worth 25k dont u? — kajan johnson (@IamRagin) March 20, 2014 @IamRagin I think so my friend! All the best brother! — Chad Laprise (@ChadLaprise) March 20, 2014 I guess they can do that. Nick Diaz and Mike Pyle are sparring in a room somewhere. Ready for Brazil. Curtindo Natal!!! Amo amo amo essa terra!!!! LOVE NATAL! LOVE RIO GRANDE DO NORTE ✌️❤️❤️❤️ pic.twitter.com/G97pap2QHM — Jhenny Andrade UFC (@jhennyandrade10) March 20, 2014 Less eye pokes? A little scary. Got a package delivered to my house today. Looks like the UPS employee is also part of... http://t.co/Z4EyUeKamd — Joe Ellenberger (@JoeEllenberger) March 20, 2014 Kinda cool. Find anyone's first tweet. HT to Ariel. Heading back to Vegas after UFC 95 last night in London. Time to get ready for WEC in Corpus Christi next weekend. — Dana White (@danawhite) February 22, 2009 Anderson, you are going to be on your back more than a pornstar with a mortgage. — chael sonnen (@sonnench) May 27, 2010 I'm finally jumping on the twitter bandwagon - damn peer pressure! — Ronda Rousey (@RondaRousey) June 3, 2011 Would have loved to see that. OHSHIT SITTING IN MY HOTEL ROOM THOUGHT I HEARD A CAT KEPT HEARING IT CHECKED THE HALL CHICK SCREAMING HELP FROM A ROOM BROKE THE DOOR IN — Pat Barry (@HypeOrDie) March 21, 2014 BATHROOM DOOR MALFUNCTION. I BROKE THAT ONE IN TO!! I GOT TO BREAK DOWN 2 DOORS!!!!! I HAVE VIDEO OF THE FIRST DOOR BUT MGT. SAID PLEASE NO — Pat Barry (@HypeOrDie) March 21, 2014 FIGHT ANNOUNCEMENTS Announced yesterday (Mar. 20 2014) Gegard Mousasi vs. Mark Munoz at UFC Fight Night Berlin FANPOST OF THE DAY Today's Fanpost of the Day comes via dpk875. Top Prospects to Watch this Weekend Here are some of the better prospects in action this weekend. I've also updated my top 10 HW prospects after three fighters from the list I put out in December have signed with either UFC or WSOF. You can find the updates here. Tech-Krep FC - 21 Mar - Krasnodar, Russia HW Tyler East (11-3) vs. Sergei Kharitonov (20-5) Age: 24 Height: 6'6 From a sheer physical talent standpoint, East is one of the best HW prospects in the world. He has a wrestling background, outstanding athletic ability and looked to be improving his standup game as he stayed busy back in 2012. What holds him back is a history of Cocaine use, Domestic Violence, and a recent year long stint in prison. Since getting out of prison his only fight ended in no contest, so I really have no clue what to expect out of him here. With all his issues East might not be welcome in any of the major US organizations until he can put up some wins and time in front of his issues. Kharitonov at 33 years old has won two in a row since losing to Josh Barnett in the Strikeforce HW Grand Prix, and could punch his own ticket back to the bigger shows with a win here.... Check out the rest of the post here. Found something you'd like to see in the Morning Report? Just hit me up on Twitter @SaintMMA and we'll include it in tomorrow's column.Marvel’s huge upcoming Spider-Man comic book event the Spider-Verse is already igniting the consciousnesses of Spider-Man comic book fans everywhere with the Edge of Spider-Verse and Superior Spider-Man preludes. This is hardly surprising considering that the central premise of the storyline is that we get more Spider-Man for our money as we get to see almost every version and iteration of Spider-Man there’s ever been. Of course it’ll get people flocking in high numbers to pick up the story. However the Spider-Verse is genius for so many more reasons than the pure fan-service of seeing four or five different Spider-Men (and Women) in the same place. For starters the storyline is introducing a swathe of new Spider-Men characters that we’ve never seen before like Gwen Stacy’s Spider-Woman, Dr. Aaron Aikman from a futuristic sci-fi Spider-Man world and Peni Parker a 14 year old girl who pilots a Spider-Man powered mech-suit. If just one of these characters takes off in a big way (And it already looks like Gwen Stacy’s Spider-Woman has) then Marvel and the Spider-Man team (Dan Slott etc) have themselves another title to release, presenting Spider-Man fans with another Spider-Man hero to follow other than the Amazing, Ultimate, Sometimes Superior and 2099 Spider-Men. If you can make another Spider-Man take off like all of those just listed did, you’ve created another iconic character and therefore you’ve created another facet of income. But the genius doesn’t end there. By showing us every Spider-Man we’ve ever seen in one place Marvel is spotlighting and highlighting the entirety of Spider-Man’s history, everything the WebHead has ever done, in any shape or form, is being brought up, referenced or shown through the Spider-Verse. Superior Spider-Man #32 showed us several iterations of Spider-Man in several different stories, the House of M, the Fantastic Five, etc etc. Why is this genius? Well, Marvel are surely going to be raking in sales for all of the comic book storylines that Spider-Man has ever been in, as people read the Spider-Verse and discover the House of M Spider-Man and want to know more about his story they’ll seek out and buy the House of M Spider-Man comics. Spider-Man Noir returned in Edge of Spider-Verse #1 and I’ll eat my hat if this didn’t result in a sudden boost of sales for the previous Spider-Man Noir titles directly afterwards. If you needed some evidence that what I’m talking about is actually taking place then look no further than my recent article asking people through a poll if Marvel should release solo titles for Spider-Man Noir, and Spider-Gwen who were the stars of the first two Edge of Spider-Verse issues. The resounding answer was ‘Yes’ with 98% of people coming out resoundingly in favour. Essentially Marvel have come up with a storyline that simultaneously encourages fans to buy older comic book storylines, whilst introduces them to potential new titles to fall in love with, all whilst convincing people that they are being given the greatest thing ever by seeing a whole bunch of Spider-Men in one place. It’s the perfect sales strategy and to be honest I really don’t care, I’m enjoying paying for, and reading, every second of it so far! Want more Spider-Man news? Subscribe to the Whatever A Spider Can newsletter to get the latest news and rumors about upcoming movies, TV shows and comics before anyone else. Or you can follow us on Twitter @WhatASpiderCan or like us on Facebook.In August, a rescue crew in Wichita, Kan., answered a 911 emergency call. A man named Joseph Martier had collapsed inside a dingy storage building at an isolated industrial park just outside town. Mr. Martier was unconscious from a drug overdose, but he recovered later at a Wichita hospital. It appeared to be just another drug-abuse episode -- except for the drug. It was fentanyl, a lethal "designer drug" that can be hundreds of times more potent than heroin. The near-death of Mr. Martier, 42, a Pittsburgh businessman now being held on drug charges, helped solve a lethal mystery that had vexed federal drug agents for a year. Since 1991, scores of people on the East Coast had dropped dead after shooting up fentanyl, a drug so strong that a fleck the size of a sugar crystal can kill a healthy adult. Agents had no idea where the drug was coming from. The nondescript building where Mr. Martier collapsed proved to be part of the country's only operational fentanyl lab, the government now charges. The Drug Enforcement Administration says it is the only active fentanyl lab DEA agents have ever busted. On Feb. 3, agents who raided the building found chemicals and equipment used to make fentanyl, a heroin-like drug the DEA calls "the serial killer of the drug world." The same day, agents arrested two middle-aged Wichita suburbanites, each with an intense interest in science and chemistry. One man -- George Marquardt, 47 -- was a chemical "genius" who had won a state science fair award as a teen-ager but was busted in 1978 for trying to mix LSD with methamphetamines. The other -- Phillip "Sam" Houston, 45 -- was described by friends as an eccentric oil geologist who had built an observatory in his home and unearthed meteorites for a university museum. Mr. Marquardt was charged with manufacturing and distributing fentanyl, and Mr. Houston with distributing the drug, sometimes called "China white," on the street. Between them, the DEA now charges, these two amateur chemists were directly responsible for killing most -- if not all -- of the 126 East Coast addicts who died from shooting up fentanyl in 1991 and 1992. "We can say without a doubt that this lab caused the deaths of many, many people in Philadelphia and in other cities on the East Coast," says Michael Pavlick, a DEA special agent in Philadelphia, where 21 addicts died of fentanyl overdoses between August and October. Mr. Pavlick says the government may seek life sentences for the defendants under a federal law that covers deaths caused by illegal drugs. Prosecutors will try to match the fentanyl seized in Wichita with samples taken from some autopsies of fentanyl overdose victims, Mr. Pavlick says. In New York, according to court documents filed there, a DEA chemist has compared fentanyl from Wichita -- provided in December to an undercover agent -- with leftover fentanyl found with overdose victims in New York. His conclusion: The two samples are "consistent." Some of the Philadelphia junkies died so swiftly that syringes were still embedded in their arms. Almost every day in early September, someone in the city was falling over dead, killed by a massive overdose of fentanyl. The victims probably thought they were buying heroin, say drug agents in Philadelphia. The street dealers who sold the drug also probably thought it was heroin, they say. Like heroin, fentanyl is a white crystalline powder that produces an intense euphoria. But unlike heroin, a grain of fentanyl the size of a pinhead can cause instantaneous respiratory arrest. One form of fentanyl is 80 times more potent than heroin, DEA chemists say. Another form, allegedly produced in the Wichita lab, is 400 times more potent. Both fentanyl and heroin are diluted and sold in $20 street bags weighing roughly 30 milligrams each. But a safe dose of fentanyl is just one-sixteenth to one-eightieth of a single milligram. To properly dilute a kilogram of pure fentanyl would require 200 kilos of cutting agents, says Anthony Senneca, a DEA special agent in Philadelphia. "It's very difficult to get the mix just right," Mr. Senneca says. "If you get a hot batch that's not diluted properly, a lot of people are going to die." Up and down the East Coast last summer, heroin junkies were shopping for heroin but buying fentanyl instead -- and dying for their error. The DEA was stumbling across strong batches of fentanyl everywhere. In Baltimore, 28 people overdosed on the drug in 1992. Twenty-three died that year in New York, where fentanyl was sold as "Tango and Cash." The deaths spread north to Connecticut and Boston, south to New Jersey, Maryland and Virginia, and on to South Carolina. Meanwhile, someone was getting rich from making the fentanyl. Agents say a kilogram of fentanyl sells for $240,000 to $640,000, depending on purity. A kilo of heroin sells for $100,000 to $200,000; cocaine, for $20,000 to $25,000. Except for a $10,000 rotary evaporator to dilute the drug, making fentanyl does not require enormously expensive equipment or chemicals. As the deaths continued, the DEA had been checking purchases of the dozen or so legal precursor chemicals needed to make fentanyl. The undertaking was a massive one. The chemicals are common. They are ordered for legitimate use hundreds of times a day from chemical supply firms across the country. Finally, there was a breakthrough. Agents came across a suspicious purchase by a Boston man named Christopher Moscatiello. From there, they traced more chemical buys in several states from the East Coast to the Midwest. Late last year, an undercover DEA agent managed to buy fentanyl in Boston from Mr. Moscatiello, according to a DEA affidavit filed in Pittsburgh. During the yearlong investigation, agents collected 37 pounds of fentanyl in the city. But even though agents knew Mr. Moscatiello and others were buying chemicals, they did not know where the fentanyl was being cooked. They were able to narrow the list of possible cities to only about 20 across the country, one agent says. Then Mr. Moscatiello came through. He mentioned to the undercover agent in Boston that his supplier had nearly died from a fentanyl overdose in Wichita. Wichita? It was an odd site for a fentanyl overdose. The city had never reported a fentanyl death. There were other curious aspects of Joe Martier's near-death experience. He had not injected fentanyl. He had inhaled its fumes. And he was not from Wichita. He was visiting from Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh made sense. The city did not have a drug problem nearly as bad as New York's or Philadelphia's, but it eclipsed those cities in fentanyl deaths, reporting 21 such overdoses last August alone.Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner (Photo: Screen capture) As more excerpts of Corey Lewandowski’s new book continue to leak, a picture is painted of Steve Bannon’s feud with Paul Manafort and the campaign chair begging for his job. As Politico revealed Monday, Aug. 14 was Steve Bannon’s first day at work with the Trump campaign. He’d met President Donald Trump and Manafort that weekend at the Bedminster golf course. Manafort reportedly appeared in boat shoes, which Bannon thought made him look like Thurston Howell III from “Gilligan’s Island.” Manafort requested the company of Bannon, handing him a transcript from a New York Times story. After just three paragraphs, Lewandowski claimed Bannon looked up from the story, asking, “$12.7 million payment from Ukraine? How much of this is true?” Manafort assured that it was all lies and his lawyers were fighting it. “When are they going to run it?” Bannon asked. Manafort said The Times planned to publish the following day. “Does Trump know about this?” Bannon asked. “What’s to know? It’s all lies,” Manafort replied. Bannon argued someone should probably give him a heads up that his new campaign manager is about to be in the paper. “It was a long time ago,” Manafort claimed. “I had expenses.” Bannon actually understood that the explosive story in his hand would “at the very least … leave a mark.” When the story ran the following day, Lewandowski claimed, Trump exclaimed “I’ve got a crook running my campaign.” Trump wanted Bannon to fire Manafort that day, but Bannon cautioned that it would make a flood of bad press. He argued Trump should simply remove his authority and give him a new title. Kellyanne Conway was named as the campaign manager and Bannon was the new CEO. Manafort remained “chairman.” Just days later, Trump was about to take the stage at a North Carolina rally when a friend showed him an AP story that described Manafort as running “a covert Washington lobbying operation on behalf of Ukraine’s ruling political party, attempting to sway American public opinion in favor of the country’s pro-Russian government.” The AP story also revealed that Manafort and his deputy, Rick Gates, had “never disclosed their work as foreign agents as required under federal law.” According to court documents, the two men are now under indictment by a federal grand jury on 12 counts: conspiracy against the U.S., conspiracy to launder money, unregistered agent of a foreign principal, false and misleading [Foreign Agents Registration Act] statements, false statements, and seven counts of failure to file reports of foreign bank and financial accounts. Trump demanded son-in-law Jared Kushner fire Manafort. That following morning Manafort balked at the request to resign, concerned about the perception it was about the Ukraine stories. “It will make me look guilty,” he said. Kushner warned nothing could be done and a press release was going out any minute. Trump defended Manafort just months ago, saying that Manafort’s lawyer proved there was no collusion on the campaign. He then attacked former foreign policy advisor George Papadopoulos, who seems to have turned against Trump. The Fake News is working overtime. As Paul Manaforts lawyer said, there was "no collusion" and events mentioned took place long before he… — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 31, 2017North and South Koreas' joint industrial complex in the North's border city of Gaesong / Yonhap President Moon Jae-in's campaign pledge to develop more land for the now-shuttered industrial park in the North Korean border town of Gaesong will require around 9 trillion won ($7.98 billion), an analysis showed Saturday. The analysis, which is based on data provided to Rep. Shim Jae-chul of the main opposition Liberty Korea Party by the unification ministry and operator of the complex Hyundai Asan Corp., puts the estimated cost for the development plan at 9.13 trillion won. On the campaign trail, Moon promised to develop 30 million square meters of more land for the Gaesong industrial complex. The land developed for the complex had been around 92,500 square meters. Shim claimed that about 1.79 trillion won has been invested in developing the complex, which is some 700 billion won more than what the unification ministry previously estimated. The factory zone, launched in 2004, had accommodated 124 South Korean firms which employed more than 54,000 North Korean workers to produce labor-intensive goods such as clothes and utensils. Seoul shut down the joint production zone in February 2016 in response to Pyongyang's nuclear and missile tests. (Yonhap)As many readers know, the Rohingya crisis in Myanmar, now being called a genocide by growing numbers of United Nations officials, has reached a tipping point. Though persecution against this stateless Muslim minority has been perpetrated since the country received independence from Britain in 1948, many are only waking up to the news now. It is estimated that nearly one million Rohingya have fled Myanmar since the late 1970s, and the military-backed government’s campaign of destruction — coupled with a refusal to grant Rohingya the rights and protections of citizenship — has made a return to Myanmar both unappealing and, in many cases, impossible for Rohingya refugees. Further troubling is the name in which the genocide is being carried out: Buddhist nationalism. With all of this suffering abounding, I recently had the honor of serving on a panel addressing the crisis, hosted by the Chicago Theological Seminary. At this event I wore three hats: (1) committed BPF Board member; (2) Insight mindfulness and Vipassana practitioner in a lineage directly indebted to Burmese Buddhism; and (3) deeply concerned and slightly helpless-feeling human. Fortunately, I was surrounded by a group of thoughtful, passionate experts and activists who shared their inspiring stories, wisdom, and calls to action. Key Presenters Jeanne Hallacy, director of Sittwe, a short, poignant documentary viewing the crisis through the eyes of one Buddhist teenager and one Muslim teenager, both living in Mynamar’s Rakhine state. Dr. Mohammed Zaher Sahloul, Syrian-American doctor and founder of MedGlobal, an NGO providing medical relief in disaster areas. Aye Min Thant, a Burmese-American immigrant and co-founder of Saddha: Buddhists for Peace. Jess Benjamin (yours truly), Board member representing the Buddhist Peace Fellowship. Key Takeaways The panelists did an excellent job of framing the current Rohingya crisis in terms of its complex history, reminding us that the intergenerational trauma of colonialism, along with a harsh 50+ year military dictatorship that the country is still emerging from, has enabled cycles of violence that continue to play out in everyday interactions. Buddhists who once peacefully protested military rule during the Saffron Revolution are now siding with the very same military in oppressing and othering the Rohingya minority. All My Ancient Twisted Karma: Buddhism and Intergenerational Trauma May those who suffer be without suffering, may those who fear be without fear, may those who grieve be without grief — may all living creatures be so! —Mahāparittaṁ, The Great Safeguard If nationalist violence is antithetical to the core of Buddhist teachings, which encourage us to act from a place of fierce compassion and non-harm, how can we reconcile what is happening? True collective liberation doesn’t come at the expense of certain groups, and it doesn’t mean just a little more liberation for Buddhists. While it is easy to point the finger in a binary framework of blame, deeper investigation reveals a country still reeling from centuries of oppressive colonial and military rule, and a military that is using Buddhist ethnic nationalism to foment conflict and stir up unfounded fear of the Rohingya in a thinly-veiled attempt to consolidate their own power. Though it may not be agreeable, one can see how these conditions are the ripe breeding grounds for turmoil and tension, enabling oppressed peoples to either look the other way or continue to perpetuate cycles of violence out of fear and desperation. Dr. Joy DeGruy and Dr. Gabor Maté are two notable scholar-practitioners who have explored intergenerational trauma grounded in historical realities of oppression: slavery, colonization, and the criminalization of substance addiction. We can also find wisdom from Lama Rod Owens in Radical Dharma: Thus, trauma becomes a cyclical experience of continuous unfolding, of continuous movement through places without consent as it perpetuates terror, despair, hopelessness, and disconnection. It is a voyage that never docks at any port, but is suspended, unexamined. Such a long-standing and complex crisis does not have an easy fix. Instead, it requires the engagement of many different people and organizations close to the issue. BPF has been fortunate to partner with, learn from, and support the work of some incredible Buddhist-based organizations, including Saddha: Buddhists for Peace; the Clear View Project, founded by BPF’s former ED Hozan Alan Senauke; and the International Network of Engaged Buddhists. 5 Ways You Can Take Action Right Now Since the most pressing audience question from the event was “What can we do??,” I’ll share here the main action items I took away from the evening, and I invite others to contribute additional thoughts, resources, and actions in the comments as well. WHAT YOU CAN DO 1. Listen to and learn from those closest to and mostly deeply impacted by the crisis! 2. Watch and share this illuminating video produced by Saddha: Buddhists for Peace, addressing the conflict in Myanmar from a group of young Burmese-Americans to their elders. 3. Educate yourself and others by reading and sharing these outstanding articles (here and here) by Khin Mai Aung, a Burmese-American writer and former lawyer at the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund. 4. Visit the Burma Task Force website, an excellent resource for concrete, legislative-based actions, toolkits and alerts, and up-to-date information. 5. Donate to and/or volunteer with organizations doing important, on-the-ground work, like BRAC, International Organization for Migration (IOM), Doctors Without Borders, MedGlobal, UNHCR, Action Against Hunger, and Burma Task Force. A recording of the panel event is here. Jess Benjamin serves on the Board of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship. They collaborate on media projects related to spirituality, science, and social justice, and work with nonprofits to raise money and awareness for issues such as food security, education reform, and community health. They have been practicing in the Vipassana tradition since 2005 and are currently a mindfulness meditation teacher.Chemotherapy and other treatments did not adversely affect the health of their baby when compared with those born to mothers without cancer Pregnant women who discover they have cancer should not delay treatment until after the birth or induce the baby very early, as they can be successfully treated without harming the fetus, a new study by cancer experts published on Monday has found. Chemotherapy and other treatments for the mother-to-be did not adversely affect the health of their baby when compared with those born to mothers who did not suffer cancer, the researchers concluded. The European study emphasized, however, that the women in the study did not receive treatment during the
Suansing said that Metropolitan Manila Development Authority (MMDA) traffic officers, traffic enforcers or traffic aides and members of the Philippine National Police Highway Patrol Group (PNP-HPG) cannot take away a motorist’s license unless they are deputized LTO agents. Aside from Edsa and Roxas Boulevard, the MMDA has jurisdiction over traffic on all national roads in Metro Manila, yet MMDA traffic enforcers cannot confiscate a motorist’s license. This rule also applies to the traffic officers/enforcers/aides of provinces, cities and municipalities including Makati City, which is widely known as the Republic of Makati. The exception is when a motorist is involved in a road crash resulting in injury or death, then he/she is obliged to surrender his/her driver’s license to the arresting officer even though the latter is not a deputized LTO agent. Valid for 72 hours only In traffic incidents not resulting in injury or death, an LTO-deputized traffic enforcer will issue a Temporary Operator’s Permit (TOP) to the traffic violator. Suansing said that the TOP serves four functions: 1) It is a receipt that the driver’s license was confiscated; 2) It is a charge sheet; 3) It is a summons; and 4) It is a temporary driver’s license/conductor’s permit. There is no deadline for redeeming a confiscated driver’s license, but the TOP issued by LTO-deputized traffic enforcers is valid for 72 hours only. This means that a motorist whose license was confiscated can continue to drive only while his/her TOP is valid. A P3,000 fine is imposed on a motorist not carrying a valid license/conductor’s permit, certificate of registration, or official receipt while driving a motor vehicle, Suansing warned. Driving without a valid license This includes driving with an expired, revoked, suspended, inappropriate driver’s license restriction code, inappropriate driver’s license classification, fake driver’s license, tourist driving a motor vehicle with a valid foreign driver’s license beyond the 90-day maximum allowable period, and a student driver driving without being accompanied by a duly licensed driver. In addition, the unlicensed or improperly licensed driver shall be disqualified from being granted a driver’s license and driving a motor vehicle for one year from the payment of the fine. A motorist who is apprehended has the right to know what traffic law he/she violated. It’s advisable to always keep a copy of Republic Act 4136 (Land Transportation and Traffic Code) in your car to make sure the traffic regulation being cited exists. By the way, AAP gives free copies of R.A. 4136 to its members. Where to redeem your license There was a time when motorcycle-riding traffic enforcers in uniform strictly enforced the speed limit of 100 kilometers per hour for light vehicles on the South Luzon Expressway elevated section, aka the Skyway, from Buendia, Makati City to Calamba, Laguna. Suansing says that these traffic enforcers are duly deputized LTO agents and are authorized to confiscate the license of a driver who disregards the speed limit or violates any other traffic regulation. Traffic violators on the Buendia-Alabang Skyway, NAIAEx and CAVITEx are obliged to attend a half-day seminar at the LTO Central Office along East Avenue in Quezon City and pay a fine before redeeming their license. However, traffic violators apprehended on the SLEx from Alabang to Calamba and the STAR Tollway will have to redeem their license at the LTO Region 4 office in Lipa, Batangas while traffic violators on the SCTEx and TPLEx have to go all the way to the LTO Region 3 office in San Fernando, Pampanga to redeem their license, according to Suansing. All motorists who violate traffic regulations, whether these be on expressways, tollways or city streets, must attend the half-day seminar and pay a fine. The remedial education of errant drivers is part of the penalty. Swerving is reckless driving A few motorists are apprehended for alleged “swerving.” Suansing says that swerving is changing direction abruptly, and if done without reasonable caution and/or without using the appropriate turn signal, it is considered reckless driving. R.A. 4136, Chap. 4, Art. V, Sec. 48 states: “Reckless driving – No person shall operate a motor vehicle on any highway recklessly or without reasonable caution considering the width, traffic, grades, crossing, curvatures, visibility, and other conditions of the highway and the conditions of the atmosphere and weather, or so as to endanger the property or the safety or rights of any person or so as to cause excessive or unreasonable damage to the highway.” You don’t have to be a lawyer to understand all that legalese to mean that changing lanes suddenly without using your turn signal is swerving, or reckless driving. Yet it happens all the time: A driver on the rightmost lane beside the sidewalk suddenly decides to turn left at the intersection, and abruptly swerves across two lanes to occupy the left turn lane. In general, most traffic enforcers just look the other way. Obstruction of traffic Another frequent traffic violation is illegal parking. This is considered obstruction of traffic, Suansing says. Waiting at the curb with your engine running and hazard lights switched on is illegal parking and therefore obstruction of traffic. This is because the Land Transportation and Traffic Code states: “Obstruction of traffic: No person shall drive his vehicle in such a manner as to obstruct or impede the passage of any vehicle, nor, while discharging or taking on passengers or loading or unloading freight, obstruct the free passage of other vehicles on the highway.” (R.A. 4136, Chap. 4, Art. V, Sec. 54) It seems that motorists who park wherever they wish, and jeepney and taxi drivers who load or unload passengers in the middle of the road have never heard of a violation called obstruction of traffic. Or choose to ignore it since chances are, no one will apprehend them anyway. Occasionally, if the driver of an illegally parked vehicle is not present, a MMDA-accredited tow truck may come along and tow the vehicle to an impounding area. If the driver is around, he will be issued a traffic violation ticket after which he must move his vehicle.Relatively recently, the Congressman from my district — Republican, Lee Zeldin — posted this inflammatory statement on his Facebook page, targeting young people and Democratic presidential hopeful, Senator Bernie Sanders: Being in this target demographic, and one of Mr. Zeldin’s constituents, I felt I had to address this post. This argument that Bernie Sanders supporters just want “free stuff” like universal health care system and free tuition at public colleges and universities, which isn’t economically feasible is a narrative we hear from people on both sides of the aisle; Republicans like Lee Zeldin, and establishment Democrats like Hillary Clinton. In the debate before her victories on March 15th, the Democratic front-runner said “As my dad used to say, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is…Senator Sanders’ plan is expensive….” Earlier in the primary, in her Nevada victory speech, Clinton accused millennial Sanders supporters of only wanting handouts, stating “It can’t just be about what we are going to give to you.” Before we get into the economics, let’s first put Bernie Sanders’ ideas (free tuition at public colleges and universities, universal health care, $1 trillion in infrastructure spending to stimulate employment, breaking up the banks, and publicly financed elections) in perspective because simply stating that his supporters are seeking handouts is unfair. These are some of the biggest problems we face as a nation: 1. There are currently 20 million Americans who are still either uninsured or underinsured. Millions more are unemployed or underemployed. 2. There is a historic student debt crisis preventing college graduates from striking out on their own after finishing school. The prospect of crippling debt also deters many young people from pursuing higher education. 3. Wealth inequality is at its highest level since the Gilded Age with the majority of new income going to the top one percent; the middle class is shrinking. Wages have stagnated for decades (since Reagan’s presidency) while the cost of living has risen steadily. 4. The megabanks that crashed our economy by engaging in risky subprime derivatives trading are now bigger than ever, and subprime lending continues, largely unchecked. 5. Following a trend of Supreme Court decisions which culminated in Citizens United, the amount of money being spent on elections has skyrocketed. Lobbying has become a legal form of bribery which undermines our democratic values and process. The gridlock in DC is largely the result of influence peddling by lobbyists. Mr. Zeldin is, himself, funded by two of the most influential special interests: the Koch Brothers. For that matter, so is Hillary Clinton. 6. The U.S. is now an oligarchy. Our government responds only to the interests of the wealthy. And that brings us to the second part of the narrative: the idea that the kinds of solutions Bernie Sanders is proposing are too expensive. These claims are predicated on the idea that United States is in a debt crisis, or at the very least could face one if we’re not careful. It is a common talking point, but it does not hold up to scrutiny. It is important to understand a little history when engaging in the spending debate. Our country was founded on debt. Alexander Hamilton convinced President George Washington to pay back war bonds after the Revolution, thus establishing our national credit. What Hamilton understood was that credit is necessary to a growing economy, and debt is thus beneficial. Unlike Thomas Jefferson whose ideal was a yeoman agrarian economy, the first Secretary of the Treasury recognized the potential for the United States to become the commercial empire it is today — indeed, he laid the foundations. Nevertheless, concerns over government spending have persisted since the Founding. To do as Mr. Zeldin did, and hold up the aggregate U.S. debt as a dollar figure, is incredibly misleading. And he knows it: Unfortunately, the Congressman appears unaware that when economists determine the impact of national debt, they look to the ratio of interest payments to our national GDP. Based on that ratio, we are not now in a debt crisis. In fact, spending and borrowing are not problems unless we lose our ability to pay our expenses, and thus harm our credit. The money for those payments comes directly from taxes on businesses and individuals. But before we start taking up arms about how spending hurts us because it means more taxes, we have to understand something: As we make payments, we help our credit which helps our economy. Good credit generally means low interest rates which translate into high levels of investment. When there’s high levels of investment, investor confidence is high. High investor confidence is generally evidence that our debt is not problematic. Such is the case today and for the foreseeable future. In other words, we’re fine. That’s not to say the situation won’t change eventually, but statements like Mr. Zeldin’s that we are “kicking the can” is hyperbolic. As long as we can keep up with our payments, and we don’t default like we did during the government shutdown, we will be alright. We just have to ensure that taxes are high enough to sustain our growth, and that they are paid. And that is exactly what Sanders’ plan does. According to a recent study based on standard models, Bernienomics would result in savings overall, as well as unprecedented growth. Here are three ways the Vermont Senator’s plan brings money back into government: A) Bernie’s plan closes tax loopholes for individuals and corporations. According to a study from October reported on by Reuters, “[t]he 500 largest American companies hold more than $2.1 trillion in accumulated profits offshore to avoid U.S. taxes and would collectively owe an estimated $620 billion in U.S. taxes if they repatriated the funds.” This means that the “Treasury Department loses an estimated $90 billion in tax revenue annually” as Business Insider points out. As it stands today, Fortune 500 companies are able to get away with paying zero federal income tax. Such was the case with CBS Corporation and Mattel in 2014. How does this happen? Tax loopholes allow companies to shift their earnings (on paper) to their overseas tax havens. Essentially, corporations can report domestic losses, in spite of earning the majority of their revenue domestically, and have it appear as though the domestic earnings were made overseas through subsidiaries. Today, many major U.S. corporations report the majority of their earnings in this way. Tax havens are exploited, not only by companies, but by individuals, at an estimated cost of $1,259 a year to the average taxpayer. As I mentioned earlier, we have to pay our expenses, and the money has to come from somewhere. The excuse we often hear, from people like Zeldin, for maintaining these loopholes is that companies will leave if we don’t. These politicians point to the fact that many U.S. corporations report earning a majority of their money overseas through subsidiaries. Of course, the problem with this argument is that it is circular because the tax loopholes allow companies to report domestic income as foreign. In reality, eliminating tax havens would render the location of corporate headquarters irrelevant because companies will not cease operations here — they can’t afford to. We are the world’s largest consumer economy. Take Burger King, for example, which recently merged with Tim Hortons, and “relocated” to Canada. Burger King still has 12,000 restaurants in the United States. The only difference is now, the company is legally able to avoid taxes it would otherwise have to pay. B) Bernie’s plan ends the tax breaks for capital gains and dividends for the wealthy, and eliminates the exemption for gratuities and bequests. Capital gains, the money one makes on investments, are currently excluded from taxable income, and are instead taxed at special low rates. Unlike income, these earnings are not taxed annually, but rather whenever an investor decides to cash out. The idea behind this exclusion was to encourage investment, but the end result has only been to benefit one group of people: the top 1 percent. Rather than stimulate the economy, the wealth gap has exploded. Billionaires like Warren Buffet, are now able to enjoy lower tax rates than ordinary, hard-working Americans. Here’s how capital gains break down. Gains on investments held for less than a year (short term capital gains) are taxed as income, but as soon as an investor crosses that one year marker (long term capital gains), the highest rate (graduated) that he or she will have to pay is 20 percent. Taken as an expenditure, the capital gains and dividends exclusion costs the United States billions annually. In the 2014 fiscal year it cost the American taxpayers $91 billion. C) Bernie’s plan raises income tax rates — especially on the wealthiest Americans. Income tax rates on top earners are at some of the lowest rates they’ve ever been since the tax became permanent with the adoption of the 16th Amendment. Every Republican president since Ronald Reagan — besides George H.W. Bush — has slashed income tax rates. Over time, this has contributed to our deficit. So what are politicians like Lee Zeldin and Hillary Clinton really saying when they criticize Bernie’s economic agenda? Politicians who complain about the cost of investing in the American people, while at the same time refusing to raise taxes (Lee Zeldin has expressed his opposition to raising taxes on the wealthy and even signed a ‘no tax’ pledge in 2013; Hillary Clinton has said it is her desire to “raise incomes, not taxes”) are telling voters something very important: there is no political will for the kind of overhaul we need. Hillary Clinton’s economic plan does far less than Bernie’s; it does not provide for universal health care or free tuition at public colleges and universities. She proposes a more modest spending increase than the Vermont Senator. As far as income tax is concerned, Hillary would not raise taxes on anyone making $250,000 or less annually. According to Mother Jones, this means she would exempt many wealthy individuals from tax hikes. Her capital gains tax proposal is equally disappointing. Under her plan, taxes gains on investments held for up to two years would be the same as our current income tax rate, and has decreasing rate maximums for investments the longer they are held. Gains on investments held longer than six years which includes many of the assets held by billionaires, are subjected to an unchanged maximum rate of 20 percent. Still, as limited as Clinton’s proposals are, they’re nothing compared to Zeldin’s austerity and tax cutting approach to governing. All the while, real people are suffering. This situation is why people support Bernie Sanders. We don’t have many leaders on either side of the aisle with the courage to stand up for what is right over what is politically expedient. Bernie is one of the few politicians to face the harsh realities of America today. Our taxes do need to go up, and we need sweeping government action. Misguided debt hawking and the political points to be earned by opposing higher taxes pale in the face of the needs of our families, friends, neighbors, and selves. Let’s grow up instead of reducing Sanders’ appeal to greed, laziness, and naivete.Levels In SuperHot are very well crafted to reflect the mechanics I mentioned above. Many of the levels even have well done elements of verticality. Never once did I ever encounter a hallway that was too small to dodge bullets, nor did I ever feel that the game’s placement of enemies or items was done so in an unfair fashion to cheaply increase the difficulty. Each level clearly must have gone through many iterations and testings to get them all to be at the level of quality they are now. A game with such a strange core gameplay mechanic always runs the risk of not taking that into account in the level design. But that is not the case in SuperHot. If I had one criticism for the Level Designers of this game it would be that the levels are always fairly set in stone with the characters inside of them being the only thing that move. I think it would have been interesting to see some moving platforms or walls to shake up the world around you. It also might have been nice to see some more platforming elements that could have added another layer of challenge to these puzzles. At the end of the day though, if those additions to the level design would run the risk of making the levels over complicated it may have detracted from the core gameplay loop.We recently learned that the government is making it difficult for Palestinian Authority workers from Gaza to reach the PA offices in Ramallah. Why is Israel making things difficult for Fatah-affiliated PA workers who coordinate between Gaza’s residents and Israel? And does it have anything to do with the expected report about Operation Protective Edge? Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman has suggested quite a few times to destroy the PA, led by Mahmoud Abbas. Some deny there is such a policy and that what is happening is a security check. In any event, there is some logic in the system. It may be time to stop harassing the residents of Gaza; our decade-long experience shows it is not helping (Archive Photo: Reuters) First there was coriander. After Hamas took power in Gaza, Israel decided to restrict trade in the strip. Exports from Gaza were completely banned, while heavy restrictions were imposed on imports. For security reasons, of course. Coriander, which was on the list of banned products, is a known security risk. As part of these restrictions, exporting carbon dioxide to the Pepsi factory in Gaza was also banned. Because from soda one can make… something. The initial explanation for this policy was the desire to encourage “the people” to rebel against Hamas, which is clinging to power via outright military dictatorship. If the economic situation is bad, so goes the theory, “the people” will rebel. As there is no shortage of weapons in Gaza, an uprising may even topple Hamas. Almost a decade later, it seems “the people” understood the precise opposite of the intended message. The Israeli blockade of Gaza (and, to a lesser extent, the Egyptian one) is the weapon being used by Hamas to explain why the economic situation in Gaza is so dire—an unemployment rate of more than 30 percent and an average standard of living lower than that among Israel’s poorest population. Israel is being blamed for this, while its current explanation is that Hamas is the one responsible. But how is Hamas responsible? When an organization launches a rocket at Sderot, the defense minister announces that “Israel sees Hamas as responsible,” and in response, Israel bombs “Hamas terror facilities in Gaza.” There is something extremely backward about this cycle, which has been repeating itself for years: The more “terror facilities” we bomb, the more “terror facilities” remain for a future bombing. We have bombed so many terror facilities in Gaza that there is only one thing that has not been hit. Lieberman promised that as soon as he is appointed defense minister, he will take care of the elimination of Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh. Yet this does not appear to be on the agenda. Other leaders are still with us, as well, to continue this never-ending quarrel. And even the allegedly ephemeral organizations are not really harmed. This only serves to show us that the price of the war on terror is being paid by Gaza’s residents, who are only involved in it by because of the power of the dictatorship controlling them. Hamas, the Islamic Jihad and the rest of the ephemerals are alive and well. How is this happening? How is the Hamas government as stable as the Netanyahu government? And how is it that Haniyeh had yet to meet “the Creator of the universe,” despite the defense minister’s promise? Because the situation is convenient for both governments: The one in Jerusalem and the one in Gaza. It is not an act of love. Both governments, it seems, feel comfortable with each other. The rhetoric contains deep hatred. They will destroy the Zionist terror, and we will destroy the Hamas terror. But in practice, the quarrel allows both governments to prove that there is no solution. A peaceful solution may be impossible, but the question is who is paying for its absence. Is the Hamas government paying? Of course not. Leaks from the report on Operation Protective Edge reveal that its authors found that Hamas’ military power has not been worn out at all. It may therefore be time to stop harassing Gaza’s residents. Our decade-long experience shows it isn’t helping.Bill Cosby accuser backs Nevada bill to lift statute of limitations on sex crimes Read more Two more women came forward on Friday to accuse the veteran comedian Bill Cosby of drugging and sexually assaulting them decades ago, when they were in their teens. Sunni Welles and Margie Shapiro joined the more than three dozen women who have accused the 77-year-old comedian of sexual assault, reading statements alongside the celebrity attorney Gloria Allred. Welles said she was a 17-year-old aspiring singer at the time of her encounter with Cosby, which took place in the mid-1960s in Hollywood after a visit to a jazz club. “He was a star. He was Bill Cosby and I buried it in my memory until all of these brave women began to come forward,” said Welles, who sobbed during her statement. Best known for his “America’s Dad” persona, Dr Cliff Huxtable on the top-rated Cosby Show, Cosby has never been charged over any of the allegations. He settled a 2005 civil suit alleging sexual misconduct. Representatives for Cosby did not respond to requests for comment on Friday. Cosby’s attorney Marty Singer has dismissed similar allegations made by other women as “discredited” and “defamatory”. The allegations have scuttled Cosby’s television projects and led to cancellations of numerous comedy performances, although he continues with his Far From Finished tour. Shapiro said she was 19 and working at a doughnut shop in Santa Monica, California, in November 1975 when she met Cosby, who drove her to his place, where she took a box of matches with his name on it as a souvenir. He later drove her to Hugh Hefner’s Playboy mansion, where she said she took a pill after losing a bet with Cosby, and woke up to him sexually assaulting her. She presented the matches on Friday, which had 18 November 1975 and “from my evening at Bill Cosby’s house” scrawled in pen inside. Bill Cosby issues brief video and tells fans 'I'm far from finished' Read more Cosby performed on Friday in Baltimore – where he was heckled – and was set to perform on Saturday in Charleston, West Virginia. Allred, who represents several accusers, said Cosby “appears to be treating the allegations of so many women who have spoken out previously as a joke”. She criticized him for wearing red silk pajamas in a 10-second video last month plugging his West Virginia show. “Given so many allegations that he drugged and sexually assaulted women and that they awakened naked in his bed, his decision to appear in his pajamas is extremely offensive,” Allred said.Yesterday I saw three college women sitting on a park bench at the playground in Minneapolis. They were all in bikini tops and bottoms. I felt bad for them. I felt like they were oppressed more than the Somali women sitting on an opposite park bench in full hijab. They had bought into the cultural belief that women ought to bare their bodies for the entire world in order to be valued, receive attention, feel attractive. It is almost (dare I say it) like a religion in this country. But can you imagine the backlash if a Muslim woman wearing a scarf were to write articles, books, provocative magazine articles, about these women being oppressed, forced to wear bikinis, or dominated by men? And yet that is how Muslim women are so often presented in the media. Oppressed. Forced to wear scarves. Dominated by the men in their lives. So instead, here is a wonderful articles about the hijab, or Islamic head covering: Hijab and Modesty by Dilshad Ali at the Muslimah Next Door blog on Patheos. And though I feel it is always best to let the women who actually wear headscarves be the ones to talk about them, here’s an article I wrote for Skirt magazine a few years ago: The Dress on the Back of the Door comparing my black abaya with my pink bikini, and how I wear them both in Djibouti. Since I live in a Muslim country, as a person who tries to be respectful of local modesty norms, I feel I’ve earned the right to at least bring up the topic now and then. The scarf seems to have taken on a life of its own, with book covers and titles all making use of it. Most of the time, it is used as a symbol of oppression. But is that what the majority of Muslim women feel? I don’t think so. Not any more than saying that the majority of non-Muslim women believe that the bikini is a symbol of oppression. Some might say that, but probably not most. The author in the article above refers to an essay by a woman who calls herself a pagan. This woman talks about covering as sexy and empowering because it allows her to decide how much of her body to reveal, and who gets to see it. She decides, in my own words, that there is just as much beauty in the concealed as in the revealed. In my experiences in Djibouti with friends, I rarely find women who feel oppressed or forced into covering. And I understand and have experienced the appeal of modesty while also feeling sexy in a full-body covering, which might seem contradictory. Again, there is just as much beauty in the concealed as in the revealed. To say that because women cover in response to cultural pressure and therefore the scarf is oppressive is like saying that because women wear skinny jeans in response to culture pressure, skinny jeans are oppressive. I guess that’s not entirely true because head scarves are more than a cultural phenomenon, they are a religious one as well. Confining the discussion to one of culture oversimplifies the issue, but I will let these women speak for themselves. And in her article Hijab and Modesty, Dilshad Ali does a fine job. I have also recently stumbled across some nice blogs by Muslim women who write about this. A Muslimah’s Musings The Hijab Diaries Hotchpotch Hijabi in Italy I have skinny jeans. I have a bikini. I have an abaya (the black robe common among Arab women). I have a niqaab (the face veil). Am I oppressed? (I initially wrote that the women in bikinis were overweight. This was a poor choice of words because it put the emphasis on weight and led some people to believe I only felt this way because of their body shapes. I would have felt the same had they been thin and regret mentioning that at all. It took away from what I was trying to say.)The Underground Railroad was a network of secret routes and safe houses established in the United States during the early to mid-19th century, and used by African-American slaves to escape into free states, Canada and Nova Scotia with the aid of abolitionists and allies who were sympathetic to their cause.[1] The term is also applied to the abolitionists, both black and white, free and enslaved, who aided the fugitives.[2] Various other routes led to Mexico or overseas.[3] An earlier escape route running south toward Florida, then a Spanish possession (except 1763–83), existed from the late 17th century until Florida became a United States territory in 1821 (ending the safe haven for escaped slaves was the main reason Florida changed nationality).[4][5] However, the network now generally known as the Underground Railroad was formed in the late 1700s, and it ran north to the free states and Canada, and reached its height between 1850 and 1860.[6] One estimate suggests that by 1850, 100,000 slaves had escaped via the "Railroad".[6] British North America (present-day Canada), where slavery was prohibited, was a popular destination, as its long border gave many points of access. Most former slaves settled in Ontario. More than 30,000 people were said to have escaped there via the network during its 20-year peak period,[7] although U.S. Census figures account for only 6,000.[8] Numerous fugitives' stories are documented in the 1872 book The Underground Railroad Records by William Still, an abolitionist who then headed the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee.[9] Political background [ edit ] At its peak, nearly 1,000 slaves per year escaped from slave-holding states using the Underground Railroad – more than 5,000 court cases for escaped slaves were recorded – many fewer than the natural increase of the enslaved population. The resulting economic impact was minuscule, but the psychological influence on slave holders was immense. Under the original Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, officials from free states were required to assist slaveholders or their agents who recaptured runaway slaves, but citizens and governments of many free states ignored the law, and the Underground Railroad thrived. With heavy lobbying by southern politicians, the Compromise of 1850 was passed by Congress after the Mexican–American War. It stipulated a more stringent Fugitive Slave Law; ostensibly, the compromise addressed regional problems by compelling officials of free states to assist slave catchers, granting them immunity to operate in free states.[10] Because the law required sparse documentation to claim a person was a fugitive, slave catchers also kidnapped free blacks, especially children, and sold them into slavery.[11] Southern politicians often exaggerated the number of escaped slaves and often blamed these escapes on Northerners interfering with Southern property rights.[12] The law deprived suspected slaves of the right to defend themselves in court, making it difficult to prove free status. In a de facto bribe,[13] judges were paid a higher fee ($10) for a decision that confirmed a suspect as a slave than for one ruling that the suspect was free ($5). Many Northerners who might have ignored slave issues in the South were confronted by local challenges that bound them to support slavery. This was a primary grievance cited by the Union during the American Civil War,[14] and the perception that Northern States ignored the fugitive slave law was a major justification for secession.[15] Structure [ edit ] [16] Harriet Tubman (photo H. B. Lindsley), c. 1870. A worker on the Underground Railroad, Tubman made 13 trips to the South, helping to free over 70 people. She led people to the northern free states and Canada. This helped Harriet Tubman gain the name "Moses of Her People". The escape network was not literally underground nor a railroad. It was figuratively "underground" in the sense of being an underground resistance. It was known as a "railroad" by way of the use of rail terminology in the code.[17] The Underground Railroad consisted of meeting points, secret routes, transportation, and safe houses, and personal assistance provided by abolitionist sympathizers. Participants generally organized in small, independent groups; this helped to maintain secrecy because individuals knew some connecting "stations" along the route but knew few details of their immediate area. Escaped slaves would move north along the route from one way station to the next. "Conductors" on the railroad came from various backgrounds and included free-born blacks, white abolitionists, former slaves (either escaped or manumitted), and Native Americans.[18][19] Church clergy and congregations often played a role, especially the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), Congregationalists, Wesleyans, and Reformed Presbyterians, as well as certain sects of mainstream denominations such as branches of the Methodist church and American Baptists. Without the presence and support of free black residents, there would have been almost no chance for fugitive slaves to pass into freedom unmolested.[20] Route [ edit ] To reduce the risk of infiltration, many people associated with the Underground Railroad knew only their part of the operation and not of the whole scheme. "Conductors" led or transported the fugitives from station to station. A conductor sometimes pretended to be a slave in order to enter a plantation. Once a part of a plantation, the conductor would direct the runaways to the North. Slaves traveled at night, about 10–20 miles (16–32 km) to each station. They rested, and then a message was sent to the next station to let the station master know the runaways were on their way. They would stop at the so-called "stations" or "depots" during the day and rest. The stations were often located in barns, under church floors, or in hiding places in caves and hollowed-out riverbanks. The resting spots where the runaways could sleep and eat were given the code names "stations" and "depots", which were held by "station masters". "Stockholders" gave money or supplies for assistance. Using biblical references, fugitives referred to Canada as the "Promised Land" or "Heaven" and the Ohio River as the "River Jordan", which marked the boundary between slave states and free states.[21] Struggle for freedom in a Maryland barn. Engraving from William Still's The Underground Rail Road, p. 50[22]. Engraving from William Still's, p. 50 Traveling conditions [ edit ] Although the fugitives sometimes traveled on boat or train,[23] they usually traveled on foot or by wagon in groups of one to three slaves. Some groups were considerably larger. Abolitionist Charles Turner Torrey and his colleagues rented horses and wagons and often transported as many as 15 or 20 slaves at a time.[24] Routes were often purposely indirect to confuse pursuers. Most escapes were by individuals or small groups; occasionally, there were mass escapes, such as with the Pearl incident. The journey was often considered particularly difficult and dangerous for women or children. Children were sometimes hard to keep quiet or were unable to keep up with a group. In addition, enslaved women were rarely allowed to leave the plantation, making it harder for them to escape in the same ways that men could.[25] Although escaping was harder for women, some women were successful. One of the most famous and successful conductors (people who secretly traveled into slave states to rescue those seeking freedom) was Harriet Tubman, an escaped slave woman.[26][27] Due to the risk of discovery, information about routes and safe havens was passed along by word of mouth. Southern newspapers of the day were often filled with pages of notices soliciting information about escaped slaves and offering sizable rewards for their capture and return. Federal marshals and professional bounty hunters known as slave catchers pursued fugitives as far as the Canada–US border.[28] Fugitives were not the only black people at risk from slave catchers. With demand for slaves high in the Deep South as cotton was developed, strong, healthy blacks in their prime working and reproductive years were seen and treated as highly valuable commodities. Both former slaves and free blacks were sometimes kidnapped and sold into slavery, as was Solomon Northup of Saratoga Springs, New York. "Certificates of freedom," signed, notarized statements attesting to the free status of individual blacks also known as free papers, could easily be destroyed or stolen, so provided little protection to bearers. Some buildings, such as the Crenshaw House in far southeastern Illinois, are known sites where free blacks were sold into slavery, known as the "Reverse Underground Railroad". Under the terms of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, when suspected fugitives were seized and brought to a special magistrate known as a commissioner, they had no right to a jury trial and could not testify in their own behalf. Technically, they were guilty of no crime. The marshal or private slave-catcher needed only to swear an oath to acquire a writ of replevin for the return of property. Congress was dominated by southern Congressmen, as apportionment was based on three-fifths of the number of slaves being counted in population totals. They passed the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 because of frustration at having fugitive slaves helped by the public and even official institutions outside the South. In some parts of the North, slave-catchers needed police protection to exercise their federal authority. Opposition to slavery did not mean that all states welcomed free blacks. For instance, Indiana, whose area along the Ohio River was settled by Southerners, passed a constitutional amendment that barred free blacks from settling in that state. Terminology [ edit ] Members of the Underground Railroad often used specific terms, based on the metaphor of the railway. For example: People who helped slaves find the railroad were "agents" (or "shepherds") Guides were known as "conductors" Hiding places were "stations" or "way stations" "Station masters" hid slaves in their homes Escaped slaves were referred to as "passengers" or "cargo
29), yet triggering the transesterification reaction with a catalyst to induce plasticity in an SMP network has not been attempted before. The thermally induced plasticity of the network was first investigated via iso-strain stress relaxation. In this set of experiments, each sample was stretched to 100% strain. We emphasize that this strain value is much higher than those reported for other transesterification-based plasticity systems (~10%) (21, 23, 25). This is particularly important given our interest in shape changing instead of malleability in those studies. Nevertheless, with the strain maintained constant, the stress relaxation (σ/σ 0 ) was monitored, with σ and σ 0 representing the instantaneous stress and the initial stress, respectively. Figure 2A shows that complete stress relaxation at 150°, 140°, 130°, 120°, and 110°C takes about 10, 20, and 40, 100, and 200 min, respectively. Thus, 130°C is an appropriate temperature of choice to achieve plasticity because it allows complete stress relaxation within a reasonable time without concerns about the thermal degradation of typical polymers. This temperature is sufficiently above the T trans of typical SMPs (8–10), including that of the current system. We therefore use this temperature to further probe the thermally distinct elasticity and plasticity. We should state here that T p is not a static temperature; the transesterification reaction does occur at temperatures below 110°C. However, the reaction may become so slow that it can be neglected. Thus, T p is defined as the experimental temperature at which the plasticity is induced at a rate that is significant within the experimental time scale. Fig. 2 Thermomechanical characterization of the elasticity and plasticity. (A) Stress relaxation at various temperatures. (B) Partial stress relaxation and the corresponding shape retention at 130°C. (C) Quantitative correlation between the shape retention ratio and the extent of stress relaxation. (D) Consecutive plasticity (stress relaxation) cycles at 130°C. (E) Consecutive elasticity (shape memory) cycles. (F) Consecutive elasticity and plasticity cycles (labeled “I” and “II,” respectively, for easy demonstration). We note here that similar iso-strain stress relaxation experiments were typically used to quantify plasticity and malleability in the literature (21, 23). Our purpose of introducing plasticity is quite different in that we are more interested in permanently changing the shape of a polymer instead of reprocessing thermosets. Thus, a parameter that is more relevant than stress relaxation has to be identified. Such a parameter is defined as the shape retention ratio R ret = 100% × ε/ε load, with ε load and ε representing the respective strains at the plasticity temperature before and after load removal, respectively. We note that the shape fixity ratio for a typical elastic shape memory cycle is defined by a seemingly similar equation R f = 100% × ε/ε load. The critical difference lies in that ε in R f refers to the temporarily fixed strain (recoverable), whereas ε in R ret is the permanent strain (irrecoverable). A question naturally arises: How is the stress relaxation quantitatively related to R ret? To answer this question, a sample was subjected to partial stress relaxation experiments summarized in Fig. 2B. In this type of experiments, the sample was first stretched to 100%. While maintaining this strain value, partial stress relaxation was allowed by controlling the relaxation time. The external stress was then removed, and the sample was allowed to reach its equilibrium length. This completes the first stress relaxation experiment, and the equilibrium length is used to calculate the R ret corresponding to this particular extent of stress relaxation [R σ = 100% × (1 − σ/σ 0 )]. Subsequently, three more stress relaxation cycles were run on the same sample in a similar fashion: stretching it to 100% strain and allowing the stress to relax to a higher extent in each cycle. The correlation between R ret and R σ can thus be obtained. Figure 2C shows that R ret typically falls behind R σ, but the lag between the two becomes smaller and smaller as the stress relaxation approaches 100%. An R σ value of 90%, for instance, corresponds to an R ret value of mere 80%, and full shape retention (R ret ≈ 100%) can only be achieved when the stress is completely relaxed (R σ ≈ 100%). As mentioned earlier, achieving a robust cumulative plasticity effect requires that the network can undergo multiple cycles of stress relaxation (and shape retention) without deterioration in its performance. This was probed by four consecutive stress relaxation cycling experiments summarized in Fig. 2D, showing that the stresses can be completely relaxed in all cycles. This is nontrivial because an otherwise higher T p may induce various side reactions that could lead to either material brittleness (strain reduction) or permanent crosslinking that could destroy the plasticity. We note that the peak stress in each cycle in Fig. 2D decreases progressively with the cycling. This is partly due to the fact that the stress values were calculated on the basis of the initial sample cross-section area, whereas the actual cross-section areas for subsequent cycles were progressively lower because of the cumulative sample elongation. Mullin’s effect may be another reason for the cycle-to-cycle reduction in peak stress. Having established the basis for plasticity, we evaluated the elastic shape memory performance of the network. The consecutive shape memory cycles in Fig. 2E were obtained under a stress-controlled mode with identical deformation and recovery temperatures of 80°C. Within each cycle, the shape fixity ratio and shape recovery ratio are both above 98%. Cycle-to-cycle comparison shows very little deviation. The overall strain shift even after four consecutive cycles is quite minimal (about 2%). These results suggest that plasticity is suppressed under the condition of the elastic shape memory experiments. The above experiments set the basis for probing thermally distinct elasticity and plasticity in one combined thermomechanical cycle. Figure 2F shows four consecutive elasticity/plasticity cycles. Within each cycle, an elasticity-based shape memory cycle was achieved with the shape fixity and shape recovery ratio both above 98%, followed by a plasticity cycle with the shape retention ratio approaching 100%. No noticeable deterioration in performance (shape retention for plasticity and shape fixing and recovery for elasticity) was observed upon cycling. These results verify that the plasticity and elasticity can be realized in a highly robust fashion without any overlap. The thermally distinct plasticity and elasticity offer unprecedented flexibility in 3D shape manipulations. Figure 3A shows that a square film can be folded plastically into a permanent bird, which can be deformed into various temporary shapes (a plane or a flat film) that can recover by virtue of its elasticity. The recovered bird can be further manipulated plastically to form a drastically different permanent origami structure (boat) that can also fix various recoverable temporary shapes (a windmill or a flat film). This ability to repeatedly and permanently redefine the shape of a smart origami is a critical distinction from other known responsive origami structures (30, 31). Another distinction lies in that typical smart origami requires more complicated fabrication processes that often involve the use of multiple material sets (30, 31), whereas the current system consists of a single material with the most straightforward folding and stress relaxation process. Similarly, with cutting, folding, and plastic deformation, a rectangular flat film can be used to create a kirigami structure that can also be deformed into recoverable temporary shapes (Fig. 3B). Movies showing the shape recovery of various origami and kirigami structures can be found in the Supplementary Materials (movies S1 to S5). Here, the importance of the recovery into complex 3D permanent shapes can be easily overlooked. Conventional shape memory behaviors allow a permanent flat film to be deformed into a temporary 3D shape, and thus the recovery of the latter back into the former (complex to simple). The opposite geometric change (recovery to a complex shape) requires the fabrication of a complex permanent shape, which is beyond the scope of conventional shape memory concepts. The recovery into complex permanent shapes is highly relevant practically because many SMP device applications do involve 3D permanent geometries. To further emphasize the advantage of the thermally induced plasticity, we note that the 3D permanent shapes in Fig. 3 are difficult to fabricate by light-induced plasticity because of its line-of-sight limitation. Fig. 3 Shape manipulation via thermally distinct elasticity and plasticity. (A) Smart origami structures. (B) Smart kirigami structure. Scale bars, 10 mm. The cumulative nature of the plasticity provides an additional unique freedom for shape manipulation. The images on the left-hand side of Fig. 4A demonstrate that a flat film can be plastically deformed five times to yield an arbitrarily defined permanent tube with surface features on its internal wall, which is nearly impossible to fabricate with conventional processing techniques. Such a complex final shape is the direct consequence of the cumulative plasticity; that is, the deformation introduced in each plasticity step was carried over to the final structure. Here, each of the intermediate permanent shapes can also be elastically programmed into recoverable temporary shapes (images on the right-hand side of Fig. 4). Fig. 4 Demonstration of complex shape manipulation via cumulative plasticity effect and shape memory effect. The original and recovered shapes in each elastic shape memory cycle shown are visually indistinguishable; thus, the same photo was used for ease of demonstration. Scale bars, 5 mm. We note here that a conventional thermoplastic SMP can be molded and remolded to redefine its permanent shape. However, there are several critical differences between the current system and a thermoplastic SMP. The repeated and complete stress relaxation shown in Fig. 2D, for instance, cannot be achieved with a conventional thermoplastic SMP. A thermoplastic SMP can completely relax its stress only when it is heated to its flow state; however, the material will lose its integrity altogether. Thus, a stable zero-stress state without loss of material integrity, as is accomplished in the repeated stress relaxation in a DMA apparatus (Fig. 2D), is only possible with the dynamically crosslinked system. When a thermoplastic SMP is remolded, the prior shape is completely erased (that is, noncumulative). In contrast, Fig. 4 shows that new permanent deformations are introduced one after another without erasing the prior deformation. Thus, the surface textures from the two embossing steps are preserved in the inner walls of the final arbitrary tube. Had this been a thermoplastic SMP, the surface textures would have been lost as the permanent shape was redefined. Thus, the cumulative effect is a critical factor that distinguishes our system from a thermoplastic SMP. In addition, redefining the permanent shape of a thermoplastic SMP typically requires a mold. Thus, to fabricate the bird and boat in Fig. 3A using a thermoplastic SMP is extremely difficult because this would require a sophisticated mold and demolding would be nearly impossible given the complexity of the shapes involved. We should state that, for thermoplastic SMP, stress can also relax under iso-strain conditions at an elevated temperature below its flow temperature (32, 33). At first glance, this is similar to the essential stress relaxation behavior in Fig. 4D. However, there are fundamental differences: (i) the equilibrium stress cannot reach zero for thermoplastic SMP and (ii) upon heating, the fixed strain after the stress relaxation can recover. The latter is particularly critical because it suggests that such deformation for thermoplastic SMP is elastic instead of plastic, as is observed in our system. Overall, the demonstrations in Figs. 3 and 4 are only possible with our dynamic crosslinked system and are not possible with a thermoplastic SMP. We further note that 3D printing could, in principle, produce polymer devices with largely unlimited permanent geometries into which shape memory functions could also be incorporated. A permanent shape fabricated by 3D printing is, however, static. That is, it cannot be further changed after fabrication. In contrast, the method revealed in this study allows numerous cycles of manipulation of a permanent shape. Despite this fundamental difference, our concept could be combined with 3D printing to yield a 3D permanent shape that could be dynamically manipulated in an on-demand fashion. In summary, we designed a polymer network with a thermal phase transition and thermally exchangeable covalent bonds. The former introduces elasticity responsible for its shape memory behavior, and the latter contributes to an opposite plasticity via network topography rearrangement. Although both are triggered thermally, they can be reflected distinctively without any overlap. The robustness of the elasticity and plasticity in our system, in combination with the cumulative nature of the latter, permits manipulation of polymer shapes in ways that are limited largely only by imagination. The physical principle behind our system can be readily expanded to a variety of other systems with different phase transitions and reversible covalent chemistry. Thus, our work should lead to numerous opportunities for future innovations involving shaping polymers. MATERIALS AND METHODS Materials Pentaerythritol tetrakis(3-mercaptopropionate) (tetrathiol crosslinker, Sigma-Aldrich), 1-benzoylcyclohexanol (UV-184, photoinitiator, TCI), polycaprolactone diol (M n = 10,000, Sigma-Aldrich), acryloyl chloride (TCI), and triethylamine (Aladdin) were all used as received. TBD (transesterification catalyst, TCI) was neutralized with 2 molar equivalents of acetic acid before its use. Polycaprolactone diacrylate (PCLDA) was synthesized according to the method reported in the literature (34). Polymer network synthesis PCLDA (1.5 g) was dissolved in DMF (N,N′-dimethylformamide) (0.5 g) at 80°C. A DMF solution containing a stoichemical amount of the tetrathiol crosslinker, photoinitiator (UV-184, 0.5 wt %), and neutralized TBD (2 wt %) was added to the PCLDA solution and stirred for several minutes. The precursor solution was quickly poured into a mold defined by two glass slides separated by a silicone rubber spacer (thickness: 0.5 mm). The mixture was then irradiated under ultraviolet light for 5 min (light source: IntelliRay 600 Flood UV, intensity: 30 mW/cm2). The obtained film was vacuum-dried (100°C) overnight. General material characterizations are available in the Supplementary Materials (fig. S1 to S3). Thermomechanical characterization Samples were cut into rectangular shapes (6 mm × 1.5 mm × 0.47 mm) before testing. Unless otherwise noted, tests were conducted with a Dynamic Mechanical Analysis machine (DMA800) in a strain rate mode. Demonstration of macroscopic shape manipulation The various origami and kirigami structures were manually folded (or cut for the latter) from flat films. The folded objects were placed between two glass slides and thermally annealed under compression (130°C, ~30 min). Before annealing, silicon oil was spread onto the film surfaces to avoid self-sticking. For the demonstration of the cumulative plasticity in Fig. 4, a flat film was first compressed using a stainless steel mold with a rectangular wave pattern. Then, the film was stretched 30% followed by compression using the same mold rotated by 45°. After a further 30% stretching, the film was curled and bent into a random tube with the surface pattern on its inner surface. Each step above required a thermal annealing (130°C, 60 min) to induce the plasticity. The demonstration of the elastic shape memory behaviors in Figs. 3 and 4 was conducted with an identical deformation and recovery temperature of 80°C following typical shape memory procedures. SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIALS Supplementary material for this article is available at http://advances.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2/1/e1501297/DC1 Movie S1. Recovery from an origami boat into an origami bird with infrared heating. Movie S2. Recovery from an origami plane into an origami bird with infrared heating. Movie S3. Recovery from an origami windmill into an origami boat with infrared heating. Movie S4. Recovery from a flat film into a kirigami “ZJU” with infrared heating. Movie S5. Recovery from a flat film into an origami bird with infrared heating. Fig. S1. Differential scanning calorimeter (DSC) curve for the polymer network. Fig. S2. Dynamic mechanical analysis (DMA) curve for the polymer network. Fig. S3. Stress strain curves (five tests) for the polymer network at 70°C (above its melting point), showing that the maximum strain is roughly between 750% and above 1100%. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license, which permits use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, so long as the resultant use is not for commercial advantage and provided the original work is properly cited. Acknowledgments: We acknowledge H. Bai and J. Wu for their kindly help with the discussions. Funding: This work was supported by the following programs: National Key Basic Research Program of China (no. 2015CB351903), National Natural Science Foundation of China (nos. 21474084 and 21470490), the Chinese central government’s Recruitment Program of Global Experts, and 985 program for the startup funding. Author contributions: T.X. conceived the concept and wrote the paper. Q.Z. designed the experiments. Q.Z. and W.Z. conducted the experiments. T.X. and Y.L. directed the project. All authors analyzed and interpreted data. Competing interests: The authors declare that they have no competing interests. Data and materials availability: All data needed to evaluate the conclusions in the paper are present in the paper and/or the Supplementary Materials. Additional data related to this paper may be requested from the authors.The Steam Exploration Sale is now live which can only mean one thing for PC gamers: time to break out your wallets! Steam’s Thanksgiving sale starts today and will end on December 2nd. Why is it called the Steam Exploration Sale? The enablers over at Steam will gladly recommend games for you to check out based on the previous titles that you’ve played and the contents of your Steam library all in the “Your Exploration Sale”. There are some massive deals to be had. For example, The Valve Complete Pack which ordinarily goes for a hearty $99.99 is currently 75% off for a grand total of $24.99. So what will you get for 25 bucks? You’ll get Counter Strike: Global Offensive, Portal and Portal 2, Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2, Team Fortress Classic, Team Fortress 2, Counter Strike, Counter Strike: Source, Counter Strike: Condition Zero, Day of Defeat, Day of Defeat: Source, Half Life 2, Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Deathmatch, Half-Life 2: Lost Coast, Half-Life 2: Episode One and Episode Two, Half-Life, Half-Life: Blue Shift, Half-Life: Opposing Force, Half-Life Deathmatch: Source, Half-Life Source, Ricochet and lastly, Deathmatch Classic. They really weren’t kidding when they called it the Valve Complete Pack. The Steam Exploration Sale doesn’t just include what seems like every Valve game ever made, either. With interesting titles like Goat Simulator going for a scant $4.99, you no longer have an excuse not to try out the amazing Goat MMO Simulator expansion that’s free for Goat Simulator owners. Other featured deals include a 50% discount on Watch Dogs, Company of Heroes 2 for just $10, and 75% off of Sid Meier’s Civilization V: The Complete Edition. With the Steam Exploration Sale offering such a wide variety of games at such competitive prices, it should come as no surprise that the data that shows that about 36.9% of games in Steam libraries go unplayed is actually a real statistic. Happy Black Friday shopping!Following Garbage's Long Journey Around The Earth Garbology Our Dirty Love Affair With Trash by Edward Humes Hardcover, 277 pages \| purchase close overlay Buy Featured Book Your purchase helps support NPR programming. How? Americans generate more trash than anyone else on the planet: more than 7 pounds per person each day. About 69 percent of that trash goes immediately into landfills. And most landfill trash is made up of containers and packaging — almost all of which should be recycled, says Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Edward Humes, "It's instant trash," he says. "We pay for this stuff, and it goes right into the waste bin, and we're not capturing it the way our recycling programs are intending us to capture it. We're just sticking it in the ground and building mountains out of it." Humes' new book Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash follows the journey that trash takes as it makes its way from garbage containers through landfills, sanitation plants and scrap heaps. He tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross that because much of our trash is immediately hidden from our daily lives, it's easier for us to be wasteful. "We don't see the consequences of our wastefulness," he says. "We have built waste into our entire consumer culture to the point where we don't notice it anymore because of these conveniences we've created for hiding our garbage.... In a difficult economic environment, it's just crazy to take all this material and just bury it in the ground." Some landfills, including Puente Hills near Los Angeles, manufacture energy from the methane gas that's produced during trash's decomposition process. "There is so much trash in this landfill that it generates enough electricity to power 70,000 homes," he says. "And a number of privately run landfills have adopted some of these methods and are either making fuel or generating power with [the methane from the trash production]." Humes says capturing the methane gas to make energy is better than allowing it to escape into the atmosphere, but that doesn't mean it's the most efficient way to make energy. "It's still a losing proposition, but it's better than nothing," he says. "The real solution is just to stop putting so much stuff in giant burial mounds, but that's a really tough nut to crack." Humes' investigation into garbage's journey around the Earth didn't stop on land. He also met with scientists who study the 5 massive gyres of trash particles swirling around in the Indian, Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Created by the convergence of ocean currents and wind, the gyres contain masses of litter that aren't entirely visible by the human eye. "What we're actually seeing in the ocean is this kind of chowder of plastic — these tiny particles that are the size of plankton," he says. "It's plastic that has been weathered and broken down by the elements into these little bits, and it's getting into the food chain." Humes says it's estimated that the weight of plastic finding its way into the sea each year is equivalent to the weight of 40 aircraft carriers. Fish then eat the bits of corroded plastic, confusing it for plankton. "We are eating the fish that are eating the plastic, but the scarier part is that these little bits of plastic become sponges for some potentially dangerous chemicals that are released into the marine environment, and we may be ingesting that, too," he says. "Nobody knows for sure yet. We know that the plastic does attract these chemicals and that fish are eating it. How much it actually works its way into the food chain is still unknown but being researched now." The cost to clean up these plastic gyres is staggering, he says. "So a lot of the efforts are being focused on trying to reduce the amount of plastic that gets into the ocean in the first place," he says. Enlarge this image toggle caption courtesy of the author courtesy of the author Interview Highlights On trash incineration programs "The image in America is so poor that it's really had a difficult time getting traction, and in some places it has been attempted, it has been disastrous because of mismanagement," he says. "The entire city of Harrisburg [Pa.] is bankrupt now because of the way they failed to manage their trash burners. So it's gotten a black eye in the U.S." On the largest active landfill in the United States, Puente Hills, which is more than 500 feet tall and has been collecting garbage for more than 60 years "It's actually filled a valley that used to be a dairy farm and is now a mountain built of trash.... It's 500 feet tall, so when you stand atop it, you're standing on the biggest man-made structure in California. It is a plateau of garbage. The smell varies. One day I was up there and it smelled like Christmas trees because they were mulching pine trees up there. Other times, it is the most noxious, rotting, sulphuric smell, and literally, it burns the nostrils as you inhale it. But the smell is not as impressive as the sheer scale of this place. It has 130 tons of garbage contained in this mountain. It is a high point in the south end of Los Angeles, so you can see the entire basin of Los Angeles by standing on a mountain of its trash." On how trash is estimated by the EPA "Every landfill weighs the stuff that comes in, [but] the EPA doesn't do that. They purport to measure trash and issue an official trash bible every year, but it's an indirect method. They calculate how much stuff we manufacture in the U.S. and what its life expectancy is, and they crunch these numbers and they sort of predict how much trash will be thrown away. And unfortunately, it vastly underestimates the trash that we make." On China trading trash as an export/import product "They're finding value in material we're not able to find value in and paying relatively little for it — shipping it immense distances with enormous environmental impact involved in that, and then using it to manufacture products they're shipping back to us. And we're buying and basically turning it into trash again, and then it's an endless cycle. It's an incredibly wasteful process. You think of all of these 12,000-mile journeys with giant cargo vessels shipping this material. The perverse economies of it work because of the nature of our consumer economy, but it's an incredibly wasteful process." Paper or plastic? "The correct answer is neither, if you want to have the best solution.... In terms of the actual greenhouse gas impact, a paper bag tends to be higher."German airlines face being banned from landing in Britain unless they hand over their passenger lists in advance for security screening, senior Whitehall officials have confirmed. Urgent talks are now underway between London and Berlin to pressure the German government to drop their data protection laws that prevent advanced passenger lists being provided on privacy grounds. The move is part of preparations for the introduction later this month of a fresh package of counter-terrorism legislation designed to hit the flow of British and European jihadists travelling to Syria and Iraq, and to keep out foreign fighters trying to travel to Britain. David Cameron made clear in September that alongside new powers to seize passports and exclude British nationals from the UK he also intended to put existing ‘no-fly lists’ to stop them coming to the UK in the first place on a statutory basis. “Airlines will have to comply with our no-fly list arrangements, give us information on passenger lists and comply with our security screening requirements,” said the prime minister. “If they do not do so, their flights will not be able to land in Britain.” The most senior Home Office official, Mark Sedwill, the department’s permanent secretary, confirmed on Wednesday that the threat applies to all EU airlines but particularly German flights: “We are looking in future legislation at taking mandatory powers. We are working with all the airlines. We have 90% of advanced passenger information,” he told the Commons public accounts committee. But he disclosed that German airline flights are among the 10% of flights that currently arrive in Britain without providing advanced passenger information. Sedwill told MPs that the issue was data protection legislation in some countries, and others in which it was possible to travel on identity cards rather than passports within the European Union. “We are in discussions, which for obvious reasons I have to keep somewhat private, with other EU countries to change their data protection legislation in order to require this data of the carrier. “It is our intention to mandate carriers to provide that information and that legislation will also mandate that authority [to ban them from landing]. We are talking to relevant countries about their data protection legislation and the conflict between their legislation and ours in this matter. He confirmed that German airlines are among those facing the ban after being asked repeatedly by Conservative MP Richard Bacon if this meant that German airlines would not be able to land in Britain if the ban went ahead. The advance passenger lists do not just include names and travel plans but also personal details such as home address, credit card numbers and other data which enable security services to build up a profile of passengers they are interested in. The US currently enforces a ban on airlines that refuse to provide advanced passenger lists on its transatlantic flights. The issue of tackling foreign fighters is expected to be raised by home secretary Theresa May at a meeting of the inner G6 EU interior ministers from Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Britain, in Paris on Thursday.My generous Canadian teacher santa contacted me quickly to let me know things were coming from Amazon right away! A HUGE box arrived from Amazon and it was like Christmas came early! Inside was enough paper to last me the entire year (and then some I bet), eight boxes of Kleenex (the good stuff!), a jumbo pack of expo markers (in bright colors!), eight packs of pencils (Ticonderoga, the good stuff again!), an automatic pencil sharpener, and three cannisters of lysol wipes! The generosity of my santa in not just ordering me all of this but also taking the time and money to get quality materials was really touching. It's helped lift a major financial burden for me, and will keep my classroom running smoothly this year. Good thing I have kids coming in to help me set up my classroom next week that can carry all of this for me!Image: William Mewes/Flickr Thanks to a recent Supreme Court decision, Canadian cops need a warrant before they can get subscriber information from telecommunication companies—which is why police are now lobbying for a legal workaround so they can access that same information without court approval. In 2014, the Supreme Court of Canada decided that subscriber information such as names and addresses carries with it a reasonable expectation of privacy, and that accessing such information without a warrant constitutes an unlawful search. The ruling has caused "substantial resource and workload challenges for law enforcement," according to a resolution adopted by the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police (CACP) at its annual convention in August. "The lesson has been that if police are given free reign to access sensitive data, they will overuse it" Previously, requests for subscriber data were merely voluntary requests, and were often fulfilled on the same day they were filed, the resolution states. Now, a response can take more than a month to arrive. To get around this, the CACP announced it supports the creation of a new law "designed to specifically provide law enforcement the ability to obtain, in real-time or near real-time, basic subscriber information," which isn't possible when you need a warrant. The CACP is even planning to craft such a legislative proposal itself, ahead of the Canadian government's next Cybercrime Working Group meeting in November. "The lesson has been that if police are given free reign to access sensitive data, they will overuse it," Tamir Israel, a lawyer for the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic, wrote in an email. "The simple fact is, while unchecked powers of this nature may be convenient for police, they are excessive in nature and there is no justification for them," he added. Watch more from Motherboard: Oil and Water The report also reveals that a discussion paper prepared by the Canadian government's Department of Justice, and presented to the Cybercrime Working Group, proposed the creation of another "administrative (non-judicial) scheme," intended to circumvent the Supreme Court ruling. However, "The 'administrative scheme' they mention is the one that was flatly rejected by Canadians and by the federal government when it was introduced as Bill C-30 back in 2011-12," Israel wrote. "At the time, the government committed never to passing such expansive powers again." The Department of Justice has not returned Motherboard's request for comment. If the CACP's efforts or that of the Department of Justice are successful, it could make last year's Supreme Court decision—a welcome win for privacy in Canada—a short lived victory.Attorney General Jeff Sessions violated his own memo outlining the standards for recusing himself from the probe into Russian election interference, offering opinions about investigator Robert Mueller during a Fox News interview. Attorney General Jeff Sessions violated his agreement to recuse himself from being involved in the ongoing investigation of coordination between Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia by commenting on the case in a nationally televised interview. After it was revealed that he had lied to a Senate panel about his contacts with Russia while working as a campaign surrogate for Trump, Sessions was pressured into announcing that he would recuse himself from the investigations. In a Department of Justice memo explaining the details of the recusal, Sessions’ chief of staff noted that the recusal “extends to Department responses to Congressional and media inquiries” related to the Russia investigation. But Sessions threw that all out the window for Fox News. On Fox & Friends — which has become the leading source of pro-Trump propaganda in the media, including receiving access to Trump in exchange for this status — co-host Ainsley Earhardt asked Sessions to weigh in on comments from Trump insinuating trouble with the investigation due to a pre-existing relationship between special counsel Robert Mueller and former FBI Director James Comey. Instead of telling the hosts that his recusal bars him from making that brand of commentary, Sessions declared that “we need to … clear the air on this and let the system work its will.” Co-host Pete Hegseth asked Sessions if he “had any concerns” about the hires Mueller had made to lead the investigative team, a reference to conservative attempts to impugn the motives of the professional investigators. Again, Sessions chose not to refuse comment, instead saying, “Mr. Mueller is entitled, lawfully I guess, at this point, to hire who he desires but I think he should look for people who have strength and credibility by all people.” Sessions also dropped a hint in front of Fox’s audience that he wants the Mueller-led probe concluded quickly, echoing language for the Trump administration that has urged quickly moving on from the case, despite its implications for American security. EARHARDT: Mr. Attorney General, we were talking to the president — we were asking him about the Russia probe and the latest on this investigation. The deputy attorney general has appointed Robert Mueller to oversee this case. Many people are questioning that, because he is very good friends with James Comey, who is being investigated in this, or involved in the investigation. We asked the president about it. He said it was “bothersome” to him. What do you think? SESSIONS: Well, we need to have a — clear the air on this and to let the system work its will. That is all that can be done at this point. And we expect full integrity and good work from every person involved in this investigation. HEGSETH: Do you have have any concerns, briefly, Mr. Attorney General, of the hires that have been made by Bob Mueller? Lot of criticism, you see people tied to the Clinton Foundation, Democratic politics — any concerns there? SESSIONS: Well, Mr. Mueller is entitled lawfully, I guess, at this point, to hire who he desires. But I think he should look for people who have strength and credibility by all people. DOOCY: An exit question for you: Do you have full confidence in Robert Mueller? SESSIONS: Mr. Mueller is someone I’ve known for a long time and I’ve had confidence in him over the years, yes. DOOCY: Over the years, but what about right now? SESSIONS: Well, I feel confident about what he will do. That is all I can say to you about that. The man has a good reputation. He knows his business. Hopefully, we can see this matter move forward, and come to an end sooner rather than later. DOOCY: I think we’re all ready for that. Ethics experts raised warning signs about the interview, which is new ammunition for Trump’s pushback against the investigation on multiple fronts, including his Twitter account. Richard Painter, former White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush, told Politico, “He should not be doing this.” And Washington University law professor Kathleen Clark told the outlet, “I believe that the White House and its allies are attempting to undermine Mueller’s stellar reputation and his credibility. Sessions should not participate in this type of attempt to undermine Mueller’s investigation.” Trump and those in his orbit have shown an avowed hostility to ethical norms during their short time in power, favoring what appears to make Trump’s life easier rather than what helps the American people. Sessions willfully violating his own office’s guidelines is just the latest blow.In a recent private meeting, the House speaker and Senate president were stunned when Governor Deval Patrick, according to a person briefed on the conversation, raised the prospect of US Attorney Carmen M. Ortiz running for governor and spoke favorably of the prosecutor whose investigation of the state Probation Department has rattled the Legislature. According to the person, Patrick said the federal prosecutor, whose Puerto Rican-born parents raised her in a New York public housing project, has a great story to tell about her successful legal career. He left the impression he was suggesting that the two should meet her. Asked about the conversation, Patrick’s director of communications, Brendan Ryan, said any interpretation that the governor had been trying to promote Ortiz as a gubernatorial candidate is “patently false.’’ Ryan would not comment further. Advertisement The person briefed on the discussion said Senate President Therese Murray and House Speaker Robert A. DeLeo were flabbergasted to think that Patrick would raise a possible Ortiz candidacy with them. Ortiz’s criminal bureau has been focused on several top legislative leaders and some of their involvement over the past decade in the hiring of probation officers. Get Today in Politics in your inbox: A digest of the top political stories from the Globe, sent to your inbox Monday-Friday. Sign Up Thank you for signing up! Sign up for more newsletters here Patrick had cleared the room of others attending the weekly Beacon Hill leadership meeting before the discussion turned to the 2014 race for governor, the person said. None of the three at the meeting on Nov. 26 in DeLeo’s office would comment to the
one of these guys through the end of the World Series.(Note: This report was edited to reflect that, unlike previously reported, the Deltas folding is not yet final.) A founding executive of the San Francisco Deltas announced his departure from the financially troubled organization just days after the club won the North American Soccer League championship. The Deltas’ future has been uncertain. Most games drew about 2,500 people and the team told its fans during the season that it could not survive without higher attendance. In an email Tuesday, titled “Goodbye Deltas,” Ricardo Stanford-Geromel wrote: “It’s hard to believe how far we’ve come in less than 3 years. In 2015, I had the idea to put a professional soccer team in San Francisco. I pitched the idea to over 100 potential investors, and I was honored that one of them agreed to become the main investor. Hundreds of people embraced the dream and were essential to turning the Deltas into a reality. But that’s not all–in our first season of playing, we won the championship in a sold-out final game against the New York Cosmos at Kezar Stadium last Sunday. “I want to thank each and every one of you for being a part of this amazing adventure.” This news organization initially reported that Stanford-Geromel’s email was a sign that the team was shutting down, but he disagreed. “I didn’t say that the Deltas folded,” he posted on Twitter several hours after his email. “I said that my Deltas email will no longer be working, as I don’t work there anymore.” The San Francisco club struggled early in its inaugural season schedule before storming back to finish second in the NASL standings before topping North Carolina FC in the semifinal round and defeating the Cosmos in the title match. Notably, their season also included training sessions at San Quentin State Prison and splitting two games with the San Jose Earthquakes. Still, the club seemingly struggled financially. Citing low attendance and a preference for transparency, club CEO Brian Andrés Helmick penned a piece on Medium pleading Delta fans “just came back with one friend!” The Deltas surged late in the campaign, outscoring opponents 19-8 on a late-season stretch in which it went 6-0-4 to help negate its 1-3-1 start to the year. Despite then losing its regular season finale, SF shut out North Carolina and New York in the playoffs — the latter victory inspiring fans to storm the field…And they have donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to Hillary Clinton’s family foundation and to her presidential campaign. via ISLAMIC SUPREMACISM DOES BUSINESS IN U.S. VIA A TURKISH CULT: It has become increasingly apparent that the United States is not only confronting a violent effort by Islamic supremacists to impose the program they call shariah on the rest of the world, Muslim and non-Muslim, alike. Dangerous as jihadist terrorism is, America – and the rest of the Free World, for that matter – also face what amounts to a pre-violent assault. The Muslim Brotherhood calls this stealthy, seditious effort to “destroy us from within” a “civilization jihad.” One of its prime practitioners in this country is the Gulen Movement, a cult/business empire led by a reclusive Turkish expatriate, Fethullah Gulen, who operates from within an armed camp in the Poconos. As The Gulen Movement monograph makes clear, one of the most troubling aspects of this cult is its success in advancing the Islamic supremacist agenda – albeit under the guise of Turkish nationalism – via one of the fastest-growing networks of publicly funded charter schools in the United States. Fethullah Gulen is wanted on multiple international arrest warrants issued by the regime of his one-time ally, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Here in the United States, government investigators are also looking into numerous allegations against the Gulen Movement involving: indoctrination, influence operations, salary-kickback schemes, visa system abuse and more. In fact, the allegations against the Gulen Movement extend all the way to the U.S. Congress. In late October 2015, a USA Today investigation revealed that the Gulen Movement had illegally funded more than 200 trips to Turkey for Members of Congress since 2008. It did so using false disclosure statements that concealed their Gulen sponsorship from both the legislators and the House Ethics Committee, which had been misled into approving member- and/or staff participation in the trips. Thus, in spite of the Gulen Movement’s carefully projected image of harmony, interfaith dialogue, and tolerance, a far more troubling picture is beginning to emerge that the Center believes warrants a closer look. A PDF of the newly released monograph is embedded below: THE GULEN MOVEMENT – Turkey’s Islamic Supremacist Cult and its Contributions to the Civilization Jihad Dozens more posts on the Gulen Movement in the Creeping Sharia archives. Update: Poconos-based Muslim cleric on trial in absentia in TurkeyUnfortunately, the well deserved Nobel prize has eluded Weigl because of the politics and WW2. However, he received many honors, including the Order of St. Gregory from the Pope Pius XI, the Leopold Order from the Belgian King, the Order of Polonia Restituta, and in addition he was elected to the Polish Academy (PAU or Polska Akademia Umiejetnosci) and many foreign Academies, and he became an honorary member of several scientific societies (A Monograph, 1994; Krynski, 1967a,b, 1997). Praises were heaped upon Prof. Weigl, including a kind statement by Charles Nicolle, a Nobel laureate, who established that louse is the typhus' vector; he wrote: "The 'war' with typhus did not appear promising, until it was joined by the brilliant Polish scientist, Professor Rudolf Weigl from Lwów, Poland. Weigl taught us how to cultivate the typhus agent in lice, and moreover, has developed a superior vaccine, which saved many thousands of lives. As person, Weigl deserves highest recognition, as a brilliant intellect, untiring worker and a fanatic of science" (Krynski, 1997). Weigl's typhus research was continued for a few more decades by his collaborators and students, among them Anna Herzig-Weigl (Herzig, 1939), the second wife of R. Weigl, Stefan Krynski, Stanislawa Woyciechowska (see Krynski, 1987), Henryk Mosing (Mosing, 1947), Zbigniew Stuchly, and Albina Kuchta (A Monograph,1994; Krynski, 1967a), but at present it is mainly of a historical interest. In 2003, Yad Vashem of Israel honored Prof. Rudolf Weigl as Righteous Among the Nations. (1) The period before WW2 Most of the methods for the cultivation of lice and production of the Weigl vaccine were developed before WW2 in the Department of Biology of the UJK in Lwów, which was then a Polish city, with several Universities or Schools of Higher Learning, best characterized as a counterpart of Boston in USA or Cambridge in England. It had rich Western and international traditions, as reflected by its many names (Leopolis in Latin; Leopoli in Italian; Lemberg in German; Lvov in Russian; Lviv or Lwiw in Ukrainian, the spelling of Russian and Ukrainian names depending on the transliteration). Lwów was a city with about 600 years of Polish history and tradition and the extremely patriotic Lvovian citizenry. At the eve of WW2 in 1939, its population of about 350,000 was a rather homogeneous'melt' with various ethnic and religious backgrounds: predominantly (about 60-70%) Roman-catholic, about 20-30% Mosaic (integrated and orthodox Jewish), the remaining about 10% Armenian-catholic (of Armenian origin), Greek-catholic (predominantly of Red Rutenian or Ukrainian origin), Lutheran (mainly Austrian or German) and others. Photo 15. The Old University Building (three storie building on the right) at the Mikolaj Street, where Weigl's Institute was located between WWI and WWII, and during WWII, and where Weigl's vaccine was produced. (To the right is the Church of St. Mikolaj (St. Nicholas), where the author of this essay was baptized and his parents were married.) (2) The period during and just after WW2 WW2 started on September 1, 1939, and as results Lwów became occupied first by the Soviet and later by the Nazi's Armies. However, Weigl's Typhus Institute became a'safe haven' for the intellectuals in 1939 - 1944, during both occupations. Otherwise, during this period, Lwowian universities have lost (killed or deported, mainly to Siberia) over 40% of Professors, with highest loss of about 90 % at the Medical School (Albert, 1989a). (a) The period of Soviet occupation 1939 - 1941: During the USSR occupation period of 1939 - 1941, Weigl did his utmost to protect the Institute employees from the systematic and inhumanely cruel deportation to Soviet gulags in the North (for men), and to Southern Siberia (for women and children, who were arrested at night and exiled by trucks and trains to very primitive kolkhoz'es situated mainly in the wilderness of Kazachstan), where the death rate approached 30% per year, and where I lost many of my friends and colleagues (see also, Kopanski, 1997). About the time when the Soviet secret police (NKVD or KGB) organized their first cruel deportation of Lvovian population to Siberia, the first secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party, Nikita Khrushchev, has visited Weigl at his Institute and offered him the title of Academician and a directorship of an Academy Institute in Moscow. Weigl has politely rejected it, which fortunately did not cause any negative consequences; instead Weigl has received promises of additional buildings for his Institute in Lwów (Nespiak and Ojrzynski, 1994), and of an exemption for his employees from deportations to Siberia. I learned about the details of the Khrushchev's visit from my father, who spoke fluent Russian (because long before WW1 he lived and studied in the Russian-occupied provinces of Poland, including Warsaw). My father, Stefan Szybalski, a pre-WW1 graduate of the University of Toulouse, France, was asked by his friend Prof. Weigl (who was unfamiliar with Russian language, similarly as nearly the entire population of Lwów, including myself) to help him in dealings with Russian visitors and the Soviet Russian administration, including Khrushchev and the NKVD (who supervised arrests and deportations, during the 1939-41 period of the Soviet occupation of Lwów). It is a pity that Stefan Szybalski has not written up his memoirs of this period, since many famous Russian professors and Academicians, who were'starved' of the contacts with the Western world made a pilgrimage to Weigl's Institute in Lwów, considered by Russian as a Vienna-like Western European city, though occupied then by Soviets. Posing as biologist in a laboratory attire, my father played deftly a role of Weigl's translator. Frequently, after a few glasses of vodka, the Russian visitors could not resist temptation of describing their hardships and then share their personal tales of horror related to life in USSR and to Stalin's terror; one of the Russian visitors, after getting drunk, gave the following very characteristic and helpful advice: "Do not ever join the Communist Party and do not steal excessively". He then elaborated: "If you are not a Party member, they will always court you to join, but once you join and then are kicked out of the Party this is your end. If you steal too much this will lead to your demise, but if you do not steal at all, you will starve; thus remember to steal only in moderation, just enough to survive!" Through his influence, and often helped by my father, Weigl was able to help in securing the release and return to Lwów of several of the Siberian deportees. Among those was Stefania Skwarczynska (at that time at UJK, and after WW2 the Professor of Theory of Literature at University of Lódz, Poland, and a member of PAN), who was deported to Kazachstan, because of her "guilt" of having a husband, who was a pre-WW2 colonel of Polish Army and at that time a war prisoner in a German 'Oflag'. Stefania was helped by her UJK major professor, Juliusz Kleiner, and by Weigl to return from Kazachstan in Siberia with her mother and two very young daughters (one of her daughters, Maria Olszewska, is at present a Professor of Cytology and Cytochemistry of Plants at the University of Lódz, Poland, and a member of PAN). Weigl has provided Stefania with a safe employment in his Institute, and I trained her to become a louse breeder. While working with her at adjoining desks in 1941-43, I learned plenty about her own and her mother's and children's hunger and misery of the inhuman deportation. She was an enthusiastic and gifted raconteur, and as an accomplished story teller, she described to me some amazing and cruel experiences in the steppes of the Soviet Kazachstan, hundreds of miles away from the 'civilization' (as represented by the nearest railway station). My family have also been directly threatened by deportation to Siberia at least twice. Our Soviet 'passports' were first confiscated by NKVD and then the dreaded "paragraph 11" was added to them; this meant that we had to be moved to some place located hundreds of miles away from any even smallest town, which 'location' meant the wilderness of Siberia. Again, thanks to Weigl's help, my father was able to nullify this cruel ruling; however, the same happened to us again, but this time our second "paragraph 11" ruling reached us only one day before the Nazi invasion of Soviet Union. Hitler's armies have attacked the Soviet army on June 22, 1941, and entered Lwów on June 29, 1941. During this ghastly last week of Soviet occupation there were massive arrests and all jails became overfilled with Lwowian citizens. Then in the middle of that week the Soviets have initiated the systematic mass murder of the prisoners. Just after June 30, when Soviet retreated, we have succeeded to enter one of the prisons, because I was trying to help my friend in finding his father (who was a lawyer and a lice 'feeder' at the Weigl's Institute, and who was arrested by Soviets a few days earlier). What we found, were the heeps of the partially decomposing bodies stacked four to ten deep on the cell floors. In this prisons alone, the Soviets have murdered about 3500 prisoners before the Soviet retreat (Kopanski, 1997). During the next few days of the unusually hot weather, we searched other prisons, finally finding the body of my friend's father among the progressively more viscous mass of the victims of this Soviet atrocity of systematic ethnic murders. I lost then at least five Lvovian friends or their parents: three Roman catholics, one Greek-catholic and one Jewish. (b) The period of German occupation (1941 - 1944): During the Nazi occupation of Lwów (1941 - 1944), employment in Weigl's Institute provided some degree of protection from the random arrests and deportation to the Nazi concentration camps; Gestapo seemed to prefer to avoid 'dealings' with persons from whom they might accidentally acquire typhus-infected lice (it was well known that carrying lice was our occupational hazard). Moreover, all employees carried an impressive looking identification card ("Ausweiss") from the "Oberkommando des Heeres" (Office of the Commander-in-Chief of the German Army); this "Ausweiss" was another of Weigl's life-saving "inventions" (as partly "engineered" by my father). The Institut's Headquarter was in Krakow and the German microbiologist in charge was Dr. H. Eyer, who had a rather fair opinion as not interfering with Weigl's pro-Lwowian activities. After WWII, Eyer served as Professor at the Max-v.-Petterkofer Institute of Hygiene in Munich. He described the history of his years with Weigl (Eyer, 1967). Another interesting and partially related history of these years is by Lindenmann (2002), a Swiss Professor. Weigl helped to protect many of the unemployed university professors and their associates by employing them as lice feeders; such employment entitled to special food rations and made them at least partially immune from arrests, deportations and/or death during the Nazi occupation. Some aspects of employment in Weigl's Institute had some elements in common with Spielberg's Hollywood movie "Schindler's List". I wonder if it is significant that both Weigl and Schindler were born in Moravia and both were recognized byYad Vashem as "Righteous Among the Nations". Since feeding lice occupied the feeders for only one hour per day, and since the University (with exception of the Institute of Technology, renamed by Germans as "Technische Fachkurse") was closed by Nazis, the 'feeders' had the remaining time left for organizing the underground University courses and for other educational and patriotic activities. For instance, I was supervising a 'breeding unit' consisting of feeders who were mostly mathematicians of the famous Lwów school of mathematics, including the world famous professor, Stefan Banach, and others including Jerzy Albrecht, Felix Baranski, Bronislaw Knaster, Wladyslaw Orlicz, and also other scientists like Tadeusz Baranowski (biochemist), Ludwik Fleck (bacteriologist; Fleck, 1947), Seweryn Krzemieniewski and his wife Helena (both famous bacteriologists), and Krukowski (archeologist). Famous artist Stanislaw Skrowaczewski (with whom I studied piano under Florentyna Listowska) was also a lice feeder; he became a composer and a famous conductor of the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra, whom I was meeting frequently at his concerts in Madison, WI, in the Sixties or Seventies. Lwów school of mathematics was also known as "Scottish", not because of any direct relation to Scotland, but because of the name of the Kawiarnia Szkocka (Scottish Coffee House), where Lwowian mathematician were routinely meeting and solving their theorems on the paper napkins, on disposable table cloth, or in the famous Scottish Coffee House Volume. The first computer language ("Polish" or "reverse Polish", as used by the Hewlett-Packard Company) was also created by this group. It was intellectually very stimulating but also somehow surrealistic, to listen to their long discussions about frontiers of mathematics, including elements of topology and theory of numbers, while they were feeding lice. However, I had to watch that in the fervor of their discussion they did not overfeed lice, beyond 45 minutes, because our laboratory lice lost their natural instinct to stop feeding, with a disastrous consequence to them, because their guts started to burst due to'sucking' too much blood. During Nazi occupation of Lwów, 1941-44, Weigl used his fame and the pre-WW2 scientific connections with German biologists to protect all of us from Nazis. To achieve that, however, he also had to play dangerous and potentially questionable humanitarian role by being forced to produce his vaccine for Germans. At the same time, he had to resist a Nazi's offer to become a director of a special Institute to be established for him in Berlin and to become a German citizen called "Reichsdeutche". Despite great personal risks, he made a brave response in 1941/42 to an offer by a high-ranking German Army emissary (as combined with subtle threats); he said that: "As biologist, I know the phenomenon of death; it is to you to accept me as Polish professor of Polish nationality". He also added that "it might appear questionable for the German officer, to offer honors to a Polish Professor, who by accepting the German offer would have dishonored himself". The high-ranking German officer, apparently a Heinrich Himmler's representative, understood that Professor Weigl was neither to be threatened nor to be bought. Professor Weigl has described this dramatic exchange, thereafter, my father, Stefan, who in turn related it to me. There are also more elaborate versions of this exchange between Weigl and Himmler's representative. Weigl had a permission to have a radio, and allowed my father to listen to it and spread the political news among his trusted friends during this very bleak and sad time of the Lwowian history; this access to the radio was a blessing, since otherwise there was a death penalty for having a radio. Weigl was very courageous and not afraid to secretly cooperate with Polish Underground (AK or Polish Home Army) during Nazi occupation. Several shipments of Weigl's vaccine were surreptitiously and illegally delivered to the Warsaw ghetto and to other Nazi-established Jewish ghettos in other major cities, where typhus epidemics were rampant. My father, who was assisting Prof. Weigl in administration of the Exanthematous Typhus and Virus Research Institute, had more than once transported the vaccine to the Warsaw ghetto; I was helping him with that task and delivering the vaccine to Professor Ludwik Hirszfeld, as he describes it in his famous memoirs (Hirszfeld, 1989, pp. 267 and 269). Tomasz Cieszynski [whose father, Dr. Antoni Cieszynski, Professor of Stomatology of UJK, was murdered by Nazi Gestapo in Lwów in July 1941 (Albert, 1989b) as among the 25 massacred Professors of the UJK, Politechnika, and other Academic Schools of Lwów] has described one of the sessions in Weigl's office that preceded the second of the transports of Weigl's vaccine to the Warsaw ghetto by my father and me (Cieszynski, 1994). The importance of Weigl's vaccine in the Warsaw ghetto was stressed in the famous book by Szpilman (1946; 2002), who says that Weigl was "as famous as Hitler in the Warsaw ghetto", Weigl as a symbol of Goodness and Hitler as symbol of Evil. The 'death penalty' threatened all of us engaged in the illegal vaccine transportation, but this did not deter us, since the everyday life was more than dangerous anyway. As an example of an enormous loss of life in general, of 120 Lvovian chemistry students (about 10 Roman-Catholics, 10 Greek-Catholics and 100 Mosaic Jewish), who together with me succeeded to pass the Communist-administered entrance examinations as to enroll in October/November 1939 at the School of Chemistry of the Lwów Institute of Technology (Politechnika Lwowska, with its name being modified depending on the changing occupations), only 14 could be accounted for by 1944. (3) Re-occupation by Soviet Union in 1944 Although successfully resisting the "enticing" German offers in 1942/43, Prof. Weigl was not able to resist the unavoidable forced move in 1944 from Lwów to central Poland. Soviet army re-entered Lwów in July 1944, and Weigl's beloved city was ethnically cleansed by the Soviet administration, as a consequence of the abominable USA-approved Yalta/Potsdam acts (see Introduction), which authorized the forced and cruel deportations. The annexation of Lwów and its ethnic cleansing were secretly planned in advance and signed by Roosevelt, (later Truman), Churchill and Stalin during the Yalta and Potsdam Conferences. This was done treacherously, behind the back of the Polish Government in Exile in London, the staunch WW2 ally of USA and UK. Thus, USA was in fact promoting the second, practically total ethnic cleansing of Eastern Poland by Soviet Union. Such first ethnic cleansing, even a more cruel one, was perpetrated by USSR in the years 1939-41, as a result of the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939, but involved 'only' about 20% of the Lvovian population (and that of the Eastern half of Poland), because USSR did not have enough trains and time to deport to Siberia the entire population (Kopanski, 1997). Moreover, by this act USA was also approving all the atrocities inflicted upon Lvovians during and after WW2 by the Soviet Union, although USA could have easily prevented this unnecessary tragedy. A few thousand of survivors and descendants of the pre-WW2 Lwowians (of Polish citizenship) still remain in Lwów (presently Lviv) and try to preserve their heritage, including the Roman-catholic Cathedral, a few churches, and some very monumental and old cemeteries. CONCLUSIONS AND COMMENTS Weigl's scientific research flourished in Lwów, and led to the development of new approaches to study ricketsiology (and later virology) and to an effective anti-typhus vaccine. This happened in the period between WWI and WWII. Weigl's Institute remained very active during most of the WWII, but Weigl's association with Lwow became terminated concurrent with the 1944/45 annexation and ethnic cleansing of Lwów and Eastern Poland by the Soviet Union. This annexation in favor of Stalin was very unfair, since Poland, after all, was the first country, which on September 1, 1939 has resisted Hitler's aggression, whereas Stalin's USSR was Hitler's ally between 1939 and 1941. USSR was actively supporting Hitler's war effort by supplying Germany with train loads of war materials and food. On the other hand, a very secret small unit of the Lwowian underground was charged with disrupting the Soviet supplies for Hitler's armies, which were attacking Western Europe; our unit has derailed or destroyed several Russian-German transport trains in 1940 and up to June 1941 (using explosives, which were secretly produced also by myself as the student at Politechnika Lwowska in the laboratory of the Organic Chemistry Department directed by Professor Edward Sucharda and with his 'blessing'). Derailing Soviet trains had a doubly beneficial role for the Eastern Poland and Allies, since the same trains that carried Soviet supplies for Hitler's armies, were used also for cruel deportation to Siberia of the pre-WW2 Lvovian citizenry and that of Eastern Poland (Kopanski, 1997). During this period of close USSR-Nazi Germany cooperation, the USSR authorities have also confiscated practically all private property in Eastern Poland, including Lwów. These properties were never returned to the rightful owners (like, e.g., Professor Weigl, his family, many University Professors, including those who fed lice, or my family and myself), neither at the end of the WW2, nor even now. Moreover, the over 600 years of Polish history of Lwów and Eastern Poland, including many art galleries, museums, historical and scientific edifices, all that what was the essence of Polish culture, had perished as result of the forced resettlement and ethnic cleansing. This is the sad end to the personal fate of Prof. Weigl and many others like him, who gave so much to the science, medicine, and humanity in general, and as the'reward' were deprived of their roots and have lost everything, many of them their lives. One could add here, at the end, that the generally despised insect, louse, has played a double role during the WW2: it was not only a carrier of a dreaded disease, typhus, but ironically it was also protecting lives of those who worked with this insect and of those who were vaccinated with the product of Weigl's brilliant research effort. --- Moreover, one could also conclude that while Weigl was trying to help humanity by developing his insect cultivation methods and typhus vaccine, the Stalin's USSR (1939 - 1941 and after 1944) and Nazi Germany (1941 -1944) were engaged in murders and cruel deportations, whereas the naive and irresponsible USA policies of 1943-1950 were responsible for the further human misery in the USSR-dominated, annexed or occupied, but pre-WW2 independent Eastern and Central European countries, and moreover, for a definite possibility of a nuclear holocaust, which almost by miracle was avoided because of Stalin's death. Most of that seems to be now forgotten, and the insect louse plays practically no role in our lives. But the noble deeds, courage and scientific discoveries of Professor Rudolf Weigl and those associated with him should never be forgotten! ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Dr. Karl (Karol) Maramorosch, originally from the Kolomyja region, has encouraged and helped me to prepare this essay. The technical part of the louse breeding and vaccine production was based first on my imperfect memory, and then substantially rewritten based mainly on the publications of Stefan Krynski, Professor Emeritus of the Medical University of Gdansk (Krynski, 1967a-c, 1997; Krynski et al., 1994; and others below), who also read a late version of this manuscript, all that thanks to the generous help of Prof. Janusz Limon, Chairman of the Department of Biology and Genetics, Medical University of Gdansk. My memory was also refreshed and the manuscript was corrected by my brother, Stanislaw Szybalski, as acknowledged inthe text. Dr. Malina Kuczynska, Professor Emeritus of the Slask Institute of Technology in Gliwice, Poland, was extremely helpful in locating persons connected with the Weigl's Institute, including Dr. Jakub Cieszynski and his father Dr. Tomasz Cieszynski; the latter, a Professor Emeritus of the Medical Academy in Wroclaw, Poland, has spent very many hours correcting the latest versions of this manuscript and adding some crucial details (see also Cieszynski, 1994). Furthermore, I was helped by Profs. Jerzy Wegierski, Katowice (historia konspiracji), Jerzy Chmielowski, Chairman of the Department of Biochemistry of the Slask Institute of Technology in Gliwice, Poland, who is trying to erect a memorial plaque on the edifice of the former Weigl's Institute at the corner of Mikolaj and Dlugosz Streets in Lwów, Poland (presently Lviv, Ukraine), by Dr. Liliana Nitecka, and by my cousin, Dr. Romana Tuma (nee Bogdanska), one of the "feeders" and presently a retired ophthalmologist in Florida. I am also thankful to mgr. T. Burzynski of the Muzeum Narodowe Ziemi Przemyskiej in Przemysl for many references and drawings. Many others who helped me are mentioned in the text. The present version contains 15 photos, mainly from the Muzeum Narodowe Ziemi Przemyskiej, which were procured by Stanislaw Kosiedowski, who has kindly affixed those to my manuscript and who is very active in gathering the Weigl's history on his Internet pages: http://www.lwow.home.pl. I am very thankful to him.A California man and his dog are being credited with saving a man who was trapped for days in a hole on a mountain. Ramon Llamas says he and his dog, a mixed breed named Mole, were hiking as they often do on a trail in Riverside, Calif. when Mole suddenly stopped. "He kept on tugging at my pant and whining, pulling me," Llamas told MyFoxLA.com. Mole led Llamas to a hole about the size of a plate, and Llamas says when he looked in he saw eyes staring back. Llamas says he originally thought there was an animal trapped inside the hole, but then heard a voice calling softly for water. Llamas called over other hikers, who called 911, and gave water bottles to the man until paramedics arrived. Llamas told MyFoxLA.com the man, who is believed to be homeless, told him his name was Paul and he had become trapped while looking for shade. Officials say the man was hospitalized, but is expected to make a full recovery. "He'd be dead if it wasn't for that dog," one paramedic told MyFoxLA.com. Llamas says Mole's heroic actions haven't really sunk in yet. "...It hasn't really hit me yet," Llamas said. "Although he is a tough, good dog." Click for more from MyFoxLA.com.The ultrasn0w unlock for iOS 4.2.1 has been released and it works to unlock iPhone 3GS and iPhone 3G running iOS 4.2.1 on basebands 04.26.08, 05.11.07, 05.12.01, 05.13.04 in addition to 05.14 and 05.15 via updating to 06.15.00 iPad baseband. Using the ultrasn0w unlock isn’t complicated, but it’s a multi-step procedure that carries a few risks and first requires you to jailbreak your iPhone. Before you get started with the unlock, you need to consider the following: Important notes about iOS 4.2.1 unlock on iPhone 3GS and iPhone 3G Unlocking your iPhone voids your warranty from Apple For basebands 05.14 and 05.15 this iOS 4.2.1 unlock requires you to update to baseband 06.15 from iPad 3.2.2 firmware onto your iPhone, this can not be reversed You can not downgrade from baseband 06.15 (the iPad baseband), and you will no longer be able to restore to stock firmware. This means you will forever need to use your custom saved IPSW files! And finally, directly from the iPhone Dev Team: “iPhone3GS users with old bootroms who want to go to iOS 4.2.1 should not use PwnageTool! Update to stock iOS 4.2.1 first (through iTunes) then use redsn0w 0.9.6b5 to update your baseband.” It is important that you understand and accept these risks before proceeding. How to unlock iOS 4.2.1 on iPhone 3GS and iPhone 3G using ultrasn0w If you have older baseband, you can go straight to using ultrasn0w. You can update to iOS 4.2.1 from iTunes but this will update your baseband and require the use of the iPad firmware. Here are the steps to unlock, the process is basically the same with Pwnage or redsn0w: If you are using PwnageTool, Basebands 05.14 and 05.15 need to download this iPad IPSW file in addition to PwnageTool 4.1.3 Unlock Edition (Mac) You can also just download redsn0w 0.9.6b5 for Mac and Windows If using PwnageTool to create a new custom IPSW, use the aforementioned IPSW download (yes its for iPad). If using redsn0w 0.9.6b5, the app will automatically download the iPad IPSW for you Jailbreak your iPhone 3G or iPhone 3GS, pointing it at the newly created custom IPSW After your iPhone has been jailbroken, reboot the device and then launch Cydia Tap on “Manage” and then tap “Sources” Tap to “Edit” and then “Add” a repository, and then type the following: http://repo666.ultrasn0w.com After the repository has been added, you can search for “ultrasn0w” and download version 1.2 Download and install ultrasn0w 1.2, this will automatically unlock your iPhone 3GS and iPhone 3G Restart your iPhone and enjoy your unlock The process of jailbreaking and unlocking iPhones usually sounds more confusing than it is, just follow instructions carefully. The main problem with this unlock method is that certain baseband versions require the use of an iPad baseband which can not be reversed, this marks your iPhone in an obvious manner to Apple and this is why it voids your warranty with them. Jailbreaking is not illegal but it is frowned upon by Apple, however the difference between a standard jailbreak and this particular unlock is that jailbreaking is reversible, and this unlock is permanent. Update: the iPhone Dev Team forgot to include the proper bundle for iPhone 3GS users on 4.1 with PwnageTool 4.1.3, but you can fix it rather easily. Here are their comments on the matter: There’s an error in the bundle for the iPhone3GS 4.1 that prevents the new baseband from being used. If you know your way around OSX, please download the fixed bundle, and unzip it if Safari hasn’t already done so. Then “Show Package Contents” of PwnageTool.app, navigate to Contents->Resources->FirmwareBundles and drop it there. Otherwise, please wait for the updated PwnageTool, or the OSX version of redsn0w coming soon. Update 2: The redsn0w 0.9.6b5 download is now available for Windows and Mac, it’s an easier method to perform the jailbreak and unlock for many.\| Home \| Back to Background Information about Goldfish \| Back to Goldfish Varieties \| BRISTOL AQUARISTS' SOCIETY COMMON DISEASES OF FISH We reproduce here, with their kind permission, the table of 9 common diseases of fish from Practical Fishkeeping Magazine's Good Health
terrorists were popularly held responsible) gave Putin a chance to prove himself on the national stage, even as evidence seemed to link the FSB to the explosions. (An official investigation eventually laid the blame on an ethnic Karachay and Arabs reportedly linked to Al Qaeda.) Once again, there were rumors of uprisings and talk of revolt. The country seemed about to come apart. But what about the elections? I was watching television on the afternoon of December 31, 1999, when the network interrupted programming: Yeltsin would deliver an address. Something big was up: the president usually spoke before midnight, wishing Russians a happy new year just before the Kremlin bells sounded. The camera showed him seated before a New Year’s tree looking bloated. His speech seemingly impaired, he announced, wheezing, “Today, on the last day of the outgoing century, I am resigning. I’ve heard people say Yeltsin will hang on to power by any means, he’ll never hand it over to anyone. That’s a lie. … We’re setting the very important precedent of a civilized, voluntary transfer of power from one Russian president to another. … I’m leaving before my term ends. … Russia must enter the new millennium with new politicians.” And with one newly minted politician in particular, “a strong person worthy of being president, one to whom almost every Russian ties his hopes for the future … Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.” Startlingly, Yeltsin asked for forgiveness for all that had gone wrong and wished everyone a happy new year. The screen then faded to black, and Russia’s first president, from that moment on, began fading into history, rarely to be seen or heard about until his death in April 2007. But he would be remembered as the first president, general secretary, or tsar in Russian history to resign voluntarily. Later that day, Putin rang in the new year in a televised address, asserting, grimly, that there would be no vacuum of power and warning that any attempts to subvert the law or the constitutional order would be suppressed. That many Russians had simultaneously come to support the former spymaster and quietly blame his former agency for the bombings hardly seemed paradoxical by then. Post-Soviet Russia had proved an almost impossible country to govern; presumably, only a ruler as cunning as Putin could succeed at the task. In any case, Russia’s crisis-battered people wanted stability above all and did not necessarily associate it with the rule of law, something they had never known. Wearied by the chaotic Yeltsin years, Russians showed scant appetite for further politics. This would change only after Putin and his protégé, President Dmitry Medvedev, announced (offensively to so many, as if the electorate had no say) in September 2011 that they would swap jobs, just before tainted elections to the State Duma that brought crowds of angry demonstrators onto the streets. Putin soon benefited mightily, even fatefully, from macroeconomic trends beyond his control. When he assumed the presidency in 2000, Russia’s gross domestic product stood at a trillion dollars. Since then, GDP and per capita incomes have doubled, changes mostly attributable to an exponential growth in the price of Russia’s chief export commodities—oil and gas. The last traces of the dark, gritty, post-Soviet Moscow of the 1990s disappeared amid glitter and garish flashing lights, including those atop the black Volvos carrying the newly rich past Bolotnaya Square; housing complexes with palatial dachas began appearing throughout the suburbs; a surfeit of expensive restaurants opened; and Russians, not just the wealthy, but the middle class, started flocking to resorts on the Mediterranean, in the Seychelles and the Maldives. With standards of living continually rising, Putin, as he steered Russia back to authoritarian governance, managed to maintain a popularity rating, year after year, of 60 to 70 percent. The grim colonel of 1999 was gone, replaced by a tongue-lashing ruler as admired and buff as he was cheerless. The State Duma elections of 2011 upended everything: young Muscovites (mostly), outraged over instances of apparent fraud documented on various social networks, took to the streets, and a diverse array of opposition leaders followed. Which led to Shevchuk’s soulful performance on Bolotnaya Square. But there was one obvious problem: no opposition figure had managed to establish primacy, and almost none were sufficiently known outside Moscow (and St. Petersburg). Behind such disunity, some Russians—forgivably—saw the specter of disorder rise should Putin be forced out. Today, eight months after an anti-Putin rally in May turned violent (seemingly because of police action) on the day before Putin’s inauguration, the opposition movement has stalled, with some of its leaders mired in lawsuits launched by the authorities, others simply having returned to the sidelines. Few outsiders seem to care. Starting last summer, the State Duma went on a xenophobic legislative spree aimed at hitting back at the United States, which Putin accused of funding the demonstrators of the previous year. It passed laws raising fines on demonstrators more than a hundredfold, labeling NGOs engaged in political activity “foreign agents,” prohibiting NGOs from employing directors with U.S. nationality, felonizing defamation, allowing the authorities to block “harmful” websites, and even banning the adoption of Russian children by Americans. The Russian government has also terminated USAID’s 20-year presence, turned down American funds for further nuclear arms reductions, and ended cooperation in crime fighting. This may all be bad, but however much Duma deputies lambaste the United States on the airwaves, no anti-American hysteria has seized the population. No aura of crisis exists. The economy continues to grow, if sporadically. Stores are full; restaurants do brisk business. Most Russians want above all for the government to leave them alone, and so far it has. Still, long-term trends are worsening, with the population shrinking, corruption now sapping as much as a third of GDP, little investment going into infrastructure, and Russia’s hydrocarbon revenues threatened by increased U.S. gas production (thanks to fracking) and the return of Iraqi oil to world markets. Since late 2010 Putin’s popularity has steadily fallen and currently stands, according to the Levada-Center, a Russian polling organization, at 25 percent. It’s hard to imagine that he will complete his six-year term, but it is equally difficult to envision a scenario that would force his early departure. If I’ve lost the hope I felt on Bolotnaya Square last year, I do not share the pervasive Russian fatalism. The late Russian historian Nicholas Riasanovsky has given me reason for calm. In an edition of his seminal A History of Russia, written, I believe, during the Brezhnev stagnation years—a time when no one, despite obvious, deepening flaws in the Soviet system, could imagine how it could ever change—Riasanovsky wrote that history has a way of advancing, even when historians are baffled as to how. I agree. Bolotnaya Square is calm now, but maybe not for long.Forest for the Trees, a nonprofit bent on beautifying Portland with an ever-increasing number of street murals, is at it again. This week, the group brought 29 artists together to create a series of 19 street murals. The group, which began in 2013, is quickly transforming Portland into a hotbed of street art. This year, Forest For the Trees invited singer/songwriter John Gourley of Portland's own Portugal The Man to collaborate on a mural at the Ford Building in Southeast Portland. Gourley, a visual artist whose work adorns much of Portugal The Man's album releases, will collaborate with London-based artist INSA, and Zach Johnsen of Portland. Most of the murals will be completed by Sunday. But Gourley's won't happen until next week, when the band returns from touring. The Gourley/INSA/Johnsen collaboration will offer a unique viewing opportunity, thanks to an app developed by INSA that will allow viewers to take pictures of the mural and experience it in animated form. For more information, visit Forest For the Trees website here. You can also follow the group on Instagram at @ffttnw, or follow the hashtag, #ffttnw. Beth Nakamura 503-221-8218 Twitter: @bethnakamura Instagram: @bethnakamuraYeah, we're a sucker for a good Kinect hack, and we're a sucker for anything involving RC cars, too. Happy day for us, then, as the two come together in blissful harmony with this project from Michael Schweitzer and Michael Himmelsbach at the University of Bundeswehr Munich. It's a 1:10 scale auto with Microsoft's fancy cam mounted up front and what looks to be a surplus Dell XPS M1330 riding in style on the back. The laptop is running a simplified version of the object-avoidance software used by the team to propel a full-sized and similarly autonomous VW, obviously shrunken down a bit for this application. This little 'un is a little shaky right now, but that's largely because they haven't managed to get an accurate odometer working yet. Still, it does avoid obstacles, as you can see, and now all it needs is some Lexan bodywork before it can look pimpin' when cruising the strip -- autonomously, of course.: This post was updated to clarify how the object avoidance software was used previously.Get the biggest daily news stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email When more than a million people lined the route of the Queen Mother’s funeral, they were there to say farewell to a national treasure held in genuine affection. But there was growing fury last night that the same lavish send-off will be afforded to Margaret Thatcher – Britain’s most divisive PM who destroyed lives and shattered communities. And while the Queen Mum and Princess Diana before her went to their graves mourned by a grieving country, the former Tory leader will go to hers to the sound of bitter protests and anger at the fact the £10million ceremonial funeral will be paid for by hard-pressed taxpayers already being battered by savage cuts. Critics lined up to slam next Wednesday’s event and the £5million security operation that will swing into action to prevent the day descending into chaos amid increasing fears of violence along the route from Westminster to St Paul’s Cathedral. They pointed to the difference in the outpouring of grief for the Queen Mother and Diana after their deaths compared with the split opinions that met 87-year-old Lady Thatcher’s – where some groups were seen celebrating in the streets. A sea of flowers covered Kensington Gardens near Di’s home when she died in 1997. Yesterday, just a couple of bouquets lay outside the ex-PM’s house in Belgravia, Central London, along with a pint of milk – a reference to her early nickname as Thatcher the milk snatcher. (Image: PA) Labour MP John Mann led the calls for her funeral – with full military honours – to be paid for privately. He said: “No politician now or in the future should have their funeral paid for by the taxpayer. "I’m happy for them to have St Paul’s but there is an important principle here. Politicians should not have their funerals paid for by the taxpayer.” His colleague Graham Stringer called on a privatised industry such as BT to pay for the ceremony. He added: “I think that would be symbolic and beautifully appropriate. "The church service with military honours I have no difficulty with. She was Prime Minister at a time when we were at war with Argentina. “It is the taxpayers’ money which she always claimed she wanted to save.” Around 27,000 had last night signed an e-petition on the Government’s website expressing their anger at being forced to pay for the funeral of a woman who made £400 a minute from her speeches and was worth £9.5million – and once famously told European leaders: “No, no, no.” A similar protest on change.org had attracted 1,500 signatures yesterday. (Image: Mirrorpix) And hundreds of Mirror readers demanded Lady Thatcher’s entire send-off should be paid for her by her family rather than just a part of it which has been agreed. And they pointed out, her son Mark is said to be worth around £60million. Joan Harris said: “If the Tories and big business want Margaret Thatcher to have a lavish funeral, OK, but they should pay for it. "A very big proportion of the population hated her with a vengeance and do not feel we should pay for her funeral.” Janet Bowley added: “How dare they give this woman a funeral like Diana and the Queen Mother, it is a joke isn’t? "In this economic climate when we are all being asked to live on £53 per week where is the money for it coming from, it certainly should not be the taxpayer. “We could use £10million for the care of our elderly who are struggling from the policies she introduced all those years ago. "All the people whose lives she ruined who suffered and are no longer with us will be turning in their graves.” Pauline Hollins said: “Why should she get a funeral like Diana? Diana was loved for a start, all Thatcher did was completely ruin industry in this country. "Also why should we pay? The money should be going to those who really need it.” Denise Clendinning added: “Why don’t they just have a simple service like normal people? After all she won’t be here to hog the highlight. "Also, if she is having this special funeral then Tony Blair should have the same. He served three terms and he did a better job then she did. Why is she so special.” There was similar anger on Twitter. JJ Briden tweeted: “If UK cannot afford to support the poor, weak, sick & vulnerable, why are we paying for a millionaire tyrant’s funeral?” Cat Hartland-Welch added: “Why are we paying for the funeral of someone who privatised Britain? Pay millions for that but treat poor & disabled people like beggars.” The outcry came as it was revealed the Queen will break with protocol by attending the ceremony alongside key figures from world politics. President Barack Obama, Germany’s Angela Merkel, French leader Francois Hollande, former Soviet chief Mikhail Gorbachev and ex-US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger are on the invite list. Police across the capital have been ordered to cancel any leave they had planned for Operation True Blue next Wednesday. There could be more than 4,000 officers and 2,000 troops lining the route – numbers similar to those at Diana’s send off. With millions watching around the world, tensions will be high and senior officers are keen to avoid embarrassing incidents. They are considering using pre-emptive stop and search powers to prevent violence. Met chiefs are likely to use the Public Order Act, allowing police to stop anyone. A spokesman said a senior officer can implement the law where they have the “intelligence and grounds too suggest it is necessary”. Scotland Yard added: “We are mindful that this occasion has the potential to attract protest. “The Met wishes to speak to anyone who may chose to demonstrate on Wednesday, or in the coming days, so their right to protest can be upheld whilst respecting the rights of Baroness Thatcher’s family and those who wish to pay their respects.” Hundreds of specialist police will be working on counter-terrorism measures, with others carefully monitoring CCTV cameras for trouble spots. Every corner of the route will be checked by sniffer dogs, with sewers and drains closed. The Yard would not comment on the possible use of rooftop snipers. poll loading Should Margaret Thatcher have a ceremonial funeral? 8000+ VOTES SO FAR YES NO Read today's Daily Mirror leader column on the funeralA Google Street View team was recently sent to the town of Churchill in the Canadian province of Manitoba to map the northern area and capture images for the famous Google Maps feature. As expected, the team came very prepared, but still managed to have a very intimidating close encounter while shooting in the Arctic Tundra… Google’s Street View Trekker camera gives a 360-degree view so every possible angle is captured. It is normally carried on a backpack. Since the team was aware that the area is also the natural habitat of earth’s largest land predator, the polar bear, the camera was instead mounted on a special Tundra Buggy. During the expedition, the camera did in fact capture an adult polar bear. The big vehicle didn’t stop the animal that is known for its ferocity from taking a closer look. An adult male polar bear can weigh up to 1,550 lb. It’s an enormous animal. Hungry polar bears are extremely unpredictable, fearless towards people and are known to kill and sometimes eat humans. Whereas Grizzly bears often maul a person and then leave, polar bear attacks are more likely to be predatory and are almost always fatal. In fact, they are the only animal to see humans as prey and to actively hunt them. It’s a good thing that the Google team was out of reach! Still, at some point the team must have decided that the bear was too close for comfort and that they would be safer inside. And the bear finally lost interest. A team member took this picture from the buggy. What a magnificent creature. Churchill is known as the polar bear capital of the world, and is visited by thousands of tourists from around the world each year. Prime viewing times are in October and November, when the bears begin their move from their summer habitat on the tundra back to seal-hunting territory – the pack ice that forms every winter over Hudson Bay. Source: Dailymail To explore Churchill in Google Street View and see if you can spot a polar bear, click here. What a story. Share this with your friends below, and see if they would be brave enough to visit Churchill.L.A. City Attorney Mike Feuer announced on Thursday the filing of criminal charges against 25 people involved in five casting workshops, alleging that they charged aspiring actors for auditions in violation of state law. The charges follow a year-long investigation, in which an undercover actor working for the City Attorney’s office attended 13 workshops given by five companies. Among those charged are 18 instructors at those workshops, including casting directors and their assistants. “As the entertainment capital of the world, Los Angeles continues to attract thousands of aspiring performers from across the world. Unfortunately, pay-to-play casting schemes often exploit their dreams, purely for profit,” Feuer said in a statement. “My office will continue to crack down on those who would take advantage of performers desperate for work.” The defendants each face up to a year in county jail and a $10,000 fine if convicted. The charges involve five workshop companies: The Actor’s Link, The Actor’s Key, Actors Alley, The Casting Network, and Studio Productions. Under the Krekorian Talent Scam Prevention Act, passed in 2009, casting workshops are forbidden from charging a fee for access to auditions. Related Talent Manager Sentenced to Probation for Charging Upfront Fees Unlicensed L.A. Talent Agency Charged With Scamming Child Actor SAG-AFTRA released a statement supporting the prosecution. “Preying on the hopes and dreams of artists is one of the oldest scams in Hollywood,” said the union’s general counsel, Duncan Crabtree-Ireland. Among the defendants are casting directors and associates with extensive film and TV credits, including: — Ty Harman, who did casting on Netflix’s “Santa Clarita Diet” — Scott David, who worked on the CBS show “Criminal Minds” — Becky Silverman, of “Criminal Minds,” “Girlfriends’ Guide to Divorce” (Bravo), and “American Horror Story” (FX) — Nancy Foy, a former 20th Century Fox casting executive — Peter Pappas, of “Two and a Half Men” (CBS) and “The Big Bang Theory” (CBS) — Rachel Rose Oginsky, of “Masters of Sex” (Showtime) and “Suits” (USA) — Eddie Jaszek, of ABC’s “Castle” and “Agent X” (TNT) — Miriam Hoffman, of CBS’s “The Millers”Yes, the news has finally broken. Final Fantasy VII, Square Enix's most beloved spiky haired JRPG, is coming back to PC. The new version will be updated and optimised for modern PCs, with achievements and cloud saves. Please feel free to make your own 'Cloud saves' joke here. Everyone else has. Final Fantasy VII was originally released on PC in 1998, six months after its console release, but the game is usually more associated with the Playstation, partly because the port wasn't very good. The new version will hopefully run a little better, and it's also bringing cloud saving, which is always welcome, and achievements, which are always... there. There's also one more new feature, which is a little more controversial, it's called the 'character booster', and according to the Final Fantasy VII website it'll let you boost your HP, magic and money to maximum. I assume it's being included as a kind of super easy mode, or a way to cut out excessive grinding. Still it's a bit odd to see it advertised in this way. Final Fantasy VII is apparently coming out very soon, but in a surprising move, Square aren't going to be releasing it on any of the major digital distribution methods. Instead it will only be available through the Square Enix store, which I've never bought anything from. Have any of you?Continued from yesterday. In some cases, Moore’s claims not to have read works which he goes on to criticize might be read as a case of feigned ignorance as a form of politeness. The specific reference, which prompted Moore’s rather absurd claim not to have read super-heroes since Watchmen, was to Geoff Johns’s Green Lantern work. Moore’s made disparaging comments about Johns’s work before. Yet here, rather than slam Johns or make his Green Lantern the scapegoat for more generalized super-hero trends, Moore pretends not to have read Johns (nor any super-heroes since 1987!) in order to focus instead on these general trends. There’s arguably a form of collegiality here, in refusing to start what would be an inevitable internet fight with Johns (whom Moore might also have read, but not so closely as to feel comfortable dissecting). But this professional kindness towards Johns is accomplished by implying that Johns is part of a huge crop of comics writers who are not really worth reading, and the practical effect is to keep Johns out of the conversation. If you’re the President of the United States, you don’t engage with bloggers because it can only elevate them and make you look small. If you’re the King of Mature Comics, or representing yourself as such, you probably don’t want to put Geoff Johns on your level. If Moore’s trying to be polite by not attacking Johns’s work by name, he’s not so kind elsewhere. In the same interview, in discussing influence in art, Moore apparently can’t resist misrepresenting Grant Morrison. He claims that Morrison’s “confessed” to “a tactic of not only basing some of his narratives on my style or my work but also trying to make himself more famous by slagging me off at every opportunity.” Now, there’s certainly a lot of bad blood between these two, but Moore’s claim here is still an almost certainly willful distortion. Morrison has indeed “confessed” to copying Moore’s style… on the first four issues of Animal Man, way back in 1988. He thought that was what DC wanted (which incidentally, is something Moore should cite, since it substantiates Moore’s astounding influence on comics). Writers often imitate other writers’ style; that’s part of being a versatile writer. Moore himself has brilliantly channeled other writers, including Shakespeare in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier. The question is whether a writer does nothing else, or what the context was for a stylistic borrowing. By Moore’s own standards, Chris Claremont and Michael Moorcock could make similar charges against Moore himself. It might actually be a better criticism of the 1988 Grant Morrison to say his first four Animal Man issues aren’t a particularly good pastiche of Moore, or that they appropriate some of the worse traits of Moore’s 1980s writing, such as the purple prose Moore sometimes brought to Swamp Thing. And if you actually read the series, the very next issue – Animal Man #5 — is a revelation. It’s pure Grant Morrison, and it’s miles beyond the first four issues. Today, Morrison’s Animal Man is widely celebrated and beloved, but never for those first four issues. The moral of the story, for anyone who knows the work even superficially, isn’t that Morrison’s a shameless and self-confessed Moore clone; it’s that writers become great by moving beyond aping and by finding their own styles, precisely as Moore claims in the very same paragraph in which he slams Morrison. Moore’s using Morrison to illustrate someone who doesn’t do this, but Moore’s citation actually supports the precise opposite of what he wants it to. On top of this, it’s sad that Morrison’s “confession” of influence, in this case, has been met with charges that Morrison’s entire career amounts to plagiarism of Alan Moore. We want writers to be honest about their influences and intents. It’s useful to both fans and scholars. And it contrasts sharply with Moore absurdly pretending he hasn’t read any super-hero comics since 1987. (This would include Morrison’s Animal Man; one might ethically be expected to at least skim someone’s work before charging him with ripping off your style.) Moore’s claim that Morrison has tried “to make himself more famous by slagging me off at every opportunity” also misrepresents the facts. To the extent that Morrison has “confessed” to this, what’s specifically referenced here isn’t Morrison’s entire career, as Moore’s statement might imply. The only thing to which this can refer is “Drivel,” a column Morrison wrote for the British comic Speakeasy in 1990. The column’s editorial directive was to “take the piss out of the comics scene at the time,” in Morrison’s words. Morrison, then 30, adopted an exaggerated persona for the column, which he says was “partly inspired by the Morrissey interviews I enjoyed reading.” Morrison donated his fee for the column to the Blue Cross, most people got the joke, and Moore was only one of its targets. The column’s haunted Morrison ever since, and has often been quoted out of context to make Morrison seem like an enfant terrible, which in fairness is a fair characterization of the persona adopted for the column. He’s seemed embarrassed by it when he addresses it. Its goal wasn’t “to make [Morrison] more famous,” although it did prove a popular feature. To my knowledge, it’s the one time Morrison’s “confessed” to deliberately “slagging” anyone, and it had a context that makes citing it as such a confession more than a little problematic. This isn’t to say that Morrison’s always been kind to Moore. The two have been going at this for a while, and Morrison sometimes veers into the frustrated and exaggerated language of “always” and “never” when discussing Moore. Morrison claimed in Rolling Stone that Moore was “obsessed with rape.” Now, Moore does use rape in several of his works, and scholars do interpret this. Morrison’s underlying observation, that Moore’s use of rape needs more attention, isn’t wrong. But he’s not the best person to say it, given the history. Morrison didn’t do himself any favors by adding, “I managed to do thirty years in comics without any rape!” — which isn’t true. So there’s a pretty long and bitter history here. At this point, the issue certainly can’t be whether one has slagged the other. But to claim Morrison has done so for reasons of career advantage, or has confessed to doing so, is something of a different sort. It might also be pointed out that no one seems to accuse Moore (who’s the one who’s stated that starting fights can help careers) for going after Morrison to drum up attention for the comic-book adaptation of his unproduced screenplay Fashion Beast. I don’t believe that’s true, incidentally, but I also don’t believe Morrison has such a motivation. Morrison’s criticism of Moore, whether fair or unfair, essentially boils down to Moore not being accurate or nice or fair, or being “obsessed with rape,” or Watchmen being brilliant but antiseptic in a way that Morrison turned artistically against. But Morrison’s been consistent in admitting that Moore’s work is brilliant, and it continues to excite Morrison, as when Morrison made waves earlier this year with his interpretation of Batman: The Killing Joke‘s ending. Moore’s criticism, here and elsewhere, implies that Morrison is illegitimate. That his career is owed to Alan Moore, through recommending him to Karen Berger or through Morrison somehow ripping off and bashing Alan Moore. If you believed everything said by Morrison about Moore, you’d believe Moore was weird and a dick. If you believed everything Moore said about Morrison, you’d believe Morrison was a fraud who doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously as a writer, much less spoken in the same breath as the King of Mature Comics. These are, in fact, two very different things. It’s a telling difference, which ought to recall Moore’s similar brushing off Geoff Johns as beneath direct engagement. Moore’s making an argument here that’s less about Morrison or Johns than Moore’s own place in comics history. Essentially, Moore’s claiming that he’s the King of Mature Comics, and that — outside of a few exceptions (the undergrounds, Neil Gaiman, China Miéville) — nothing else still measures up. Everything after him can be read as a series of footnotes to him: a few interesting works, a lot of pale imitations, and some outright plagiarism. If you had to boil down Moore’s statements about Morrison and most comics writers since 1987 (with a few notable exceptions), it would be this: “I haven’t actually read them, but I’m told that they suck for the following very specific reasons.” The literal truth of Moore’s claim not to have read super-heroes since Watchmen isn’t really worth discussing. Moore may not be anywhere near as fluent about the current state of corporate super-hero universes as he was in 1987, but that’s saying something else entirely — and you’d be surprised how many current writers for the Big Two could say the same. What we’re witnessing, in Moore’s statements about other super-hero writers, is obviously less a statement about objective facts and more a case of authorial self-fashioning. It’s nothing new, to those who study wider literary history, in which many writers have claimed never to have read their rivals’ work, even when we know this not to be the case. Of course, this is a way of dismissing one’s rivals, but it’s a way of dismissing influences and comparisons one doesn’t wish critics to make, a response to the fact that it’s critics, not artists, who ultimately determine what a work means or how to understand it. Artists don’t control that, and this can be intensely frustrating for them. Some artists accept this, or even embrace good criticism of their own work; they know interpretation is something they can’t fully control, and the best they can do is hope smart interpretations win out over time — and meanwhile, get their own voice out amid the critical chorus. Others rail against their powerlessness, seeking to control their place in history or how works are interpreted, and withdrawing when they can’t. Continued tomorrow, with an analysis of Alan Moore’s Guardian interview as if a character’s dialogue… and why Alan Moore needs a hug.According to news reports, Donald Trump wanted the House Republican tax “reform” bill to be called the Cut Cut Cut Act. Alas, he didn’t get his wish, and it was instead given a boring name nobody can remember. But there’s still time to change it! So let me propose, as one reader suggested, that it be renamed the Leona Helmsley Act, after the New York hotelier convicted of tax evasion, who famously declared that “only the little people pay taxes.” That, after all, is the main thrust of the bill. It hugely favors the wealthy over the middle class, which is pretty much always true of Republican proposals. But it’s not just about favoring high incomes: It also systematically favors people who live off their assets, especially inherited wealth, over the little people — that is, poor shlubs who actually have to work for a living. To get an idea why, consider four hypothetical taxpayers and how they would fare under the G.O.P. bill. First is the poster child family Paul Ryan keeps talking about, a family with two children making $59,000 a year. In the first year of the Cut Cut Cut Act, such a family would indeed receive a tax cut. But this cut comes from several special tax credits that are basically loss leaders to help sell the plan; they all either expire in later years or will get eroded by inflation. By 2027, with the plan fully phased in, that exemplary family would actually be facing a significant tax increase relative to current law.The Los Angeles Lakers understood that the entire dynamic of the roster was going to change when they drafted Lonzo Ball with the No. 2 overall pick in the 2017 NBA Draft. Ball immediately adds to the up-tempo dynamic, which will allow teammates like Julius Randle, Kentavious Caldwell-Pope and Brook Lopez to prosper. Randle in particular could benefit from the addition of Ball, who will get Randle the ball in much better positions for easy baskets, something head coach Luke Walton hopes to see. Walton sat down for an interview on The Lowe Post podcast with ESPN’s Zach Lowe and Walton confidently stated that Randle’s offseason workouts will allow him to out hustle and outrun most of his big man counterparts: I envision with the way we’re gonna be playing next year and guys flying down the wings and Lonzo looking up to throw ahead anytime you can beat your man I just envision him just outrunning people all day, getting rebounds flying up himself, playmaking. While Randle wasn’t necessarily out of shape last season, he has worked with new Strength and Endurance coach Gunner Peterson in order to improve his body. Randle has slimmed down tremendously this offseason, losing a lot of body fat and developing his core muscle and stamina. Walton continued on about Randle during the interview, giving an anecdote about how he and his power forward have worked one-on-one. In fact, Walton is helping Randle progress towards a former player of his in Draymond Green: We’ve sat down and watched a lot of Draymond film together […] They’ve talked on the phone and we sit down and watch film as far as what his reads are when he’s coming off and he’s into it. He wants to get better, he wants to learn and I’m hoping it’s a big year for him. President of basketball operations Magic Johnson is also envisioning big things from Randle, foreseeing a breakout season from the 2014 draft pick. Randle already gave fans a brief preview into the future when he stated that he and his teammates will have fun playing alongside Ball, who will make their jobs that much easier on the floor. The 22-year-old averaged 13.2 points, 8.6 rebounds and 3.6 assists last season, while shooting 48.8 percent from the field.Cal students in the Doe Library at UC Berkeley. She was in the second semester of her freshman year at the University of California, Berkeley, when Monica Mata started to worry she might never make it to graduation. But Mata managed to overcome academic struggles and personal challenges to reach her junior year, and now she’s confident she’ll graduate, thanks in part to help from a federal Pell grant based on her family’s low income. If she does get to the finish line, she will avoid the fate of a huge proportion of her fellow recipients of federal Pell grants. A Hechinger Report analysis of Pell grant graduation rate data from a cross section of colleges and universities — which is not otherwise publicly reported anywhere — suggests that billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded Pell grants nationwide go to students who never earn degrees. And while some schools with large numbers of Pell recipients have strong graduation rates for those students, the ones receiving the biggest share of the money often do not. The government itself does not collect this data, meaning that, since 2000, taxpayers have spent $300 billion on Pell grants — the nation’s single most expensive education program, awarded based on family earnings to help low-income students get access to higher educations — with no way of knowing how many of the recipients ever actually earned degrees. In a quirk of federal policy, individual institutions do have to disclose the graduation rates of their students who receive Pell grants, when asked. And while some resisted doing so, or released them only in response to public-record requests, the Hechinger analysis of 32 of the largest private and 50 of the largest public universities — and tens of thousands of Pell grant students — shows that more than a third of Pell recipients at those schools hadn’t earned degrees even after six years. (Click here to see Pell grant graduation rates for the schools surveyed.) “We’re talking huge amounts of money and huge numbers of people,” said Richard Vedder, an economist and director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity. Related: Americans making under $30,000 can already send their children to college for free Pell grants cost taxpayers $31.4 billion in fiscal year 2015, more than double what was spent on them in 2007. Since then, the maximum award has increased by more than $1,200 per student per year and the number of students applying for the grants is up by 7 million. The program has grown so fast that Republicans have proposed freezing the maximum annual Pell award at the current $5,775 for the next 10 years. The money given to the students first goes to the college to pay tuition and fees, and anything left over can be used for books and living expenses. Unlike loans, Pell grants do not have to be repaid, whether or not a student ever graduates. Most recipients of Pell grants come from families earning less than $40,000 a year. In January 2014, Congress gave the Department of Education 120 days to produce, for the first time, Pell grant graduation rates for every university and college in the country. The department finally released the months-overdue report in November, but did not break down the information by institution, citing problems with the data, and was only able to analyze 70 percent of Pell recipients. Only 39 percent of the 1.7 million students in its sample earned a bachelor’s degree in six years. But every college should already know Pell grant graduation rates. The 2008 Higher Education Opportunity Act requires them to tell prospective students the graduation rates of Pell recipients if asked, but
read a lot into the fact this article has been released in Korean only, given it’s then less likely to be commented on by international media,” Feinstein added. Picture: Wikipedia Creative CommonsImage via Wikimedia The only known photograph of Amadu Bamba was taken in 1913, but you can’t see him in it. Or rather, you can see him, but only by suggestion. The French colonial authorities had placed him under house arrest in Diourbel, Senegal, and the framing of the picture has the naïve objectivity of a mug shot. In the background are the knotted plank walls of a mosque and at the bottom are the jagged contours of rocks and sand, but at the center is a puzzling absence, where the searing white of Bamba’s robe seems to have burned away the celluloid. Left behind are molten puddles of film where his face and feet should be. Amadu Bamba was a learned Sufi Muslim, a popular teacher, and a wali Allah, a “friend of God,” a saint. Sufis dedicate themselves to retrieving the traces of divine essence buried in the blood of human experience. They know it exists because, at the creation of Adam, God commanded his angels, “And when I have fashioned him and breathed into him of My Spirit, then fall down before him prostrate.” The Arabic word for “spirit” is the same for “breath,” and Sufis engage in marathon recitations of the shahada and dhikr (the names of Allah), the transformation of empty air into the words of divine truth, until they themselves become nothing but a continuous prayer. Bamba was a master of words. “Thanks to the Koran, I have come into the presence of my Lord / I have mastered my soul and distanced myself from Satan,” Bamba averred in his poem “Passport to Paradise.” The evidence of his boast was in the verse. Senegalese people will tell you that the Arabic rhymes so perfectly it could only be divinely inspired. His other writings bore similar proof. Students swarmed to him. Bamba founded his own tariqa, a Sufi brotherhood dedicated to the edification of acolytes. Amadu Bamba’s disciples would not be mere pupils, tullab, but fellow aspirants, muridun, and his brotherhood became the Muridiyya. The French, suspicious of this massive communion among subjects they did not trust seeking a God they did not know, exiled Bamba to Gabon and then Mauritania. House arrest had been a kind of reprieve. But to monitor Bamba’s movements, the French sought to fix his image, so they dispatched a man with a camera into the hinterland to catch the sage on film. Sufi epistemology rests on the fundamental unity of zahir (the manifest) and batin (the hidden). The first is the world known to the senses. The second is the essential nature of creation known to God and revealed to his prophets and saints. Whatever the camera captured with the soft flutter of its aperture, it belonged only to the apparent world of things. The French tried to capture the Amadu Bamba they thought they wanted: the image and body of a subject. But Bamba had seen the secret universe of heaven, had articulated its mysteries in verse and channeled its power in miracles, and part of him was unseen and unknowable. The photograph was proof. You don’t see a man, but a void and a shadow, the invisible and its indication. The Muridiyya survived Bamba and French rule, led by the grand caliphs and lesser marabouts, or Sufi religious advisers, all descendants of Bamba and therefore imbued with the divine blessing—baraka in Arabic—Bamba attained from God. The picture survived, too, reproduced in paintings, drawings, and murals all over Senegal. Every Murid hopes the image holds baraka that will bless him, too, so the saint appears everywhere: hanging in living rooms, leering from posters in open-air markets, scrawled on walls and buses. Muslim extremists, often backed by fundamentalists in the Middle East, have violently subjugated Sufis to jihad as far south as Nigeria…. In the lingering dusk of such violence, Senegalese Sufism appears once again as a faith of possibility, the potential for a popular, democratic Islam. These images were Bamba as I found him in the streets of Dakar. His picture competed with the graffiti left over from Senegal’s presidential election last spring. The incumbent, Abdoulaye Wade, a Murid, had insisted that term limits did not apply to him. When the Senegalese took to the streets to prove him wrong, his police pelted them with tear gas and killed them. The people, in turn, set up flaming barricades, masked themselves with bandanas, hoisted signs, and otherwise enacted the rawest examples of democracy. The pictures seemed atavistic compared to the campaign posters they competed with, but Bamba and his order have always been tied to Senegal’s modern fate. Islam has existed in what would become Senegal since the tenth century, a mere three hundred years after the death of Muhammad. Mature Sufism, however, only reached Senegal in the eighteenth century. The timing was fortuitous. The old Wolof kingdoms soon fell to European colonialism. The legalistic Islam of their court clerics fell with them. Sufi mysticism offered an alternative for renewal, and orders like Bamba’s became bastions of resistance and nascent democracy. Today, the legalists are back. Muslim extremists, often backed by fundamentalists in the Middle East, have violently subjugated Sufis to jihad as far south as Nigeria. In September 2012, insurgents ruling parts of neighboring Mali, a coalition including al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, desecrated Sufi mosques and the tombs of saints from Gao to Timbuktu, condemning them as artifacts of profane magic. They perpetrated this destruction in addition to stoning people, beating them, or cutting off their hands. The French army has since subdued the Islamists, but in the lingering dusk of such violence, Senegalese Sufism appears once again as a faith of possibility, the potential for a popular, democratic Islam. What remained of Amadu Bamba’s legacy after 2012’s spring of discontent? In my ignorance, I went looking for an answer from a supreme authority, Serigne Sidy Mokhtar, the current grand caliph of the Murids and Amadu Bamba’s grandson, the last indisputable seat of the saint’s soul. I hoped to find in him the same living spirit Senegalese people found in those pictures all over Dakar, where the salty sea wind blew hot and evanescent as breath. * * * I needed a guide. I would get two. The first was my friend and translator, Thomas Faye, a Senagalese reporter for the Associated Press whose face recalled Barack Obama’s. But Thomas is a member of the Tijaniyya, a bellicose order of Sufi wise men who famously declared armed war against the French in the first decades of their colonial rule. Thomas didn’t have a lot of intimates among Murids. He would need an assistant. Mody Gadiaga was an improbable squire. He looked like a sea lion, not only because of his paunch or his whiskers or the odd, blubbery lump at the base of his neck, but also because of the vacancy in his dark eyes. He was a “businessman” in the way a Mafioso might use the word, a catchall term (another is “mechanic”) used by Senegalese men to give the odd or illegal jobs they work the consistent sense of occupation in a country with a 50 percent unemployment rate. But Thomas assured me Mody had connections in the brotherhood, an unlikely prospect for a guy we found sitting in a lawn chair on the street. Other than our first meeting, he never spoke directly to me. He seemed less a companion than a giant friendly specter guiding us through Dakar and the parched savanna. I asked about the pictures of Bamba. “Of course I know the picture. I have some all over my house. From one glance, I can see his power and I get positive feelings,” Mody said. He’d seen his own visions. “I wasn’t always a Murid. I used to be a bad boy. I used to smoke cigarettes and drink beer and smoke marijuana. Then one night, twenty-two years ago, I had a dream. Saliou Mbacké, the last son of Amadu Bamba and the fifth Grand Caliph, appeared to me where I lay and said, ‘Get up.’ In the dream, I got up, and a policeman approached me and beat me. From that night on, I stopped everything.” When he woke up, Mody sought out the one marabout, personally ordained by Saliou Mbacké. His name was Bethio Thioune. At the moment I met Mody, Thioune was in prison awaiting trial for complicity in murder. Apparently, two of his disciples had claimed Thioune was God. Thioune allegedly executed them for their blasphemy, and then had their bodies unceremoniously dumped in the bush. Thioune had always been suspiciously worldly. In addition to his fervent students, he was most famous for the frequent parties at his many homes, bacchanals of almost Roman orgiastic excess, where cows were slaughtered in herds for feasting and instant “marriages” were blessed for consummation. “Some marabouts are not real marabouts—they don’t have baraka—but some students are easily duped,” Mody explained. I wondered how a good marabout could be in prison for conspiracy. According to Sufi thinking, it’s difficult to know how holy a person is. “A person ascends certain levels to God,” Lamane Mbaye, professor of literature at Cheikh Anta Diop University, later explained to me. “The order tries to help people reach the levels they can, but some levels are beyond different people. It’s not always easy to know what a person has or has not achieved.” In other words, the path of the soul does not always reflect the path of one’s life. A person may be more holy than they appear. “Amadu Bamba took Sufism down from the clouds and put it in the world.” Mody put it another way. “It is hard to tell how much baraka a marabout has. It can only be judged from miraculous things,” he said. “I have seen my marabout raise a boy from a coma in a hospital. He has prayed for me and made my business better and I threw myself into work.” Work was Amadu Bamba’s signal ritual invention. For a long time, Sufism had insisted on the renunciation of earthly life so that a student could do nothing but learn secret prayers and mystical sciences from his teacher while seeking freedom from the body and its weakness. Bamba’s insight was that meditation was only one way to escape earthly appetites. Another was to discipline the body. To the students who could never comprehend the mysteries of the Koran or had a family to feed, labor was one more way to seek the transcendence their brethren sought in their liturgies and prayers. “To the Murid, working is almost like praying,” was how Professor Mbaye put it. “From work, you will receive the fruit of faith.” The point was easily adapted to politics. “In a word, the development of Senegal depends upon the keystone of Mouridism: the cult and the mystique of work,” Abdoulaye Wade, a former president of Senegal, said upon his first election to office in 1998. But before it developed any economy, the Murid cult of work did something else: it democratized Sufism. It lowered a ladder to farmers, who could practice Sufi arts by working their lands. Precocious Sufis could dedicate themselves to prayer, others could expel their breath in toil. Professor Mbaye said, “Amadu Bamba took Sufism down from the clouds and put it in the world.” This was the world inhabited by Mody Gadiaga, “businessman” and mystic. * * * The brutish ruins of the Niary Tally mosque lie adjacent to the bustling thoroughfares of Dakar’s Biscuiterie district, where nothing sweet remains, only a poison cloud of petroleum fumes and the squawks of desperate textile sellers. I would not have even recognized the hollowed cavern as a mosque had I not followed Mody—loping awkwardly with his pinniped waddle—inside. The place was only twenty years old, but its concrete façade was already falling away to reveal gnarled claws of rebar grasping skyward. At the front of the prayer niche, the imam, Serigne Cheikh Diakhaté, was concluding the afternoon prayer. He looked like what I expected a Sufi holy man to look like, wizened and crumpled, his body laid waste by lived experience, shrouded in the angelic white of a dazzling boubou, a floor-length gown. He spoke with a dignified whisper, as if his words were collapsing under the weight of the mysteries they conveyed. Mody knelt before him in supplication, greeting him in the Murid manner, knocking his forehead against the back of the imam’s palm the way he knocked his head against the floor during prayer, and told the imam why we were here. “Well, let’s start from the beginning. To be a Murid, you have to be a Muslim. This means accepting that there is no God but Allah and that Muhammad is his Prophet. It means respecting the five pillars so you can go to paradise,” he said. “Amadu Bamba wanted his followers to do all these things. But he also wanted to add another thing: the path to experiencing God in this life. So he wrote songs and poems—khassaid—to enlighten the people.” Bamba considered his literary output his greatest miracle: seven metric tons of manuscripts, according to legend. It had been miraculous enough that he, a black man, had learned fluent Arabic. There was no earthly accounting for his production. Bamba claimed he was visited by the Angel Gabriel. Others said each of his ten fingers transformed into quills. Still other myths claimed that the individual letters of the Arabic alphabet came to life, announced themselves to the holy man, and arranged themselves into poetry. Like everything else in the Sufi universe, words have a hidden side separate from what they say and appear to mean. The Koran is taken to be complete—it is the ultimate revelation of God’s design—but its individual words retain a creative power left over from their aspiration in the mouths of God’s angels. This is the language of heaven, of God’s creation, and every utterance of the Arabic alphabet is a distant echo of God’s voice. Bamba took inspiration from this fact for his writing. He especially cherished one of God’s sacred names, al-Badi, “The Originator,” that face of the godhead that called into oblivion and brought forth a universe. Many Senegalese people learn to read Arabic but don’t know what it means. So Bamba incorporated the shahada and the names of God into songs, so his followers could remember the rhythm of the words if not their meanings and so properly remember Allah. It was ingenious. Bamba’s songs, informed by the Sufi theory of language, erased the distance between word and meaning, between the divine and its inscription: God is in the words. Bamba’s Arabic, shorn of referents, unconstrained by semantic expectations, becomes the melody of pure faith. “A saint exists to show the way,” Cheikh Diakhaté continued. “He does not supersede Muhammad, but writes odes so things can be made clear and leads people in prayer, so that they may better understand the Koran, the Prophet, and the Prophet’s life. He provides evidence to those who cannot see God.” In Bamba’s words: “The perfection of the miracles of the Prophet / Is found in the miracles of a saint / Because they inherit that perfection from the Prophet. / And the saints are the evidence of the Lord. / The saints are the signs of the authenticity / Of His Religion and His Truth.” The saint is an echo of God, a shadow of Muhammad, and his miracles are the evidence of things not seen. By now, the other dignitaries at the front of the niche, the kind of men wearing expensive waxen boubous that crinkled when they moved, were leaning in, smiling mischievously, wondering what advice their imam would give this hapless initiate. “So Amadu Bamba was foremost an educator. His job was to educate people. And they followed him into the wilderness, to Touba. There, they could be together, they could write and work, and over one hundred years, it became the second biggest city in Senegal.” Bamba’s charisma literally summoned cities from the desert. “If you want to find the saint, go to Touba, and you will find him.” * * * “If we’re going to Touba, you need a boubou,” Thomas said. We were waiting outside his house, in a car rented to go to the holy city of the Murids. “It is essential that you have one. I have a Baye Fall one I can give you.” The Baye Falls are a kind of mendicant sub-order of the Murids. Rather than the elegant solid colors of a rich devotee, I would be cloaked in tatters of Dutch wax print quilted together. I understood the aesthetic reflected the Baye Falls’ ethic of extreme frugality, and that it would better conceal my spiritual poverty, but, when I put it on during the drive, I still looked like the spawn of a mutant loom. “Ah! Look at that!” Thomas said. Mody pulled back his whiskers to reveal an approving smile. We were finally on the road, a motley pack of pilgrims: me, Thomas, Mody, and a driver, also named Mody. (“There are a lot of Modys in Senegal,” Thomas explained.) We were in a car, breakfasting greedily on croissants, moving east, and our pilgrimage finally had a sense of momentum. Touba is only one hundred miles east of Dakar, but the pulverized highway and the boundless grassland made it feel much farther. The road stretched unswervingly eastward, away from the soothing sea air of the capital and into the unforgiving glare of the savanna sun. The city announced itself from a distance. A minaret—the tallest in Sub-Saharan Africa—escaped the curvature of the earth and broke the horizon, marking the location of the Great Mosque of Touba. “There’s the mosque! That’s where you can find Amadu Bamba,” Thomas said. He meant that we would find Bamba’s mausoleum inside. Closer to its center, Touba transforms into a Muslim amusement park relentlessly assuring believers they have indeed found the place for which they have been yearning. There are stalls hawking Korans and Koran necklaces, so you can carry the Koran around your neck at all times. There are prayer beads and pictures of saints. Dwarfing everything are the minarets of the Great Mosque, glittering like a fairy castle. The mosque is not the only material fantasy Touba has realized. The city’s exemption from civilian control once made it the epicenter of the West African black market. The many mansions of the marabouts, paid for and serviced by devout disciples, are clustered here. Somewhere among them, the Grand Caliph lived. At the four corners of the plaza surrounding the mosque are four large, tacky metal sculptures of the basmala, Arabic proclaiming “IN THE NAME OF GOD” to everyone mesmerized by the sculptures’ ugliness. “I had a dream about those sculptures once,” Thomas said. “It was the night after Pentecost, and I dreamed one of these was actually a spaceship. There was a pilot whose face kept changing from Amadu Bamba’s to Jesus’s, and the spaceship lifted to heaven on a rainbow.” He paused as we circled one of these sculptures while Mody the Driver tried to find his way. “It was one of the most memorable dreams I’ve ever had.” Once we parked, we began the last approach to the mosque. The entire grounds are holy and shoes are not permitted, a discouraging prospect when the sun has had a few hours to bake the flagstones. “Saliou Mbacké put down this Italian marble to protect visitors’ feet! It stays cool even in summer,” Thomas proclaimed proudly. That grace must have been lost on me; my feet were numb with pain. I told Mody the Driver it must be because of my “white-man feet,” which made him laugh, but I secretly suspected it was punishment for my pagan trespasses. I wondered at the mansions spilling across the horizon, and asked Thomas whether we might see the grand caliph, wherever he was, somewhere out there. “No. Mody’s friend says he’s not actually here this weekend. I’m sorry.” I had hoped he was here, and that this was the reason we came out to Touba. Sometimes faith goes unrewarded. Amadu Bamba was impatient with his humanity. He prayed to disappear into batin, the invisible world, and become nothing more or less than the breath of heaven. We slowly ascended the steps at the rear of the mosque, where the marble disappeared into darkness. Here was Amadu Bamba, at last, lying concealed behind the walls of his hexagonal tomb. When the French exiled Amadu Bamba to Gabon in 1895, he was still not a wali, still not a saint. The French thought they were punishing him for sedition. His followers thought his plight mimicked that of the Prophet, whose exile from Mecca was the beginning of Islam. They remembered the Koran says, “Remember when the infidels contrived to make you a prisoner or to murder or expel you, they plotted, but God planned, and God’s plan is supreme.” Bamba recalled the Angel Gabriel told Muhammad, “O! Believers! When you meet an army, stand firm and think of God profusely that you may be blessed with success.” For Bamba, the extreme pains of exile dissolved any remaining attachments to his mortal condition. The body fell away. “It was while in exile that I was shown and cured of all my imperfections,” he wrote. “The hatred of the French has availed me all that which I desired.” Legends tell of miracles. Bamba jumped over the side of his prison ship to pray on the waters of the Atlantic, held afloat by God’s own footservants. He was imprisoned in a lion’s den where he tamed the lion. He converted infidel genies to Islam; the Angel Gabriel saved him from a stampeding bull. When he finally returned to Dakar in 1902, the Senegalese people fell down before him prostrate. The exile had lasted seven years, seven months, and seven days. Bamba and his disciples had turned the French punishment against their wardens. Bamba would be exiled again, to Mauritania, but his legend had already taken hold. The Muridiyya survived, prospered, flourished, and led Senegal to independence. Bamba was now a wali, a saint. All of this was worth considering when I was standing in his presence in my blinding boubou. Bamba’s sainthood is indebted to some very persuasive fictions he never authored. His own writings rarely mention the events of his life, which makes sense. Amadu Bamba was impatient with his humanity. He prayed to disappear into batin, the invisible world, and become nothing more or less than the breath of heaven. But we must live in the world of zahir, the physical and manifest. Perhaps our saints always elude us, but we chase them into heaven, clinging to whatever things they leave behind that we can feebly comprehend: relics and writings and songs and stories. And bodies. It’s ironic that Bamba desperately wanted to escape the mortal remains his followers now gravely venerate in their mosque. But there his body rests, cased in marble and surrounded by pilgrims. The room flooded with shadow even in the noonday sun, so dark it had to be lit by some suspended cylindrical lanterns. The shahada, the first prayer, looped and coursed around each circumference, declaring, “There is no god but God and Muhammad is his Prophet,” forever and ever, without end. * * * The compound, with its involuted corridors and manicured courtyards, betrayed itself as the home of a great eminence, even without the roiling throngs of people trying to press their way inside…. I was the focus of a hundred stares. Stupidly, I thought it might be the garish boubou I was wearing. Now I know that the boubou was the most normal thing about me. Then revelation. On the outskirts of the mosque’s plaza, Thomas relayed another message. “Mody’s friend knows where the caliph is! But we must hurry.” We clambered into the car. “It’s in a small village and everyone is already gathering.” Mody the Driver pressed the gas, pointing north. The radio was on. Touba has its own radio station, which plays nothing but Amadu Bamba’s khaissidem sung in a throat-straining warble that echoed from the speakers. We reached a stand of sheds and shops, wobbling on corrugated tin and arranged like an ersatz strip mall, when Mody the Driver pulled over into the wild grass. There was some frantic conversation between him and Thomas, and I thought something in the car was broken until I realized we were lost. The car lurched forward, then Mody engaged in something approximating a three-point turn, then another, until he turned off the road again, a mechanized whirl of indecision. Despite it all, Mody maintained his seal-like serenity. A jeep pulled off the road where we were, rushing for the brush, but the collective holler from Mody the Driver and Thomas stopped them. Were they going where we were going? They were. It turned out Mody was correct the first time; the road to Sidy Mokhtar lay through the brush. We followed the jeep across the alien landscape of interior Senegal, where the dirt turned rusty-red and kicked up in long Martian streamers from the treads of our tires. At last, we parked in a town that seemed to consist of one house, a convenience store, and a solemn gray compound. This place actually had a name: Ndindy Bougoul. The compound, with its involuted corridors and manicured courtyards, betrayed itself as the home of a great eminence, even without the roiling throngs of people trying to press their way inside. After the first door was another door to the final, inner courtyard. It turned out there were multiple entrances to this last sanctuary, arranged like answers to a riddle. Mody went to talk to one of the men guarding the entrance. I was the focus of a hundred stares. Stupidly, I thought it might be the garish boubou I was wearing. Now I know that the boubou was the most normal thing about me. I must have looked especially ghostly, as white as Bamba’s robe, in the sun-weary eyes of the true believers. Mody waved a hand at us, gesturing for us to go inside. He really did have connections in the brotherhood. As we approached the guard, and Mody and Thomas discussed the situation, I noticed the small earpiece hiding behind the guard’s ear. Sidy Mokhtar had a rock star’s security detail. “That guy has a cousin in Baltimore!” Thomas exclaimed. I didn’t know what that had to do with letting me into the courtyard. As we were about to cross the threshold into the final destination, a kind of madness ensued. The waiting crowd began to push forward. Everyone had been waiting for this chance. The bottleneck at the door created an unsustainable crush, one body heaving and gasping, the men shouting, the women’s veils pulling their heads like tops. It was frightening: I felt the pressure in my chest, the disorientation from being deprived of air, and a bewildering loss of control. Then a familiar paw reached through the chaos, and Mody, grasping my wrist, pulled me inside. Serigne Sidy Mokhtar sat impassively in a corner, his seat obscured by his saintly white gown, surrounded by an open square, full of dust. He was a carbon copy of other caliphs whose pictures I’d seen: a gray beard, a burgundy beanie, and black sunglasses. The caliph was seated unobtrusively for such a grand personage. By some kind of subtle force, the fury of the pilgrims dissipated, and the disciples sank to their knees in the dirt. A kind of benediction commenced, as the caliph’s son, speaking for his father, called for prayer. Everyone prayed together, hands point upward toward God, and the caliph prayed over them, and that was it. The congregants stood up and filed out. Thomas tapped my shoulder. “No, this way!” We turned toward the caliph, now attended by his son and the guard with a cousin in Baltimore, and got in the dirt ourselves, crawling awkwardly on our knees to the corner. I didn’t know what to say. I had questions, I guess, but the caliph, through his son, preempted me. He engaged me in a kind of catechism, forcing me to recite truths he may have already known. “What is your name?” “John.” “And where are you from?” “America.” “And why are you here?” “To learn about the legacy of Amadu Bamba.” At this, the caliph placed his hands together so they resembled two halves of an open book. From his lungs, he summoned some words. He pronounced a prayer beyond earshot, like a secret. Then he exhaled, and it was gone. John B. Thompson (@johnbthomp) is a writer from Columbus, Ohio. A fact-checker for GQ, he will begin a PhD in East Asian history at Columbia University in September.The CSNY songwriter doubled down on his anger at West’s supposed lack of talent, saying someone ‘should send him all of Ray Charles’s catalogue so he can learn how to sing’ One of the more unlikely pop music beefs rolls on, as David Crosby continues to voice his dismay at Kanye West. The singer-songwriter, who has had a long solo career as well as stints with the Byrds and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, told a US chat show that West “can neither sing, nor write, nor play … The thing that bugs me about him is the: ‘I’m the greatest living rock star’. Somebody needs to drive him over to Stevie Wonder’s house right now so he understands what a real one is. Secondly, they should send him all of Ray Charles’s catalogue so he can learn how to sing.” West claimed he was “the greatest living rock star” during his headlining set at Glastonbury in 2015. Other claims include that he is “50% more influential than any other human being” and is “God’s vessel”. Crosby previously complained about West in a tweet in July 2015, writing: “He can’t write, sing, or play at all. He is an egomaniac, he is dumb as a post, he creates nothing, helps no one.” Earlier that year he said West was “an idiot and a poser … has no talent at all”. Reflecting on the fallout from his tweets, he told Rolling Stone: “I did get in trouble … that was fun.”Claiming “God commands it,” controversial Arizona Pastor Steven Anderson calls for the mass extermination of all LGBT people, promising an “AIDS free Christmas” as a result. Anderson, pastor of the Faithful Word Baptist Church, based in Tempe, Arizona, gave a controversial and offensive sermon last Sunday, arguing that God commands good Christians to kill the gays, and that the mass execution of LGBT people is a “cure” for AIDS. In the sermon, captured on video, Anderson tells his parishioners: Turn to Leviticus 20:13, because I actually discovered the cure for AIDS. Anderson continued: If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death. Their blood shall be upon them. And that, my friend, is the cure for AIDS. It was right there in the Bible all along — and they’re out spending billions of dollars in research and testing. It’s curable — right there. Because if you executed the homos like God recommends, you wouldn’t have all this AIDS running rampant. Anderson also railed at the notion that LGBT people could also be Christians. Stomping his feet and shouting, Anderson told his parishioners that all gays are pedophiles and an abomination. Anderson said: There will never be any gays in his church, not ever, ever, ever. No homos will ever be allowed in this church as long as I am pastor here. Never! Say ‘You’re crazy.’ No, you’re crazy if you think that there’s something wrong with my ‘no homo’ policy. Anderson is no stranger to controversy. Previously the controversial and offensive Baptist pastor has publicly prayed for President Obama’s death, promoted anti-semitic propaganda, and spoken out against the evils of allowing women to speak or teach in church. And Anderson is not the only Christian leader calling for the death of gays and lesbians. It is a message that is frequently heard in small, and not so small, fundamentalist congregations across the country, and around the world. Recently a megachurch pastor made headlines after telling his huge congregation that “gays must be put to death” because God commands it. Claiming that being gay is a choice like drug abuse, the senior pastor for a megachurch in Tennessee, Brainerd Baptist Church Senior Pastor Robby Gallaty, told his large congregation that Christians should never stop discriminating against homosexuals, claiming that gays could choose to be straight if they only accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. Gallaty explained why gays should be put to death: God said that the sins of the people had infected the very land in which they live. So what happens to people who engage in this activity, this sexual immoral activity? Go to Leviticus 20, God gives us the punishment for engaging in these sins… ‘If a man sleeps with a man as with a woman, they have both committed a detestable thing. They must be put to death. And their blood is on their own hands.’ Pastor Gallaty, like Pastor Anderson, and many other Christians, use the Bible and their Christian faith to justify their hatred for gays and lesbians. Such people are dangerous individuals. Their perverse religious superstitions allow them to advocate for death and discrimination against those they do not like and do not understand.'Shiloh' Star Blake Heron Dead at 35 'Shiloh' Star Blake Heron Dead at 35 EXCLUSIVE 9:07 PM P.T. -- Cops say Heron died of an apparent illicit substance overdose...First responders attempted to revive the actor with Narcan, but life saving measures were ineffective. Blake Heron, the actor who played Marty Preston in the 1996 movie, "Shiloh," is dead... TMZ has learned. Law enforcement tells TMZ, Heron's girlfriend went to his L.A. area home Friday morning and found him dead. Paramedics worked on Heron for 40 minutes trying to revive him, to no avail. He was pronounced dead at the scene. We're told Heron had been sick the last few days. Blake had battled heroin and had just gotten out of rehab... literally days ago. We're told EMTs who responded did not find any illegal drugs. There were several prescriptions, but they were for the flu. Our sources also say there was no evidence he had consumed alcohol. Along with starring in "Shiloh," Heron had supporting roles in films "We Were Soldiers" and "11:14." He was recently in a documentary called "A Thousand Junkies" which premiered at Tribeca Film Festival. Heron was 35. RIPToxic strontium found in Fukushima groundwater Posted Highly toxic radioactive strontium has been found in groundwater near the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant. It is the first time the substance has been detected in groundwater near the plant's No. 1 and No. 2 reactors. The operator of the Fukushima plant has also confirmed strontium up to 240 times the legal limit has been found in seawater near the facility. Strontium tends to accumulate in bones and can cause bone cancer and leukaemia. Japan's nuclear safety agency says it will now monitor the effects of the strontium on fish and marine life near the plant. Last week, soil samples from outside the Fukushima plant also revealed concentrations of strontium. Japan's NHK news reported strontium-90 had been found at 11 sites in Fukushima prefecture. The substance is generated during the fission of uranium in fuel rods in nuclear reactors. It is described as a bone seeker, accumulating in bone and bone marrow. It can cause cancer and leukaemia and has a half-life of 29 years. Topics: nuclear-accident, disasters-and-accidents, environment, nuclear-issues, japanIt has been some while since the amphitheatre at Pompeii hosted any kind of audience – AD79, in fact, when Mount Vesuvius erupted and buried the ancient city five metres deep in tephra, only to lie undisturbed until the 18th century. But on Thursday evening, as the grass stood yellowing in the heavy July heat, it prepared to receive the crowds once more; not this time for some gladiatorial combat, execution or venatio, but for a concert by the English rock musician David Gilmour. Notably, it was also a return for Gilmour himself, who last played this venue (if one can call such majestic surroundings a venue) in 1971, during his days with Pink Floyd. No audience was permitted then, and instead the show was filmed and released as a documentary, Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii, the following year. And so, long before it begins, tonight’s concert has the ring of something
Bubble Map LatLong Map Line with View Finder Horizontal Multi Bar Multi Chart Radar Chart Donut Chart Step Chart DrillDown Chart Close X Axis Label: i Y Axis Label: i Y1 Axis Label: i Rotate X-axis Tick: Advanced: i X Tick Cull: Auto Show All i Top/Buttom List: Sort Bars: Decending Accending Show Values: i Hide X Tick: i Stack Bars: i Spline Chart: i Apply Settings Close Steps(Districts) 3 4 5 i Scale(Districts) i i Map Fill Color: i Apply Settings Close Steps: 3 4 5 i Scale: i i Legend Title: i Map Fill Color: i Map Stroke Color: i Show Label on Map: No Yes i Select State: Select State ANDAMAN NICOBAR ANDHRAPRADESH ARUNACHAL PRADESH ASSAM BIHAR CHANDIGARH CHHATTISGARH DADRA NAGAR DAMAN DIU DELHI GOA GUJARAT HARYANA HIMACHAL PRADESH JAMMU & KASHMIR JHARKHAND KARNATAKA KERALA LAKSHADWEEP MADHYA PRADESH MAHARASHTRA MANIPUR MEGHALAYA MIZORAM NAGALAND ODISHA PUDUCHERRY PUNJAB RAJASTHAN SIKKIM TAMILNADU TELANGANA TRIPURA UTTAR PRADESH UTTARAKHAND WEST BENGAL i Apply Settings Close Series Name: i X Axis: i X1 Axis: i Longitude: i Latitude: i Y Axis: i Color: i Chart Type: Bar Line Spline Area Spline Area i Chart Side: Left Right i Chart Type: Bar Pie HorizontalBar i Drill Type: Bar Pie HorizontalBar i Add Series Close Field: Group Function: Select Function avg count max min sum Add Field Close AND/OR: and or Field: Operator: Select Operator =!= <= >= starts with ends with contains matches Value: Add Filter Close Field: Add Group Close Close Close To save and share your visualization please login with your credentials Log in Cancel Save your Data before visualize it. Save Cancel To save and share your visualization please login with your credentials Log in CancelLet’s say you see somebody talking about an Amazon product on Twitter, and you want to buy it. In order to do that, you have to click on the link, and then click on the “Add to Cart” button, and then complete your purchase. Ugh. Think of all the tweets you’re missing when you do that! There’s got to be a better way! Now with the #AmazonCart hashtag (#AmazonBasket in the UK, because British people use words better than we do), you can remove that pesky “click on Add to Cart” step from your Amazon transaction, and let the entire world Twitter-using world know all about what you chose to do with your hard-earned money. All you have to do is connect your Amazon account up with your Twitter feed using the social settings, and then reply to a tweet with an Amazon product link with the hashtag. Don’t get it yet? Here, let this Amazon approved advertisement explain it to you over and over again: Luckily for Twitter users with low levels of impulse control, this does not automatically purchase the item for you. Instead you get sent an e-mail and a tweet from Amazon telling you to complete your purchase by going to your cart… which you do by clicking on the link. So, you know, exactly what you would be doing anyway. It’s worth noting that it’s not a completely surefire method of adding items to your cart. For me, it only worked the second time I tried it — which means that yes, actually going to the website and clicking “Add to Cart” would have been easier. @vqnerdballs Great! We added this item to your Amazon Cart. When ready, review your Cart http://t.co/vYa4sxSHrP and check out — MyAmazon (@MyAmazon) May 5, 2014 You also have to be using the hashtag for your region for it to work, so if you’re a very fancy American who uses the word basket instead because you spent a summer abroad in London or whatever, then you’re shit outta luck, Sherlock — here in ‘Merica, we call it a ‘cart.’ Amazon stresses that this feature will be great for people who don’t want to leave their Twitter feed or switch apps on their tablet device to make a purchase, as well as forgetful people who won’t remember in ten minutes that they wanted to buy something. You’ve got to admit, they know their target audience remarkably well. I imagine that the Venn diagram of people who refuse to leave Twitter and people who can’t remember something they just saw on Twitter is pretty close to being a full-on circle. (via TheNextWeb, image via Amazon) Meanwhile in related linksWhatever happened to the neocons, those creatures of legend whose fulminations led to the worst strategic disaster in American history? Oh, don’t worry, they’re still around and up to no good – out of power, but not out of mischief-making schemes to drag us into yet another war, this time on a scale much bigger than their previous "accomplishment." The Weekly Standard, Rupert Murdoch’s gift to the War Party, is no longer delivered in multiple copies to the White House, but that doesn’t mean editor Bill Kristol is totally bereft of influence in Washington. Kristol & Co., having disbanded their Project for a New American Century [.pdf] – which played a key role in dragging us into Iraq – have come up with a new vehicle, the Foreign Policy Initiative, which recently co-sponsored a conference with the head of the Center for a New American Security (the Obamaites’ favorite foreign policy think-tank) and the Center for American Progress, the Soros-funded headquarters for progressives such as Matt Yglesias. The subject was the "Af-Pak" front, and the attendees, whatever their other political differences, were in agreement that our new president is on the right track as he escalates this latest surge in the "war on terror." The reason for this ideological harmonic convergence is simple enough to see: in spite of Obama’s alleged commitment to "change," so far our foreign policy is Bushism without Bush – a policy of perpetual war, albeit without the Bushian bells and whistles. Not that the administration will ever admit to this essential continuity. In a move that underscores the stylistic differences between the new crowd and the old, the Pentagon recently issued a diktat to its minions, notifying them that "this administration prefers to avoid using the term ‘Long War’ or ‘Global War on Terror’ [GWOT]. Please use ‘Overseas Contingency Operation.'” Appearances are everything to this administration, whose top guns are understandably sensitive to the charge, coming from the more principled element of the Democratic Party base, that the revolution has been betrayed. The president’s defenders note that none of this should come as any surprise to those who listened to what Obama actually said on the campaign trail, and they’re right about that: he constantly charged that the Bushies had "neglected" the Afghan front and that we were fighting "the wrong war." Once in office, he would fix that, he vowed – and that is precisely what he is doing. Yet one has to note that the Bushian terminology at least had the virtue of honesty. This new crowd, which supposedly disdains all ideology and is devoted to a streamlined, hard-as-nails "pragmatism," is slipperier than a greased-up eel in a frying pan. "Overseas Contingency Operation" indeed! The euphemism is comical, yet not totally meaningless. Within it lies a hint of what the Obamaites intend, or, at least, what they say they intend. Being sensitive barometers of the political zeitgeist, the Obamaites are perfectly aware of the war-weariness of the American people. Even if you call it an "overseas contingency operation," a war in these hard times is likely to grate much harder on people’s nerves as they listen to the latest news from the Af-Pak front. Yet to call the current war a contingency is to imply that there’s going to be an end to it, and, not only that, but that the end is in sight, if still a decade or so off. This, one assumes, is progress of a sort, but one has to wonder: what is the administration’s current overseas operation contingent on? Or, in plain English, what event, or series of events, would cause us to declare victory and come home? The answer to this question is lost in a maze that would baffle the Minotaur, tangled up in so many contingencies, what-ifs, and weasel words that it would take an analyst of Alexandrian abilities to cut the Gordian Knot of this conundrum. In taking a stab at it, however, one is forced to conclude that the term "Long War" is forbidden precisely on account of its accuracy. Whatever contingencies will bring America’s post-9/11 madness to an end lie in the far future. We ought to take seriously that U.S. general who recently said we’re preparing to stay in Iraq for the next decade or so, regardless of the 2011 cutoff point stipulated in the recently signed U.S.-Iraq status of forces agreement [.pdf]. I empathize with those who had hope for a significant change in American foreign policy, yet the evidence that we are making an even bigger military footprint in the Middle East and Central Asia seems irrefutable. The one hope left is that the Obamaites will really crack down on the Israelis, who are intent on building new settlements with your tax dollars, and who are moving steadily toward a particularly nasty form of ultra-nationalism, one that represents a direct threat to U.S. interests in the region. The chances that an Israeli provocation will lead to a full-scale Iranian assault on U.S. troops stationed in Iraq are quite high at the moment, and that is one big reason for increased strains on the "special relationship." The Obama administration seems headed for a showdown with the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a hard-liner who, in the context of his ferociously rightist cabinet, is a relative moderate. With Avigdor Lieberman, the Israeli version of George Lincoln Rockwell, in charge of the Foreign Ministry, it looks like we’re going to be in for a long, bumpy ride. Yet the Obama administration, in making a big issue out of the settlements, is paving the way for Israeli "concessions" that still leave Tel Aviv with de facto control over large swathes of Palestinian land. Even minus the settlements, the peace plan one envisions coming from the Obamaites leaves Israel lording it over a demilitarized Palestinian castrato-state, one that acts as a kind of human shield for Israel’s expansionist designs. The Israelis need only agree to stop torturing their Palestinian helots quite so harshly – perhaps by letting food and medicine into Gaza – in order to successfuly goad the U.S. into provoking a war with the Iranians. The U.S. stance on Iran is reportedly Obama’s chief bargaining chip in his testy negotiations with Tel Aviv – a price that, if it is ever exacted, will be paid in blood, American and Iranian (but never Israeli). The fundamentals of U.S. foreign policy – a policy based on the grandiose delusion that the U.S. can and must retain hegemonic power in the world in order to ensure its own security – haven’t changed a single iota. According to our commander in chief, that fanatics are plotting against America in a cave somewhere in Waziristan is reason enough to launch a decades-long occupation and nation-building project in the wilds of Central Asia. As long as these baddies find a "safe haven" for their plotting, there is no country in the world that’s safe from a future as a battle zone. This is the Bush doctrine of preemptive warfare carried to its logical, Bizarro World conclusion: in keeping the peace we must invade and conquer the world. What has changed, however, is the willingness of the American people to put up with an "overseas contingency operation" without end. Therefore the Obamaites have to tread very carefully, even as they carry out the same old policies under a freshly minted rubric, mindful that the natives are already getting restless, albeit not quite yet as restless as Ted Rall. I remember way back when Rall’s rhetoric was considered radical; the Iraq war, he averred, was "a war waged under false pretexts by a fictional coalition led by an ersatz president." In 2003 and thereabouts, when news announcers had yet to take off their flag lapel buttons and Phil Donahue was getting unceremoniously ousted from the airwaves, Rall was accurately calling the Iraq war as lost and demanding Bush’s prosecution as a war criminal. In those dark days, Rall’s views – quite aside from his style – were considered beyond-the-pale radicalism. Today, we have members of Congress, including the speaker, calling for what amounts to a war crimes tribunal to sit in judgment on Bush administration officials. Yesterday’s radicalism, in this instance, is today’s growing consensus. Similarly, I believe, Rall’s recent piece calling for the president to resign on account of his serial betrayals, especially on the foreign policy front, will prove to be a prophetic reading of the zeitgeist to come. I agree with Katrina van den Heuvel, editor of The Nation, who, in an interview with Antiwar.com’s Scott Horton, compared Obama to another Democratic president with a liberal domestic agenda who got bogged down in a no-win, no-sense war: Lyndon Baines Johnson. The War Party, driven from power by the Bush defeat, has regrouped and had a makeover: in their new guise as nation-building humanitarians, they’re not making war – they’re conducting an Overseas Contingency Operation. Instead of the damn-the-torpedoes approach taken by his predecessor, this president is not averse to euphemism and what passes for subtlety in pursuing the very same ends. Yet the real contingency here is the patience of the American people, which is fast coming to an end. How long the Obamaites can delay the inevitable revolt is a matter of pure speculation. However, I’m willing to bet it’ll be sooner than they fear. Read more by Justin RaimondoSweden’s Prime Minister Stefan Löfven recently declared at the U.N. General Assembly that his nation of 10 million people would become “one of the first fossil-free welfare states in the world.” His announcement comes at a time when 146 nations have made promises to reduce their carbon emissions with the COP21 talks in Paris starting next month. Löfven and his government have made a bold statement that has prompted many commentators to ask: How on earth this could this happen, if ever? The reality is that the Nordic countries already have a strong track record when it comes to action on climate change and clean-energy generation. Denmark, for example, hit a point over the summer when it produced 140 percent of its energy needs from wind power, some of which it ended up exporting to its neighbors. Oil-rich Norway produces about 99 percent of its electricity from hydropower and has one of the highest rates of electric vehicle ownership on the planet. And, blessed by copious amounts of geothermal sources, Iceland meets about 85 percent of its energy needs from renewables. So, how can Sweden take the lead on the renewable front, especially when considering the fact that it has a sophisticated economy, which includes automobile manufacturing? The reality is that Scandinavia’s largest country has already made headway toward this goal. Currently almost 80 percent of Sweden’s electricity comes from non-fossil fuel sources. The challenge, however, is that a large portion of this power comes from nuclear. After decades of promising to decommission its nuclear power plants, the country’s government decided it would allow new plants to replace shuttered ones in 2010. Mothballing 10 to 13 nuclear power plants will throw a wrench in Sweden’s plans, as not everyone, notably the country’s power-sharing Green Party, sees this form of power as “clean” despite the fact it discharges zero emissions into the earth’s atmosphere. That nuclear sticking point aside, Sweden’s government claims it is on an ambitious course to wean itself from fossil fuels. In 2016, the country’s energy and environment ministries will spend about 4.5 billion crowns (US$545 million) on projects including solar-cell research and electric-vehicle technologies. Smart-grid and other energy-efficient technologies will also see a boost in research dollars. Curiously, Sweden is not just investing money within its borders — some of those funds will be spent on sustainable development projects abroad in poorer countries. In that sense, Sweden is taking leadership and is nudging richer companies to do the same. “Developed countries have a special responsibility to transit quickly to clean energy systems,” said Isabella Lövin, Sweden’s minister of international development cooperation, “and at the same time to support developing countries to leap-frog directly to renewables.” Sweden has not set a timetable on when exactly a 100 percent renewable society will become reality. According to Bloomberg, the focus is a rapid reduction in emissions by 2020, with the country’s capitol, Stockholm, possibly going fossil fuel-free by 2050. But the significance of Sweden’s announcement is that it behooves the world’s richer nations to put their money where their mouths are. “Increased climate funding to developing countries and climate action within the framework of development assistance are fundamental to Sweden’s and the EU’s credibility in the climate negotiations,” said the Swedish government in a recent press statement. In this case, the how of Sweden’s energy policy will be more important that the what. By taking actions that go beyond issuing a proclamation, the land of blue and gold could play a pivotal role in helping the world go green. Image credits: Leon KayeOn this week’s Zach-less episode of The One Piece Podcast we have a Manga Recap of Chapter 798, “Heart” and an Anime Recap of Episode 707, “To Be Free! Law’s Injection Shot Blasts!” We also have a huge Piece Together segment where we try our best to answer your questions, comments and theories. This week we have the animation director for Rick and Morty, Bryan Newton and the translator for One Piece in Weekly Shonen Jump, Stephen Paul on the show with us. We manage to have a good time even without our fearless leader, come join us on the adventure! 0:00:00 Introduction0:03:59 Manga Recap: Chapter 798, “Heart”0:42:16 Anime Recap: Episode 7070:58:30 Piece Together1:44:10 Good Bye! Next week, Steve and Ed continue to steer the ship as we go through Manga Chapter 799 and Anime Episode 708! We’ll see you then. We are MAJI!!Jobs’ “magical thinking” may have defined his business brilliance, but it could have been his downfall in his fight against cancer. According to Steve Jobs’ biographer, Walter Isaacson, the Apple mastermind eventually came to regret the decision he had made years earlier to reject potentially life-saving surgery in favor of alternative treatments like acupuncture, dietary supplements and juices. Though he ultimately embraced the surgery and sought out cutting-edge experimental methods, they were not enough to save him. Jobs’ cancer had been discovered by chance during a CT scan in 2003 to look for kidney stones, during which doctors saw a "shadow” on his pancreas. Isaacson told CBS’ 60 Minutes last night that while the news was not good, the upside was that the form of pancreatic cancer from which Jobs suffered (a neuroendocrine islet tumor) was one of the 5% or so that are slow growing and most likely to be cured. But Jobs refused surgery after diagnosis and for nine months after, favoring instead dietary treatments and other alternative methods. Isaacson says that when he asked Jobs why he had resisted it, Jobs said “I didn't want my body to be opened...I didn't want to be violated in that way.” His early resistance to surgery was apparently incomprehensible to his wife and close friends, who continually urged him to do it. But there seemed to be more to his resistance than just fear of surgery. "I think that he kind of felt that if you ignore something,” Isaacson told CBS, “if you don't want something to exist, you can have magical thinking. And it had worked for him in the past.” It worked in business, anyway – and brilliantly. Jobs’ employees had joked that surrounding him was a “reality distortion field,” which allowed him to make his own rules, and conjure up new products for which there was no precedent or apparent market. His capacity to create the reality he envisioned – and convince others of it – was a large part of his business success. Another element of Jobs’ decision-making process was, according to Isaacson, his trust of his own instinct. Jobs had spent time studying Buddhism in India, and he felt it served him in his work. “The main thing I've learned is intuition, that the people in India are not just pure rational thinkers, that the great spiritual ones also have an intuition.” But however well his intuition and “magical thinking” may have worked for him at work, Jobs’ postponement of surgery in favor of alternative means was a bizarre executive decision. “We talked about this a lot,” says the biographer. “He wanted to talk about it, how he regretted it.... I think he felt he should have been operated on sooner." By the time Jobs finally opted for surgery, the cancer had spread. He had an under-the-radar liver transplant and began putting a lot of energy into researching the most sophisticated experimental methods, making a complete about-face from how he began his treatment years before. According to the New York Times, Jobs was one of the few people in the world to have his genome sequenced. Collaborating researchers at several institutions sequenced his DNA in order to develop a treatment that would target his specifically mutated cell pathways. He went for an experimental treatment in Switzerland in 2009, which involves using a radioactive isotope to attack the faulty hormone-producing cells of the body. These treatments may well have extended his life, but nine months is a long time to wait in cancer time. And while there’s truth to the notion that food and supplements can aid a body’s repair mechanisms, there’s a limit to what they can do. Pancreatic cancer is one of the most insidious forms of cancer, and has few survivors. Isaacson says Jobs started talking about an afterlife more and more towards the end. On one of the interview recordings, Jobs says, “Maybe it’s ’cause I want to believe in an afterlife. That when you die, it doesn’t just all disappear. The wisdom you’ve accumulated. Somehow it lives on.” But he adds, “Yeah, but sometimes I think it’s just like an on-off switch. Click and you’re gone. And that’s why I don’t like putting on-off switches on Apple devices.” It’s impossible to know what went into Jobs’ decisions at work and at home, and whether his unexpected medical decisions were in spite of or because of his business brilliance. But for a man who revolutionized the way we work, communicate, and play, it’s certain that his life was too short. Follow me @alicewalton or find me on Facebook.VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – Syphilis rates continue to soar in Vancouver, prompting the latest warning for gay and bisexual men to get tested for the sexually transmitted disease. Public health officials say men who have sex with men are at the highest risk for infection. Vancouver Coastal Health says residents around the Richmond and Vancouver areas are especially vulnerable, with 86 per cent of the 561 new syphilis cases reported in BC last year being diagnosed within the health authority. Medical health officer Dr. Reka Gustafson says syphilis rates in 2012 across the Lower Mainland were at their highest rate in 30 years, and the numbers climbed further in 2013. She encourages men who have sex with men to become more aware of the highly contagious disease, practise safer sex and get regular testing. Syphilis is spread primarily by sex AND early symptoms such as rashes or painless sores disappear, but if left untreated the disease can lead to blindness, hearing loss, deep bone pain, and even death.‘Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.’ John Perry Barlow in his Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace 1996 PRISM surveillance and encoding backdoors, ACTA menace, traffic throttling, censorship and kill-switches, high connection charges... the Internet seems to have digressed from what we hoped it would be: an unspoilt oasis of freedom and prosperity, untouchable by the state or by corporate interests. Can a refuge be found in networks outside of The Network? The PRISM case has once again driven the reactive Internet media to explore possible options for ‘Internet 2’. Mesh One such refuge in popular new technology are ‘mesh networks’ – small ‘intranets’ in which nearby users are connected directly to each other. While in the current Internet model, end-users are connected to each other through the central point (a ‘star’ topology), in mesh networks they are connected between themselves directly. Unlike the star networks where all the traffic needs to go through a single point in order to reach the end-users, thus centralising the traffic flow and making it easier to interfere with – in mesh networks the traffic from a sender flows through other network members, which act as proxies delivering the content to their fellow recipients – which reduces dependence on the single connection point. (Adapted from here) Community mesh networks To create a community mesh network, all citizens need are stronger wireless antennae to connect to their neighbours, and specific pieces of software to route the packages efficiently. Even with improvised antennae made of ‘Pringles’ cans for instance (known as ‘cantennae’) the connection range between any two nodes can reach several to a dozen kilometres. Community mesh networks are not new, but the advance in software and hardware raises performances and enables them to mushroom – and they are established by citizens themselves. Some existing networks – like the one in Athens – gather several thousands of enthusiasts; in some, internal services like community social networks (i.e. local ‘Facebooks’) are developed. And if they wished, they could, of course, connect to the global Internet: one or more of them would pay the commercial subscriptions to the Internet service provider (ISP), and then share the connections with others; the costs would be split in equal chunks, yielding less per capita than if everyone was to purchase a connection with the ISP. Can an oasis turn into a global green? Mother Jones and Daily Dot analysed some of the existing mesh communities and concluded that an unspoilt oasis of freedom and prosperity, untouchable by the state or by corporate interests, is now truly possible! Due to such a decentralised topology and a bottom-up built network, typical causes of users’ frustration on the global Net seem to vanish. Mesh networks may promise to solve the main Internet governance problems: Surveillance (aka NSA-safe): Centralised surveillance within the mesh network is not possible due to the lack of a single connection point (though it could still be possible to monitor what goes in and out of the mesh to the global Internet). The geeky neighbours might, however, spy on each other occasionally, but this can be solved within the Neighbourhood Council. Kill-switch and censorship (aka Spring-supportive): As Bonicioli told Mother Jones, ‘When you run your own network, nobody can shut it down.’ Again due to a lack of centralised management of the network, it seems that no revolution or uprising (in the neighbourhood or beyond) could be crippled by a kill-switch or the cutting of communications. Censorship is also out of a sovereign’s reach. Net neutrality (aka Throttling-safe): As there is no telecom involved with the mesh network, there is no one to throttle the exchange of traffic within it or endanger network neutrality. Last mile access costs (aka Big-ticket-safe): Even if your local telco has no commercial interest in bringing cable to your distant village, or is overpricing the connection offered – with cheap wireless technologies and a geographically scattered decentralised mash network, the last mile could reach out even to very distant areas. Intellectual property rights (aka ACTA-safe): No centralised authority to control the file sharing and chase copyright breaches within the network (unless a prosecutor lives nearby and joins the network as well). A peer-to-peer heaven it may be! Could we then simply boost the mesh networks and connect all of them in a similar mesh way to get the globally green Internet 2? (What do you think? Let us know before the answer is posted in Part 2) Follow @VRadunovicWASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S. Coast Guard has determined — through independent analysis — it needs three heavy and three medium icebreakers to cover the U.S. anticipated needs in the Arctic and Antarctic, commandant Adm. Paul Zukunft, told reporters on Tuesday. However, how the service gets to that number or how it will pay for the ships is still an open question. In the next year, the service will know if its laid-up heavy icebreaker USCGC Polar Sea (WAGB-11) will be worth restoring. In parallel, the service is exploring whether or not to begin the design work for a new class of ships or if leasing foreign ships will be the way for the U.S. to manage its Arctic and Antarctic requirements, Zukunft said. “It’s either recapitalization with new ships, restore an old ship that may buy you ten years of service,” he said. “We’ll be able to make an assessment reactivation by next year and at that point we need to move forward but we probably need to move forward in parallel tracks as well so we’re prepared to look at funding set aside, whether it’s for reactivation of an old ship or start preliminary design and construction of a new icebreaker.” As for leasing icebreakers, legally the Coast Guard can crew the ships and operate a leased ship but the funding for a long-term deal would have to come at the front of an arrangement. “The challenge with the lease option is you score that lease all up front, you can’t spread the cost out over 30 years and then you lose the flexibility of where and how you operate that ship,” Zukunft said. The need for the ships is mounting as reduction in the icepack in the Arctic makes the region more attractive to not only natural resources exploration but also tourism and compared to the other Arctic nations. The current U.S. icebreaker capability is modest. Currently the Coast Guard has two operational icebreakers — heavy icebreaker USCGC Polar Star (WAGB-10) and medium icebreaker USCGC Healy (WAGB-20). The National Science Foundation also leases a research icebreaker — Nathaniel B. Palmer. In comparison, Russia fields almost 40 with up to a dozen more planned or under construction, according the Coast Guard’s 2013 review of the world’s major icebreakers. Additionally, U.S. icebreakers have additional missions beyond creating channels for other ships. “When you look at what do you need an icebreaker to do in the 21st century, first it needs to break ice — obviously — so it needs to have access. It needs to be able to communicate if there’s a contingency in the Arctic, you don’t have shore station you can base out of, it has to be at see, so it has to be a command and control platform (C2),” Zukunft said. “It has to be able to do law enforcement and do scientific research, also do search and rescue and not only that, if you’re operating in the Arctic — under the polar code — we anticipate there will be very stringent environmental requirements which ships that were designed in the 1970s do not meet today in 2015… All of those need to be taken into account if we’re going to operate in 2015.” The C2 and communications requirements are extremely important. The Arctic is among the most difficult places in the world to operate. Not only because of the cold and lack of human habitation, but because communication and guidance satellites are not optimized for higher latitudes making both tasks exceedingly difficult. Six different U.S. agencies have missions in the Polar regions and the Coast Guard may insist that those agencies help pay for the ships. As part of its Fiscal Year 2015 budget, the Coast Guard asked for $6 million towards design work for a new icebreaker class, according to a January Congressional Research Service report. To date, the service has received about $9.6 million in design funds starting in Fiscal Year 2013.Another wild match this season, this one between the Portland Timbers and the Columbus Crew, meant there were a lot of choices for Stumptown Breakdown this week. Not for the first time this season, we're taking a look at a late goal that decided the score line. Here it is: Darlington Nagbe (who else?) earns a free kick for the Timbers in a good position when he is sandwiched between a couple of Crew players and gets his legs knocked right out from under him. Diego Valeri steps up to take the kick. As Valeri sends in the free kick, everyone starts jockeying for position. Pa Modou Kah actually drops back toward the top of the box, probably hoping his defender will do the same. Futty Danso, in the middle of the box, has effectively become a human shield for Fanendo Adi, getting in the way of his defender and opening up the pocket of space that Adi, in the red circle, can now run into. Adi does so and puts a little space between himself and Giancarlo Gonzalez. He is now in a great position to win this ball, while Gonzalez has to fight to recover his position. You can see in the frame above that while Adi is prepared to simply jump straight up in the air, Gonzalez has to try to dive in from behind him to win the header. Gonzalez is unsuccessful. In the video you can see how he goes flying past Adi, unable to get a head to the ball or even block Adi's header, which the forward skillfully flicks toward the far post. He's a little far from the goal to the necessary power on his header to beat the keeper, but he's done well to put the ball down and toward the far post where a teammate might be able to tap it home. And of course there is a teammate at the far post, because Gata. In yet another moment where his reaction could appropriately be called pouncing, Gaston Fernandez sneaks in at the far post to poke the ball home. It may have been Gata's finish, but Kah knows who made that goal possible. As Valeri set up for this free kick, the guys behind me and I were pleading with him to "find the big tall guy." Those pleas turned into joyous shouts of "Big tall guy! BIG TALL GUY!," as Adi did his thing. If Adi can actually do this consistently, he could play a bigger role between now and the end of his loan than many of us initially expected. There are other times this season, when the Timbers attack looked particularly flaccid, that having a true set piece threat would have been helpful. Even when the opposing defense is packed into the box and the Timbers can't find the final pass or the finishing touch, they do earn set pieces. A shot in deflects off one of the many players in the box and out for a corner, or Nagbe draws a foul on his way to goal and earns a free kick. The opportunities on set pieces are there. The Timbers have been able to make the most of these chances on a few occasions this season, but so many of their corners and free kicks sail harmlessly through the box or are easily headed away by the defense. This is mostly due not, in my opinion, to bad service but to a general lack of both height and prowess in the air. The only other current Timbers player to use his height and strength to win a set piece the way Adi did is Futty, who hasn't scored a goal or earned an assist in that way since 2011. With Adi as a target on set pieces, the Timbers attack has another dimension, one that is particularly useful in those games when it just feels like nothing else is working.Show full PR text Nokia to sell and lease back head office building Espoo, Finland - Nokia has agreed to sell and lease back its head office building in Espoo, Finland on a long-term lease to Finland-based Exilion. We expect to complete the sale by the end of 2012. The selling price is EUR 170 million. "We had a comprehensive sales process with both Finnish and foreign investors and we are very pleased with this outcome. As we have said before, owning real estate is not part of Nokia's core business and when good opportunities arise we are willing to exit these types of non-core assets. We are naturally continuing to operate in our head office building on a long-term basis," said Timo Ihamuotila, CFO, Nokia. About Nokia Nokia is a global leader in mobile communications whose products have become an integral part of the lives of people around the world. Every day, more than 1.3 billion people use their Nokia to capture and share experiences, access information, find their way or simply to speak to one another. Nokia's technological and design innovations have made its brand one of the most recognized in the world. For more information, visit http://www.nokia.com/about-nokia.After a year of debate over how and where to build the much-needed second downtown Dallas DART light rail alignment, there is a chance that any dreams of downtown subway will have to wait for a new presidential administration. That’s because the preliminary budget the Trump administration presented Congress includes some blanket language that wholesale precludes the federal government from implementing any new infrastructure funding—a problem for DART since the billion-dollar D2 project is contingent on receiving federal funds from an Obama-era “Core Capacity” transit grant program. Nonetheless, at a stakeholder meeting yesterday, DART officials said they would continue to move ahead with the plans for D2 presuming that once the raw meat of Trump’s budget gets filtered through Congress, the sausage that comes out the other end will include pork for subway building. Let’s hope so. D
AST 2 YEARS, where got time to maintain his blog?? And I’m so busy all the time too. Is it surprising our numbers aren’t as high as they used to be cos blogging isn’t top of our list of priorities now? And why is it Gushcloud’s fault when they didn’t INFLATE numbers? They’re only guilty of not updating their data, but the data is NOT false or made up. When they ask us for our stats, WE ALWAYS HAVE TO GIVE SCREENSHOTS (or provide the managers access to our Google Analytics). We NEVER got away with just TELLING them what the numbers are, as Gushcloud needs the screenshots to account to the clients the total reach and engagement garnered. These numbers are NOT fake nor inflated. We did hit those numbers. If I took 3 days of analytics data from a not very active blog, the hits would also be lower than average. Taking numbers from when a blog is more active, HOW is this inflating numbers? With regards to the shell company she created “SG Private Trainers”, she SPECIFICALLY requested for ME and for the banner to be on MY blog so she could get access to MY blog hits. The banner was put up Sept 2014 when I wasn’t actively blogging anymore(was I ever really?). I remember telling Fai(account manager in Gushcloud): “Erm my blog layout changed and the banners are right at the bottom leh, why would the client want to put??” He said the “client insisted” so I was like “Okay lor.” and I charged a small amount(definitely not $1k) for it. I quoted my rate which I got and I left the agency cut up to Gushcloud. The banner is still below if you care to check it out. I’m so baffled how she created the fake company and PAID Gushcloud $1k JUST to get my stats?? Who does that? The fact is, I, and we, are being targeted. By someone and/or some people who has time and again attacked us publicly and undermined our credibility. No matter how I try to clear the air or prove myself, the attacks would still come. She could spend yet another year pulling out old ads I did that I didn’t disclaim as ads, tracking my stats, jumping at every client who hires me, posting more defamatory posts to kill me. I really wouldn’t put it past her. I thought by starting and focussing on my YouTube channel, I was effectively drifting away from blogging(what she hates that I do) and could avoid all this drama. And now, I haven’t even made ONE cent in my pocket from my channel and already the drama has begun. Before you are so quick to judge and believe, perhaps ask WHAT is the agenda behind all these attacks? Are honesty and integrity really the focus here? Or is it something more sinister? Just cos the voice is louder doesn’t mean it’s right. Just because there are charts and diagrams and “stats” doesn’t mean the data is perfect, or even fair for that matter. For someone with such high moral values, what is the point in trying again and again to wreck and annihilate someone else? Again, I do not want war. I want peace. I never fought back because: 1. A retarded part of me still hung on to the friendship we had and I would never deliberately, maliciously harm someone I loved. 2. I was afraid, No, terrified. I felt that even when we used to be so close and she was unprovoked, she could attack me like that, just how far would she go if I fought back? I was scared for myself, my reputation, my work, my loved ones, things she has shown constantly to have no qualms attacking in her rage. But why do I always have to “let it slide”, “forget about it”, and “don’t bother”? Everyone used to tell me that. You know why? Cos everyone thinks I cannot win the fight against her. And that is nothing but the truth. I cannot win. And I don’t want to win. I NEVER WANTED TO EVEN COMPETE. I just want to do good on what I do. But if someone, anyone, accuses me of something I did not do and defames me, I do not want to live this life taking it lying down in fear. I only have this life. If I die, I will not go gentle into that good night. P/S: I’m donating every cent I got from the “SG Private Trainers” banner ad to www.sanctuaryhouse.com.sg. It’s a really good cause but this isn’t me being noble. I just don’t want her money. If you found some truth/answers/entertainment in this post(sorry if it isn’t so well crafted, I didn’t have a year to do it), maybe you can make a donation or find some way to help out this Xmas too. P/P/S: Althea wrote a post addressing her directly. I’m sure she has already seen it but in case you haven’t, HERE it is.Francois Fillon says French the government has failed to ensure security for presidential candidates (AFP Photo/Lionel BONAVENTURE) Paris (AFP) - Journalists accused of bias. Judges said to be taking orders from the president. The country in a state of "near civil war." This isn't America's bitter presidential election campaign last year, but France's in 2017. The latest comments from conservative Francois Fillon, who has accused the Socialist government of failing to protect candidates, underline the increasingly ugly tone of France's campaign. Clashes in the western city of Nantes at the weekend during a demonstration against far-right leader Marine Le Pen and attacks on buses transporting her supporters were "unacceptable," he said on Monday. On Sunday evening, he accused the government of "failing to create the conditions for the peaceful exercise of democracy," accusing it of allowing "a climate of near civil war to develop in the country." Seven police officers were injured on Saturday in Nantes including one with serious burns when anarchists and vandals began throwing rocks and firebombs during an anti-Le Pen protest. Fillon, the former frontrunner whose bid has been thrown into turmoil by a corruption investigation, also said his campaign events were being disrupted "every day" by far-left activists. Both Fillon and Le Pen have also attacked judicial investigations into their use of allegedly fake parliamentary aides as an attempt by outgoing Socialist President Francois Hollande to influence the election. Fillon has described an inquiry launched in January as an "institutional coup d'etat" and has accused journalists of trying to carry out a "lynching" and an "assassination". Herve Le Bras, a veteran political observer and head of research at the EHESS social sciences university in Paris, said he could detect the influence of US President Donald Trump in the French campaign. "The way that Trump has defied the justice system and attacked the media, calling them 'fake news', I think in a way it's encouraging Fillon and Marine Le Pen to copy," he told AFP. "They can see that it seems to work in the United States," he said. - Attacks on media - Fillon, a 62-year-old former prime minister, faces allegations he paid his wife for 15 years as a fake assistant, while one of Le Pen's aides was charged last week over allegations the party defrauded the European parliament. Both deny any wrongdoing but their attacks have repeatedly questioned the independence and neutrality of the justice system ahead of a two-stage presidential election on April 23 and May 7. Polls currently show independent centrist Emmanuel Macron as the most likely winner, though analysts caution against any firm forecasts after a rollercoaster campaign and the surprises of Brexit and Trump in 2016. Fillon was the clear frontrunner until January when newspaper Le Canard Enchaine brought his wife's job to light. "To imagine that investigations could have been ordered on Fillon or Marine Le Pen is completely absurd because it would be illegal," Justice Minister Jean-Jacques Urvoas told a newspaper on Sunday. Le Pen went ahead with her rally in Nantes on Sunday where she delivered a speech laced with criticism of how French democracy had been corrupted by the political establishment, the media and financial interests. She attacked media groups who "sob about having lost the confidence of readers who justifiably are going on the internet to get their news," she said. Last week, she refused to be questioned by anti-corruption investigators, saying she would not respond to summons during the presidential campaign. - Government response - Faced with Fillon's and Le Pen's mounting defiance, Prime Minister Bernard Cazeneuve responded on Monday. "In politics, especially during campaigning, you need a certain dignity, a high-mindedness, and respect for the truth," he said during a visit to a farm show. Urvoas went further in an interview on France 2 television, accusing Fillon of trying to divert attention away from his legal problems. "Really, a 'near civil war'?... Before he was talking about an 'institutional coup d'etat', what will he say next? 'An extermination of the programmes'? 'A Holocaust of the candidates'?" he said. Fillon's might just be taking advice from his former boss for five years, ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy. The two men lunched together 10 days ago during which Sarkozy was reported to have encouraged Fillon to "dominate the media space: a headline-grabbing announcement every day."So, as it’s now finally starting to look like winter here (and I have actual work piling up like snow), I felt it was appropriate to get a little festive, and thus you get, The 12 Days of Christmas Research. On the first day of Christmas, My PI gave to me: A pile of papers to read. On the second day of Christmas, My PI gave to me: 2 data sets, And a pile of papers to read. On the third day of Christmas, My PI gave to me: 3 rejected drafts, 2 data sets, And a pile of papers to read. On the fourth day of Christmas, My PI gave to me: 4 re-vi-sions, 3 rejected drafts, 2 data sets, And a pile of papers to read. On the fifth day of Christmas, My PI gave to me: Five Ci-ta-tions… 4 revisions, 3 rejected drafts, 2 data sets, And a pile of papers to read. On the sixth day of Christmas, My PI gave to me: 6 cups of coffee, Five Citations… 4 revisions, 3 rejected drafts, 2 data sets, And a pile of papers to read. On the seventh day of Christmas, My PI gave to me: 7 courses to mark, 6 cups of coffee, Five Citations… 4 revisions, 3 rejected drafts, 2 data sets, And a pile of papers to read. On the eight day of Christmas, My PI gave to me: 8 grant proposals, 7 courses to mark, 6 cups of coffee, Five Citations… 4 revisions, 3 rejected drafts, 2 data sets, And a pile of papers to read. On the ninth day of Christmas, My PI gave to me: 9 hours of coding, 8 grant proposals, 7 courses to mark, 6 cups of coffee, Five Citations… 4 revisions, 3 rejected drafts, 2 data sets, And a pile of papers to read. On the tenth day of Christmas, My PI gave to me: 10 syntax errors, 9 hours of coding, 8 grant proposals, 7 courses to mark, 6 cups of coffee, Five Citations… 4 revisions, 3 rejected drafts, 2 data sets, And a pile of papers to read. On the eleventh day of Christmas, My PI gave to me: 11 infinite loops, 10 syntax errors, 9 hours of coding, 8 grant proposals, 7 courses to mark, 6 cups of coffee, Five Citations… 4 revisions, 3 rejected drafts, 2 data sets, And a pile of papers to read. On the twelfth day of Christmas, My PI gave to me: 12 reference letters, 11 infinite loops, 10 syntax errors, 9 hours of coding, 8 grant proposals, 7 courses to mark, 6 cups of coffee, Five Citations… 4 revisions, 3 rejected drafts, 2 data sets, And a pile of papers to read. I strongly encourage people to actually sing this; especially if they record it and send it to me. UPDATE: Keeping the holiday things together, I link to Christmas Newton’s Birthday Suggestions for a Relativist.A public university in Australia is testing a mobile-based system for issuing and maintaining recipient-owned academic credentials on a blockchain. The tools being built for the University of Melbourne are based on the Blockcerts open standard, developed last year by Learning Machine Technologies and the MIT Media Lab. The government of Malta, as previously reported, is also looking to track changes in academic records by using the tech. According to a statement from university officials, the trial forms part of a wider effort to bridge new technologies with the higher learning institution’s existing services. By storing credential data on a blockchain – within which that information is tied to a certain transaction at a particular point in time – the university is hoping to mitigate the risk of credential fraud. “While we are entirely committed to the existing degrees and awards that the University offers, we are also interested in exploring how we can build a more diverse credentialing ecosystem,” said University Pro Vice-Chancellor Gregor Kennedy. “Issuing credentials on the blockchain is a key component of this investigation.” The news marks the latest intersection of higher education and blockchain more generally. A growing number of institutions (and the researchers who work for them) are looking to launch courses related to the tech, and a few have even begun accepting cryptocurrency as payment. Image via ShutterstockDozens of Maules Creek coal mine protesters arrested, activists say Posted A protest group says around 50 people have been arrested during demonstrations at the Maules Creek mine site near Narrabri in north-western New South Wales. Mining company Whitehaven Coal operates the site and has been recently clearing land in the Leard State Forest. Environmental groups are worried that clearing in winter will endanger hibernating animals. The protest group, the Leard Forest Alliance, says around 100 people attended and up to 50 people were arrested today. Alliance spokesperson Helen War says those arrested had blocked one of the access roads. "Some were fined and some were given summons and they were moved offsite by paddy wagon," she said. Police have confirmed there was an incident at the site, but are unable to confirm the number of people arrested or if charges have been laid. Ms War says the protesters planted seedlings on a newly-cleared patch of land at the site, as a symbolic act against land clearing. "I guess it's a gesture of hope, just like the rest of the trees that have been bulldozed, they're probably going to to get re-bulldozed again," she said. "There were a lot of people here who felt it was a powerful gesture and a gesture that says this is the world that we want to create and we want to live in." In the past few days, another protest group, the Maules Creek Community Council, launched civil action against Whitehaven Coal over its winter clearing. Earlier this month about 200 farmers and environmentalists protested in Sydney against the project saying they had legal advice suggesting changes to the biodiversity management plan should not have been approved by the State Government. Senior police have been concerned by recent actions of several anti-coal protesters who have previously chained themselves to mining equipment. Two people were arrested in late May. Whitehaven says the Maules Creek project involves one of the largest coal deposits in Australia and could continue operating for up to 30 years. It estimates the construction phase will cost $767 million and says it is one of the most significant investments currently underway in regional New South Wales. The company says when operating at full capacity the mine is expected to employ about 450 people. Topics: mining-industry, industry, business-economics-and-finance, mining-environmental-issues, environment, mining-rural, rural, environmental-policy, environmental-management, environmental-impact, states-and-territories, boggabri-2382, narrabri-2390, nsw, australiaAstronomers now have the first confirmed snapshots of what appears to be the aftermath of an asteroid collision in space. When scientists first discovered the object dubbed P/2010 A2 in the asteroid belt in January using the Rosetta spacecraft, the fact that it trailed a tail made them think it was a comet. A closer look, however, suggested it was something more peculiar -- images from the Hubble Space Telescope revealed it had a bizarre X-shape nucleus, for instance. [Photo of the odd X-shape in space.] "When I saw the Hubble image I knew it was something special," said researcher Jessica Agarwal, a European Space Agency astronomer in the Netherlands. Astronomers suspect a rock maybe 10-16 feet (3-5 meters) wide slammed into a larger asteroid at speeds of about 11,200 mph (18,000 kph) with a detonation as powerful as a small atomic bomb, said researcher David Jewitt, an astronomer at the University of California in Los Angeles and leader of the Hubble observations. "We have directly observed a collision between asteroids for the first time, instead of having to infer that they happened from million-year-old remains," researcher Colin Snodgrass, a planetary scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany, told SPACE.com. The smaller asteroid was vaporized, stripping material from the larger one. Pressure from solar radiation then swept the debris behind the remnant asteroid, forming a comet-like tail. Hubble images suggest the nucleus of the object is 390 feet (120 meters) wide, with its tail containing dust grains 1 to 2.5 millimeters large, enough material to make a ball 65 feet (20 meters) wide. Mystery space 'X' unmasked When it comes to why this object has such a weird X-shape, "think of throwing a brick into a swimming pool," Jewitt told SPACE.com. "The splash pattern will not be a smooth curtain, but a series of jets, filaments and other structures that reflect the shape of the brick, angle of impact and so on," he explained. "For the case of A2, neither the projectile nor the target are likely to have been spherical, so the 'X' arms probably reflect shape irregularities in an off-center impact." The two asteroids that created the object were probably familiar with collisions, since they were most likely born from impacts between larger asteroids tens of millions to hundreds of millions of years ago, the researchers said. Encounters between asteroids are thought to be common, with asteroids of modest size colliding into each other about once a year, Jewitt added. "Catching colliding asteroids on camera is difficult, because large impacts are rare, while small ones, such as the one that produced P/2010 A2, are exceedingly faint," he said. The two asteroids whose remains make up P/2010 A2 were unknown before the impact because they were too faint to be detected. Scientists did not witness the collision itself because it happened when the asteroids were in the same direction as the sun, but computer models suggest the collision took place around February 2009. "We expected the debris field to expand dramatically, like shrapnel flying from a hand grenade," Jewitt said. "But what happened was quite the opposite. We found that the object is expanding very, very slowly." The research will be detailed in the Oct. 14 issue of the journal Nature. Asteroid billiard balls These findings give new clues as to how asteroids behave when they smash into each other and how the debris from these impacts contributes to the dust that pervades the solar system. "These observations are important because we need to know where the dust in the solar system comes from, and how much of it comes from colliding asteroids as opposed to 'outgassing' comets," Jewitt said. "We can also apply this knowledge to the dusty debris disks around other stars, because these are thought to be produced by collisions between unseen bodies in the disks. Knowing how the dust was produced will yield clues about those invisible bodies." Astronomers plan to use Hubble to examine the object again next year to see how far solar radiation has swept its dust back and how the mysterious X-shape nucleus has evolved. Future telescopes should find plenty of such asteroid crashes, with Jewitt expecting the planned Large Synoptic Survey Telescope to spot dozens of asteroid collisions shortly after they happen. * Video - Hubble Spots Asteroid Collision Aftermath * 5 Reasons to Care About Asteroids * Forget Big Asteroids: It's the Smaller Rocks That Sneak In and Blow Up Copyright © 2010 Space.com. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. FoxNews.com's SciTech section is on Twitter! Follow us @fxnscitech.Image: Google/arXiv For the most part, the first tasks to be outsourced to machines are the most routine, since these jobs are relatively easy to reduce to quantifiable parameters that can be used to train an algorithm. The upshot of this was that artists and other creative types can rest easy since quantifying creativity and aesthetics is much more difficult than, say, quantifying the rules of the road for a self-driving Uber. Nevertheless, AI researchers are hard at work tackling the problem of artificial creativity, and machines are slowly learning how to write poems, novels and even movie scripts. But according to a new paper by the Google researchers Hui Fang and Meng Zhang, professional photographers might be the next causalities of the creative AI revolution. Posted to arXiv earlier this month, the paper describes an artificial neural network called Creatism that is a "system for artistic content creation." The idea was to break down photo aesthetics into quantifiable parameters that could be taught to a machine using professional artistic examples. The result, as Fang and Zhang write in their paper, is an algorithm that "mimics the workflow of a landscape photographer, from framing for the best composition to carrying out various post-processing operations." To make this happen, Fang and Zhang first used formulas to define different aesthetic aspects of photography such as image saturation, composition, and the level of detail based on examples by professional photographers. Next, they used a collection of about 15,000 photo thumbnails of high-ranking landscape photography from 500px.com in order to teach their neural net how to crop and add lighting effects to these thumbnails to obtain the most aesthetically pleasing landscape photo. This process essentially involved having the neural net crop and add new lighting to the input photos, producing several different versions of the input. These photos were then evaluated by the researchers and four professional photographers to select the best version of the photo. The editing process for the neural net, moving from a panorama to a cropped photo to a photo edited for saturation and lighting. Image: Google/arXiv After the neural net had learned the parameters that defined a good crop and good photo lighting, it was time to allow it to 'take' its own photos. To do this, the researchers used a number of panoramas from Google Street View in scenic locations around North America, such as Banff, the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, and Big Sur. These panoramas were then fed to the neural net which had to generate a unique photo based on this environment using its learned crop and lighting parameters. The final step of the process was a photographic Turing-test to determine whether people could tell that a given photo was generated by a machine. To do this, Fang and Zhang asked six professional photographers, all of whom had at least a bachelor's degree in photography and two years of professional photo experience, to independently evaluate the photos. Each photo would be ranked on a score from 1-4, where 1 indicated a beginner-level photo with little artistic merit and 4 indicated a professional photo. Importantly, none of the photographers were aware that any of the photos had been generated by a machine. Read More: Is This Photo Real or Fake? Amazingly, of the 173 photos evaluated by the professional photographers, 41 percent were ranked as at or above a semi-professional level (a score of 3 or greater), and 13 percent of the photos scored at or above 3.5. In comparison, 45 percent of actual professional photos received a score of 3.5 or higher. So while Google's Creatism algorithm might not be the next Ansel Adams, it could still give your best Instagram photos a run for their money. The researchers posted many of the machine generated photos to an album on Github, and a few have been included below. Image: Google/arXiv Image: Google/arXiv Image: Google/arXiv Image: Google/arXiv Get six of our favorite Motherboard stories every day by signing up for our newsletter.North Korea has been dismantling the Yongbon site North Korea has handed over more than 18,000 pages of records on its nuclear weapons programme to the US. The documents log activities at North Korea's plutonium reactor at Yongbyon, which is thought to have produced the material for nuclear tests in 2006. North Korea shut down the reactor last year, but failed to meet a deadline to give a full account of its nuclear activities. A US negotiator was due to take the documents to Washington to be examined. North Korea agreed in February 2007 to give up its nuclear weapons programme in return for large-scale aid and the lifting of sanctions. The deal was agreed following six-party talks between China, the US, Japan, Russia and North and South Korea. Sceptics The BBC's John Sudworth reports from South Korea that the Yongbyon documents will provide an important glimpse into North Korea's bomb-making past, though some will question just how much new information they will contain. Doubts over North Korea's other nuclear activities remain, in particular its alleged secret uranium enrichment programme and the transfer of nuclear technology to Syria, he says. Those are the issues that have been holding up progress on last year's agreement. North Korea has reportedly agreed to a compromise solution under which it will merely acknowledge US concerns. Some Republicans in Washington were sceptical about the importance of the documents. "Any mediocre performance by North Korea is taken as an earth-shattering positive development by our state department," said Congressman Peter Hoekstra. US state department spokesman Sean McCormack said that once the documents were back in Washington "our top three priorities are going to be verification, verification, verification".The “boss-rush” fighting game never took off as a genre, but while Monster Maulers and Warzard garnered something of a cult following, Banpresto’s Metamoqester fell through the cracks. A shame really, because its intense gameplay and colorful characters can make for a fun experience. Grotesque monsters are popping up all over the world and it’s up to three warriors to globetrot and take them down. However, the warriors are not entirely what they seem since when using certain special attacks, they will change into their demonic forms. Being a spinoff from Pandora Box’s Oni RPG series, Metamoqester ironically doesn’t have much of a story. Characters: Tenchimaru – A duel-sword wielding ninja who is the most balanced of the three, and the only one who has a special projectile move. He’s the sole character to be carried over from the main Oni series. Kaiohmaru – A hulking monk who attacks with a trident and energy pistol. His moves have the worst start-up time, but with patience and timing, he can destroy almost any boss with three or four special attacks. Yukihime – A nimble priestess whose spinning attacks have some almost-ridiculous invincibility frames on them. Her pet fox accompanies her in battle, but doesn’t do more than bristle at her enemies (Poppy would be ashamed). With her speed, good pokes, nigh-invulnerability, and overall fan service-y presentation, it’s little wonder why she’s the most popular among players. Monsters: Gengoroh – A fire-breathing demon with a pagoda roof on its back and a baby (?) coming out of its chest. Its stage is a desecrated temple in Japan. Titicata – An Incan robot that seems to be a predecessor of Warzard’s Gi Gi. One of the more visually impressive monsters, it uses solely melee attacks and is pretty easily dispatched. Icebiter – A giant ice monster found the in the Antarctic, appropriately enough. Its stage is a giant ice float where a huge minotaur encased in gold watches from the background. Icebiter is a very challenging and annoying boss, since it has an icicle attack that can do big damage (even when blocked) and a cross-up body splash that can mess with a character’s defensive techniques. Brocken – A German tank mecha piloted by a young blonde woman. When her health gets to about half, she’ll spam her multi-directional machine gun attack. Victle – A surprisingly agile steampunk golem resembling Frankenstein’s monster. It apparently doubles as a clock since it uses an automaton cuckoo bird as a melee attack. Its stage is a lab in Britain. Husehime – The source of all the world’s monster attacks: a giant floating baby with spiky hair. That sounds about right. Being the final boss, its electrical attacks and screen-wide laser show will make quick work of anyone not playing defensively. The controls are pretty straightforward. There are three buttons for melee attacks (weak, medium, and strong) and one for a projectile. Special moves are done using the standard fighting game motions with the joystick and then tapping the right button. Simultaneously holding down the weak and medium attack buttons will charge the super meter (located under the health bar) up to three levels. Once at any of those levels, pressing the medium and strong buttons together will activate the characters’ super move, which sees them temporarily change into their demon form and unleash a screen-wide attack. Metamoqester has strong graphics and boasts some pretty impressive 3-D effects for its day. Titicaca is especially cool to look at when it moves around and breaks apart. When it comes to the stages, most of them are pretty dark and gloomy, with corpses littering and fires flickering in the background. The game seems to go out of its way to not mimic Monster Maulers’ light-hearted approach to design. The monster and stage designer, Takehiko Hoashi, would later go on to work as a visual effects artist on Final Fantasy IX and two of the short films (“The Duel” and “The Package”) from Halo Legends. The game has a pretty high difficulty. The characters have some degree of lag time on most of their moves, but the monsters don’t seem to have any issue connecting with their hits almost instantly. In addition to that, all of the monsters are crazy strong so it’s not uncommon for a fight to end in only a few hits. The kicker is that, unlike Monster Maulers and Warzard, the monsters’ life completely refills when a new round starts. So while Metamoqester is a pretty short game that allows two lives per credit, the difficulty can really stretch things out. The camera certainly doesn’t make things any easier. With almost every hit, the screen will shake violently and can be pretty disorienting (especially in coop mode). Blocking Icebiter’s icicle wave attack seems to last forever and makes the screen bounce so much that it can get infuriating. Gameplay stresses defense and timing, otherwise the player may just as well throw their quarters in the air. The developers have implemented a few defensive techniques like an evasive roll and an invincible backdash to further help players out. The coop feature (or “Co-Fight” as the Japanese version calls it) where two characters can team up against the monsters takes the edge off as well. Unfortunately, there are no special double team attacks like in Monster Maulers. Metamoqester was originally released in Japan in November 1995 as the pronounceable Oni – The Ninja Master. It’s understandable why the developers would want the name changed for the (very limited) international release since the Oni series isn’t very well known outside of Japan, but why/how they came up with the name they did is still a mystery. This version has a spoken narration over part of the attract mode and the characters have text quotes after each fight and during their respective endings. Other than that, the game is practically the same. So while Metamoqester isn’t as over-the-top as Monster Maulers or as deep as Warzard, it’s certainly worth seeking out. It won’t be a cakewalk, but traveling all over the world killing giant monsters typically isn’t. The Oni Series: The Oni games are a series of JRPGs that began in 1990 with the release of Devil’s Demon Record ONI (鬼忍降魔録 ONI) for the Game Boy. The overall idea was inspired by the Kamen Rider TV show where a noble warrior must transform into something stronger to fight evil, although it is set in feudal Japan instead of a more modern time. Tenchimaru appears in several of the games, as do many of his relatives and descendants, as either a main character or in a supporting role. Oni was quite popular in Japan for a while with later games being released on the Super Famicon, PlayStation and Nintendo DS. It even spawned a novelization and an anime series in the late ‘90s. There’s very little if any overlap with Metamoqester and none of the arcade game’s developmental team worked on the main Oni series.Daniel Eran Dilger Apple not only announced plans to open a Mac version of its App Store, but slated an aggressive target to begin selling titles within three months. Here’s why it’s so important to the company. . I got started advocating for a Mac software store in 2006, almost two years before Apple opened its iPhone App Store and month before the company started selling iPod games. The writing was on the wall; Apple iTunes Store was already selling blockbuster amounts of music, and Apple was also operating a major online store with everything from peripherals to software to cables and ink cartridges. Why not merge a store into the Finder? My prediction was based on the idea that Apple could tie its online retail presence into the Finder, much like the iTunes Store fit right into user’s existing music libraries. That would enable the company to help users buy exactly the right type of RAM or toner carts they needed, based on what their system already knew to be installed. How to Fix the Finder 3: Prettier Fixing.Mac – Idea 5: A.Mac Marketplace What I didn’t foresee was what Apple would do a month later: iPod games. However, having already primed the imagination pump, it seemed obvious to me where Apple was headed with iPod games, particularly a few months later when the iPhone arrived. With iPod games, Apple was clearly experimenting with how to package, market, and securely deliver software. I was confident–or at least optimistically hopeful–that Apple was doing this to revolutionize how all software was sold, for reasons I’ll address in a moment. Apple’s New Dual Processor Game Console Walk before you run In an industry where observers often forget that buildings require foundations and that good plans are more important than an enthusiasm to start building, Apple’s introduction of iPod games was roundly criticized. Why weren’t small Mac developers invited to the party? Why wasn’t the open source community asked about how they would design a games platform? Why didn’t Apple allow customers to share software downloads like borrowed books? Why didn’t Apple just turn the whole concept over to Richard Stallman and let the GNU collective crank out a whole library of free games, something that had worked so well for Linux and Pandora? From my perspective, Apple’s iPod games efforts were clearly a fledgling experiment. Once the iPhone was unveiled, it seemed very obvious that iPod games were simply an exercise in developing a secure software mechanism designed to make software a way to add value to Apple’s hardware, rather than a way to create new value, something that has dogged Apple for 30 years (and a problem I’ll articulate below). And so it was that while everyone else seemed to think of iPod games as manure, I sensed that they were only a sign that a pony was around the corner. That pony turned out to be a really fast racehorse, but Apple’s history of partnerships with its software developers has been more along the lines of horse meat. Apple reinvents software for its own survival As a company, Apple doesn’t seem too worried about all the indigent criticism directed at it by open software ideologues. It is, however, very serious about the threats posed by software companies that get all chummy with its platforms. And for good reason. In the late 70s, Apple’s hardware fell in love for the first time. And as most young creatures do, it fell for the first person to show it some attention. It was VisiCalc. The steamy romance caused little Apple IIs to fly off the shelf, establishing Apple as a major hardware maker in the emerging PC market. Apple’s dependence upon VisiCalc didn’t last long however, as VisiCalc brought its software to other platforms, and particularly as Lotus invented 1-2-3 as a VisiCalc killer. Apple should have learned, we can now say in retrospect, that software is a heartbreaking player of fragile new hardware platforms. Office Wars 3 – How Microsoft Got Its Office Monopoly Office Wars 4 – Microsoft’s Assault on Lotus and IBM In the early 80s, Apple partnered with Microsoft in developing the Macintosh. Steve Jobs recognized how important software would be in launching a wildly new hardware platform, so he arranged a marriage between the Mac and Microsoft’s Word and Excel, two ugly siblings that weren’t getting any action in the DOS PC world, where Lotus 1-2-3 and Wordperfect were still the heartthrobs everyone wanted to date. The launch of Macintosh helped Microsoft more than Apple. It turned the minor language interpreter and DOS maker into a credible applications vendor via its Mac apps. But the Mac itself didn’t take off until Jobs lined up another mate: the offspring of Adobe PostScript and Altsys PageMaker. Wedded to Apple’s Mac and LaserPrinter, this desktop publishing family earned Apple enough money to comfortably take a nap in, where it dozed off while Microsoft snuck out of the compound armed with Apple’s real value: an easy to use desktop environment. Microsoft married its copy of Apple’s technologies with its own Office apps to set up the Windows PC family, which ruled the PC desktop for the next twenty years as Apple struggled to find reasons for people to buy its non-Windows hardware. Chronicles of Conflict: the History of Adobe vs. Apple If Apple blogged its software strategy Despite recently pulling in more revenues than Microsoft, Apple remains small enough that it must keeps its plans secret to remain competitive. But since you clearly are among those interested in knowing what the company is doing, here’s my take as Apple’s unauthorized bi
the Canes know how he would work in the system, so there isn't quite as much risk as there would be with other free agents. Hypothetical Contract Offer: 6 years, $33 million - $5 million in 15/16, $7 million in 16/17, $6 million in 17/18 and $5 million the final 3 years. Jeff Petry - RD (coming off a $3.075 million salary & cap hit) Petry is a solid, right-handed defenseman that was probably a weak Oilers team best defenseman. Like Sekera, he can do a little bit of everything, but doesn't really stand out in any particular area. He played 2nd pairing minutes in Edmonton and has done the same in Montreal since being traded. He plays a pretty responsible game, can skate pretty well and contributes on both special teams. He has a decent shot and while he isn't a huge body, he'll try to play physical and block some shots. I would imagine that Montreal will make a good attempt to resign him and if they can't, he'll be a pretty sought-after target. With Carolina, he would probably be the 2nd best defenseman, but would be on the 2nd pairing. Petry has experience playing with younger defensemen, so that could work as some of the prospects move their way into the lineup. The issue is that he's a right defenseman and Carolina has a number of right-handed prospects. Possibly top 4 prospects Ryan Murphy, Brett Pesce and Roland McKeown are all right-handers, so it's something to consider. The Canes could try to bring him in shorter term, as a stop-gap, but I think Petry is probably looking for some salary and term. He would immediately upgrade the Canes defense, but I'm not sure if he's the best way to go at this time. Hypothetical Contract Offer: 3 years, $15 million - $4.5 million in 15/16, $5 million in 16/17 and $5.5 million in 17/18. Paul Martin - LD (coming off a $5 million salary & cap hit) Martin is an experienced, mobile defenseman that can do a lot of things. He skates well and can contribute offensively, but his strength is in his own zone. He will lay out his body to block shots and does a pretty good job going up against the opponents top line. His weaknesses are that he isn't physical, seems to be a little fragile over the past few seasons and has probably already seen his better days. His days in Pittsburgh are almost certainly done, but instead of considering Carolina, he might be looking for a chance to get his name on the Stanley Cup. In Raleigh, Martin would easily be a top pairing defenseman, playing a ton of minutes and contributing on both special teams. The question is for how long can you count on him? In the last 6 seasons, Martin has only played in 70% of games possible and he's 34 years old. He would be a good option for the next couple of years as long as he stays healthy, but if not, the Canes simply wouldn't have anybody that could fill his role. And unlike some other potential targets, staying healthy might be more difficult for Martin. The Hurricanes would have to offer a contract that would be worth Martin's while and it might just be to cost prohibitive for the franchise. Hypothetical Contract Offer: 3 years, $16 million - $5.5 million in 15/16 & 16/17 and $5 million in 17/18. Zbynek Michalek - RD (coming off a $4 million salary & cap hit) Michalek is a veteran shutdown defenseman that is use to playing for a small market team. He's a solid defender that doesn't really do anything spectacular, but can do a little bit of everything. Michalek has pretty good size, but isn't a guy that plays overly physical. And while he has a nice shot, he doesn't contribute much offensively. He focuses on his defensive game, blocks a lot of shots and plays a lot on the PK. He likely won't be resigned by St. Louis, but returning to Arizona could be a possibility. He has spent most of his career in the desert and when he did sign as a free agent with Pittsburgh, he didn't seem to care for the spotlight of a high-profile team. The big concern is that he gets banged up pretty easily. He has missed 71 games over the past 4 seasons and hasn't played over 73 games since the 08/09 season. With the Hurricanes, he would be a 2nd pairing defenseman that played significant minutes on the PK. But like Petry, Michalek faces the same dilemma with the Canes right-handed prospects. Because of his age, Michalek might be more of a gap-filler than Petry and that might be a benefit to Carolina. He could come in for 2 or 3 years, improve the Canes defense and allow the prospects time to develop. If he could stay in the lineup, he would work nice, if not, the Canes would have a hole on the blueline. Hypothetical Contract Offer: 3 years, $11 million - $4 million in 15/16 & 16/17 and $3 million in 17/18. Here are some other defenseman that it might make sense for the Canes to target when free agency opens: Kobinian Holzer - RD, Adam McQuaid - RD, Cody Franson - RD, Matt Hunwick - LD, Christian Ehrhoff - LD, Matt Irwin - LD, Mike Green - RD.With starting defensive backs Morris Claiborne and Brandon Carr set to hit free agency, it's officially a position of need for the Dallas Cowboys. They'll like stick to their frugal ways, but there is solid free agent talent to be had this offseason. One such case would be cornerback A.J. Buoye, the Houston Texans' standout who will also hit the open market in 2016. The once undrafted free agent (2014) has been a staple in the Texans' defense, leading the team last season with 16 pass breakups while hauling in an interception, a sack and 52 total tackles. And by the looks of it, he wouldn't be adverse to joining the Cowboys, a team he was raised to love. The Cowboys’ season may be over, but they’re not mailing it in. Don’t miss any breaking offseason news, take a second to sign up for our FREE Cowboys messenger! "If I watched anybody it was the Cowboys," said Bouye. "And the only reason I say that is my dad is a big Cowboys' fan. After the game he'll have his Texans jersey on, but as soon as we get home he's ready to watch the Cowboys' game, and he's cheering like I play for the Cowboys and I'm like'man, you ain't right'. But, I have family in Dallas that are Cowboys' fans so my dad's from Waco, TX, so I guess I just was always going for the Cowboys growing up." Is it hard for him to no longer be a Cowboys' fan? "I don't have a problem watching them," Bouye admitted. "The year they had this year with the rookie quarterback [Dak] Prescott and [Ezekiel] Elliott and just what they was able to do from the year before is just amazing. You like to see stuff like that, so you're always going to pull for teams like that who just make a complete turnaround. "I know my dad was happy. They didn't finish how they wanted to, but...I just like watching football." Does he think Dak Prescott has proven himself in this league? "If you win that many games, as a quarterback it's all on you so for him to win all those games in his rookie year -- that's all that you need," said Bouye. "It's just now are you gonna keep working or fall back a little bit, but I don't see him doing that." The standout defensive back also spoke on the coming business of his free agency as the Texans are reportedly not set to franchise tag the 25-year-old. He could be an interesting option for the Cowboys, if the price is right. His market value is projected at five-years, $57M with an annual salary of $11.4M, but his lack of takeaways should make him more affordable. Well, that and the fact his father would be ecstatic.The 2016–17 Oklahoma City Thunder season was the 9th season of the franchise in Oklahoma City and the 51st in the National Basketball Association (NBA). On the April 9, Russell Westbrook broke the record of Oscar Robertson of most triple-doubles in a season with 42. Westbrook would go on to be named the League's MVP in June. The Thunder would finish the regular season with a 47–35 record, securing the 6th seed. In the playoffs, they faced off against the Houston Rockets in the First Round, in which they lost in five games. This was the Thunder’s first season since 2006-07 without Kevin Durant as he had announced he would leave the Thunder and sign with the Golden State Warriors, whom had finished with the best-ever regular season record of 73-9 the season before. Draft picks [ edit ] The Thunder originally did not have a pick in the 2016 NBA Draft, however made a blockbuster trade the day of the draft, sending Serge Ibaka to the Orlando Magic in exchange for Victor Oladipo, Ersan İlyasova, and the draft rights to the 11th overall pick in the 2016 NBA Draft (Domantas Sabonis). They additionally drafted Daniel Hamilton with the 56th overall pick in the 2nd round (received from the Denver Nuggets). Roster [ edit ] Standings [ edit ] Division [ edit ] Conference [ edit ] Game log [ edit ] Regular season [ edit ] Playoffs [ edit ] Transactions [ edit ] Trades [ edit ] Free agency [ edit ] Player Signed Former team Russell Westbrook[6] Signed 3-year extension deal worth $85 million Oklahoma City Thunder Additions [ edit ] Subtractions [ edit ]The folks over at Titan Focus have uncovered quite a treasure trove of leaked information regarding Blizzard’s upcoming Project Titan. As always, the veracity of any leaked information is always suspect so all we can do is wonder at the actual truth behind the leaks. Anyone who has followed the gaming industry for some time knows that some facts always find their way to the masses before official reveals are made. However, looking at the list over at Titan Focus you can see that it wasn’t a mere tidbit or two but a rather in-depth group of rumors that provide some actual framework to the game. So I prefer to think that all the leaked points are true. Below is the original parts from the article "Project Titan info leak: eSports, Jay Wilson, Blizzcon 2013 and more!". Game Universe It's based on Earth's history, but also includes a high amount of fiction. It will have a "deep history", just as Warcraft and Starcraft. They're intending to include many Warcraft elements into Titan's world. Mostly Easter Eggs, but can also extend to entire characters being ported into the new game, one way or another. There will be a lot of Time Travel. When it comes to weapons, we'll have almost everything at our disposal, from magic to guns. Heavy use of Greek, Roman and Viking myths. They've invited some established writers (Richard A. Knaak for example) to help with the storyline. Game-play It's an MMORPG. We'll play from a 3rd person view, but there will also be a first person view during "events". No extra clarification as to the nature of these events could be given. TAB targeting in combat. It will benefit from a completely new game engine. Graphics will be in the established "Blizzard style". Primarily a PC game, but next-gen consoles are still being considered. Probably after launch, as with D3. Expected 12+ PEGI. It's designed with eSports in mind. They will try to grow it into a successful eSport. There will be "clan" housing. No details on player-housing. Last but not least, the game will have an Auction House. Nothing conclusive about a Real-Money Auction House but it is possible. As an extra tidbit, Blizzard was also considering introducing a RMAH into WoW at one point, but apparently not anymore. MiscellaneousWhen the Cavaliers traded star PG Kyrie Irving for a package primarily centered around PG Isaiah Thomas, many fans lamented the move as a downgrade; after all, Irving is one of the most exciting players in the league, is one of the greatest finishers at the rim of all time, and shot 40% from three-point range last season. Thomas, on the other hand, is extremely undersized at 5’9” and is currently recovering from a serious hip injury that could affect him later in his career. However, a closer look at the stats reveals that Thomas could make the Cavs a significantly better teams. Firstly, Thomas’ version of playmaking could be a big positive for the Cavs. Thomas averaged 28.9 points and 5.9 assists per game. Avery Bradley followed up Thomas with 16.3 points. That’s a large disparity between the first and second place scorer. As far as assists, Al Horford averaged 5.0, Marcus Smart 4.6, and Bradley and current Cavalier Jae Crowder each had 2.2. For the Cavs, LeBron James led the team with 26.4 points, Irving followed with 25.2, and Kevin Love added in 19. James again led the team in assists, with 8.7, and Irving added 5.8, but the next full-time players, Kevin Love and JR Smith, only averaged 1.9 and 1.5 each. What can we glean from this? The Boston Celtics’ offense revolved around ball movement, getting everyone involved, and eventually culminating in Isaiah Thomas scoring. For the Cavs, either James or Irving ran the offense on nearly every play, which was supposed to create open shots for Love, Smith, Kyle Korver, and others, but usually ended up with James or Irving scoring in isolation. The excuse for Irving’s underwhelming assist numbers has been that he’s played second fiddle to James, and has never been the primary ball-handler and facilitator of an offense. But let’s look as Irving’s assist numbers with Cleveland before James returned: from 2011-2012 to 2013-2014, 5.4, 5.9, 6.1. Pedestrian, but nothing too bad. But a player Irving is often compared to, fellow PG John Wall, has never averaged less than 7.6 assists in a season, despite being his team’s primary ball-handler and scorer. Perhaps Irving’s assist numbers will improve this year in a new offense, perhaps not. But Isaiah Thomas is already used to not getting all the stats, which should suit his transition to playing with LeBron James well. But perhaps most importantly, defenses will no longer be able to key in on Thomas, as they will have to account for James and Love, among others. That means that Thomas will see increased spacing compared to what he witnessed in Boston, so he will be able to take more open shots, and that is a fantastic thing for the Cavs. Effective Field Goal percentage, of eFG%, is similar to the usual FG% stat, except that it weighs three-point shots as worth 50% more than two-point field goals, just as in scoring. This graph shows players’ eFG% as the distance to the closest defender increases. Thomas ranks below average in the 0-2 feet bracket, due to his volume scoring play style (he took 19.4 shots per game). His size makes it more difficult for him to finish inside and to shoot in the midrange, which makes his 28.9 points per game average even more impressive. However, once Thomas gets some distance in between him and the defender, his shooting percentage shoots up, eventually placing first in the league in the 6+ feet bracket. When Thomas is open, he’s a fantastic shooter. One possible lineup the Cavs could deploy to take advantage of this could be Thomas/JR Smith/Kyle Korver/James/Love, five players who are deadly in catch and shoot situations, three of which are drive threats as well. For comparison, here are the graphs for Kyrie Irving and Steph Curry: When sizing up Curry’s numbers, Thomas comes out on top, and by a good margin. Once fully healthy and up to speed, Isaiah Thomas will be vital to the Cavs’ championship hopes. He will be a capable replacement for Irving, while providing Cleveland with elite shooting ability, which will be desperately needed in the playoffs.The Orioles reduced their 40-man roster to 39 players by exposing left-hander Tim Berry to waivers and losing him on a claim by the Marlins. In the blink of an eye, the Orioles learned today that they surrendered Berry to the Marlins, infielder Rey Navarro to the Angels and left-hander Edgar Olmos to the Cubs. I erroneously tweeted this afternoon that the Marlins claimed Olmos before I quickly made the correction. I knew Miami took one of the Orioles’ left-handers. I just had the wrong one. Berry, 24, was a highly-rated pitching prospect the past two years before faltering in 2015 and losing his place in Double-A Bowie’s rotation. The Orioles called him up to the majors for one day on June 6, 2014 before optioning him to make room for Kevin Gausman. Berry was a nice story based on his selection in the 50th round of the 2009 draft out of San Marcos (Calif.) High School. He tumbled to the bottom due to a torn ulnar collateral ligament and accepted a $125,000 signing bonus. It looked like a wise investment as Berry went 11-7 with a 3.85 ERA in 27 starts at Single-A Frederick in 2013 and posted a 1.84 ERA in seven appearances in the Arizona Fall League. He was 6-7 with a 3.51 ERA last year at Bowie, justifying his spot on the 40-man roster, but he took a huge step backward this summer. Berry made 15 starts at Bowie before going to the bullpen for eight appearances and finishing 2-7 with a 7.32 ERA 1.713 WHIP in 82 1/3 innings. The Orioles still projected him as a starter, but they needed him to work through his problems outside the rotation. Fastball command was an issue, along with Berry’s tendency to overthink on the mound. He’s one of the most cerebral and thoughtful players I’ve interviewed, dazzling the media in spring training with his in-depth answers, and he’s still in his early 20s. Baseball America ranked Berry as the Orioles’ No. 7 prospect last winter. Vice president of baseball operations Brady Anderson had invited Berry to work out with him in California. The Orioles don’t figure to make any more roster moves tonight and the warehouse is closed for the holidays, but they’ve created an opening on the 40-man roster for a future signing or acquisition. And deals still can be made during this span. That’s why cell phones were invented.Last month, I blogged about the CRTC’s Talk TV consultation and concerns that the questions were framed in a lopsided manner. CRTC Chair Jean Pierre Blais was asked about those concerns in Twitter chat and he responded that the questions and answers “were intended to be provocative.” I address that response in my weekly technology law column (Toronto Star version, homepage version) highlighting both the concerns with the survey and offering some additional provocative questions that the Commission excluded. The column begins by noting that regulation of Internet video services and the prospect of pick-and-pay television channels headline the second phase of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission’s future of television consultation which launched late last month. The “TalkTV” initiative is designed to make it easy for Canadians to participate, featuring six short scenarios followed by a limited number of choices for respondents. While the consultation quickly attracted considerable participation – the commission said thousands of Canadians responded in the first week alone – its content raises serious concerns about future plans for CRTC regulation. Indeed, if the consultation is a signal of where the commission is headed, not only is the notion of true pick-and-pay channels dead and the much-disliked simultaneous substitution alive, but regulation of Internet video services may be just around the corner. The Internet video discussion in the survey focuses almost exclusively on new regulatory fees for services such as Netflix. After asking respondents whether online services should be required to contribute to funding for Canadian content, provide closed-captioning, and adhere to regulated programming standards, the CRTC poses a series of follow-up questions that all involve additional costs. Respondents are asked whether they would pay an extra 50 cents per month for Canadian-made programming (presumably the additional cost for a Canadian content contribution fund) or a few cents each month for closed captioning. The commission also inquires whether Canadians would be willing to pay $5 more each month for increased Internet usage costs. The CRTC floats the possibility that such usage would not count against monthly data caps, suggesting that it may be willing to violate net neutrality principles as part of a new Internet regulatory regime. The consultation delves into other controversial issues, but often offers a lopsided perspective. Signal substitution, the longstanding practice that swaps a U.S. feed with the Canadian equivalent (with Canadian commercials) when the same program is being aired at the same time, was raised during an earlier part of the consultation as a policy ripe for reform. Once the issue is explained in the survey, respondents are offered just three choices: keep the policy unchanged, black out U.S. signals, or require Canadians to pay extra fees to compensate stations for lost revenues. Similarly, the consultation asks whether Canadians would like access to more U.S. and international programming. The Commission seemingly pre-judges the issue by framing the ramifications of new programming as increasing cable and satellite fees, creating lost Canadian jobs, or developing new channel packages with additional Canadian content to offset the foreign programming. When asked about the apparently skewed approach during a recent Twitter chat, CRTC Chair Jean-Pierre Blais responded that the consultation was meant to be provocative. Few would object to a provocative approach that generates interest in broadcast policy, however, these provocations are entirely one-sided. For government regulators, it is seemingly provocative to ask about Internet regulation and the implementation of new fees that could almost double the effective cost of services such as Netflix. It is also provocative to equate more consumer choice with lost Canadian jobs or to propose compensation for Canadian television stations if simultaneous substitution is removed. Yet the commission does not offer up similarly provocative options such as the elimination of many broadcast regulations in order to create a level playing field with Internet services or removing the requirement that Canadians purchase basic television services with all cable and satellite packages. It also does not provoke respondents with the possibility of new rules to eliminate simultaneous substitution by forcing Canadian broadcasters to adjust to a more competitive marketplace or to re-imagine the role of public broadcasting in Canada. Given that the CRTC rightly or wrongly often attracts the ire of Canadians, the survey also avoids the biggest provocation of all – does Canada still need the CRTC to regulate broadcasting? The answer to that question might depend upon the final results of its future of television consultation.CLOSE Autistic people are typically underemployed or struggle finding work because of their condition, despite being more than capable of doing the job and JPMorgan Chase is in the process of expanding its autism program. Suchat Pederson/The News Journal Buy Photo David Butt works at his station at JPMorgan Chase in Wilmington. Autistic people are typically underemployed or struggle to find work because of their condition, despite being more than capable of doing the job. (Photo: Suchat Pederson, The News Journal)Buy Photo More and more Delaware companies are seeking out people with autism because they're finding they have qualities — particularly their attention to detail and fierce loyalty — that make them high performing employees. Statistics show that about 70 to 90 percent of people with autism in the U.S. are highly underemployed or unemployed. Katina Demetriou, director of Autism Delaware’s Productive Opportunities for Work & Recreation, said Delaware is at the forefront in terms of states looking at employing autistic people. People with autism often have difficulty communicating and interacting with others, which can put them at a disadvantage during job interviews. "We have individuals in their 20s, 30s or 40s who have never before had a meaningful career opportunity," said Ernie Dianastasis, CEO of The Precisionists, a Wilmington startup that helps employ people with disabilities. "They've been tied up in parents' basements playing Xbox or really underemployed," he said. "People are starting to understand their strength and capabilities." While the exact number of people with autism in Delaware is unknown, the state's Department of Education estimates 1,660 public school students in 2015 had autism. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that the disorder occurs in 1 in every 68 children under 8 in the U.S. The disorder has symptoms that can range from mild to severe. More: Come for haircut at Wilmington barbershop, stay for health advice David Butt used to sort files in a Delaware government office. Wesley Gibbs reset passwords for an education nonprofit. Both men now work full time at JPMorgan Chase, and Gibbs recently received a promotion. Kevin Hamill pushed carts at Walmart, or what he called "herding silver buffalo." He now works the assembly lines as a contractor for Tesla Industries and hopes to be hired full-time in the coming months. Over the years, all three applied for jobs in fields they went to school for, but had a hard time getting past the in-person interview. So they took these jobs, despite the limited opportunities for advancement. Demetriou and Dianastasis credits former Gov. Jack Markell, who made workforce development for people with disabilities a priority during his 2012-2013 term as chair of the National Governors Association. In recent years, Demetriou has seen a “great shift” in companies hiring employees with autism. Demetriou credits this to the increase in societal awareness of autism and companies changing the way they do interviews. More organizations are doing video and working résumés, in which an applicant talks or demonstrates their skills on video. This allows employers to see these potential candidates in a new light, she said. Read: Delaware confirms six cases of the flu so far this year Dianastasis launched his company last year with the goal of employing 10,000 people with disabilities by 2025. The startup has contracted work with a handful of companies and employs right now about 100 people. Before the employees get to work — which can either be in The Precisionists' Wilmington office or at the company — the startup conducts a four-week assessment of the adults with autism. This allows them to gauge which types of jobs would be best for each person. Most of the people The Precisionists works with tend to be on the high-functioning end of the autism spectrum, meaning they are highly intelligent and have underdeveloped social skills, said Diane Shea, director of delivery services at The Precisionists. Once the employees start working, The Precisionists continue to mentor and counsel them. They also provide training to the companies' managers and employees about autism and the best way to handle different workplace scenarios. The startup recently began working with Tesla Industries, a New Castle company that makes power conversion systems for vehicles and aircraft. The company frequently works with the U.S. military. Nine Precisionists employees assemble electronic circuit boards and power conversion units and perform quality control functions. The company also has the option of hiring The Precisionists employees full-time once the contract has ended. Buy Photo Autistic people are typically underemployed or struggle finding work because of their condition, despite being more than capable of doing the job and JPMorgan Chase is in the process of expanding its autism program. (Photo: Suchat Pederson, The News Journal) Hamill, 26, who used to work at Walmart, was the first Precisionists employee to work at Tesla. The Newark resident said he finds this work to be much more fulfilling and purposeful, since it helps soldiers deployed overseas. Hamill said The Precisionists helped him with the "professional side of working." This ranges from making sure his shirt is tucked in to having a better idea how to navigate conversations with his boss. Shea said Hamill's manager asked for "25 more Kevins" shortly after he started working there. The organization hopes to increase the number of people working at Tesla. "I don't mind getting up in the morning anymore," Hamill said. "I could see myself working here until I retire." Since starting its program three years ago, JPMorgan Chase employs 30 people with autism in nine different roles. While most of these employees are based in Delaware, others are located in Ohio and even in India. The company plans to employ 300 people by 2020, said James Mahoney, executive director and head of Autism at Work for JPMorgan Chase. More: Paul Simon (no, not that one) finds his muses in the elderly people he drives Similar to The Precisionists, JPMorgan Chase works with Computer Aid Inc, a global IT company in Allentown, Pennslyvania, to find and recruit potential employees. They, too, go through an assessment period and many have been hired full-time by JPMorgan Chase, Mahoney said. “This is not charity, it’s talent play,” Mahoney said. “We truly believe we're going after an untapped talent pool that has been underemployed.” Within three to six months of working at the company, employees with autism have been at the same performance level as employees who have worked at JPMorgan Chase for years, Mahoney said. The employees on the spectrum have also been 48 percent more productive than "typical" employees at the same six month stage, he said. Mahoney said he's noticed a change in the company's culture in the past three years. More employees feel it has become a place "where you can bring all of yourself to work." Some employees have even "come out" about being diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, he said. Read: Medical Society of Delaware partners with telemedicine company Butt, 24, who once sorted files for the state, began working at JPMorgan Chase as a contractor in March 2016 and was hired in July. He works as a quality assurance tester, in which he helps make sure the financial company’s programs and websites are working properly. “Sorting files is boring,” he said. “But with this, I learn a lot. And it’s really interesting to me.” A few months ago, Butt received an employee recognition award. He said it’s one of his favorite moments of working at JPMorgan Chase so far. The plaque hangs in his cubicle. Buy Photo James Mahoney, executive director and head of Autism at Work at JPMorgan Chase & Co, chats with his employees at the Wilmington office. JPMorgan Chase is in the process of expanding its autism program. (Photo: Suchat Pederson, The News Journal) Gibbs, 30, has worked at JPMorgan Chase for more than a year, a couple months of which have been as a full-time employee. Compared to other jobs, working as a fraud analyst is much more “dynamic,” Gibbs said. Like others on the spectrum, Gibbs said he’s faced roadblocks when looking for jobs — despite having a bachelor's degree in computer science and a master's degree in political science. He hopes other companies will work to eliminate any misconceptions they have about people with autism and begin seeing them as candidates who have full potential. Just because someone might have difficulty making eye contact doesn’t make them less intelligent, he said. For the first time, Gibbs envisions himself moving up the corporate ladder and eventually having a managerial position. “I tend to be a private person. I think that held me back,” he said. “I was hesitant to build relationships. “With this new job, it’s going straight forward.” Contact Meredith Newman at (302) 324-2386 or at mnewman@delawareonline.com. Follow her on Twitter at @merenewman. Read or Share this story: https://www.delawareonline.com/story/news/2017/10/30/delaware-companies-find-value-autistic-workers/796255001/FYI. Some email correspondence in my Inbox, for those with an interest in an alternate viewpoint of the IPCC: ========================================================== At 10 AM PDT Tomorrow, Sunday, October 13th, you can watch a half hour program on KUSI TV via internet streaming at KUSI.COM. The featured guests are the Dean of Global Warming Skeptics, Dr. Fred Singer, the eminent Australian based climate scientist Dr. Bob Carter, our hero of the Global Warming Skeptics campaign, the President of Heartland Institute, Joe Bast and his star Communications Director Jim Lakely. They all speak out strongly against the silliness of the bad science of Carbon Dioxide being classified as a Pollutant and the theory that through radiative forcing it causes significant global warming. Please watch the live stream. John Coleman ========================================================== USA Today Serves Fruits and Nuts on Global Warming By Joseph L. Bast, October 12, 2013 On October 10, USA Today did its readers a grave disservice by running an op-ed full of smears and false statements by two of the fruitier nutcakes of the environmental movement, Dan Becker and James Gerstenzang. They disparage Dr. Fred Singer and Dr. Robert Carter, two of the three lead authors of Climate Change Reconsidered II: Physical Science, the latest report from the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC). They also quote me, as head of The Heartland Institute, the organization that published CCR II. And for that, we thank them. But the rest of their article is pure propaganda sludge. They quote Dr. Carter, a paelaeontologist and marine geologist and former head of the School of Earth Sciences at James Cook University (Australia), as saying “Currently the planet is cooling.” “Wrong,” they say. “The last decade (2000-2009) was the hottest on record; 2010 was the hottest year recorded.” Their claim is trivially true based on a heavily revised and controversial database that goes back only to about 1850. More reliable satellite data show no warming trend for nearly 17 years and a cooling trend in the last decade. Proxy data show the planet has been cooling since 2,000 years ago and 8,000 years ago. Becker and Gerstenzang quote Dr. Fred Singer, saying “Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant.” “Nope,” they say. “Acting under U.S. Supreme Court direction, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency found that CO2 is a pollutant because of the harm it causes.” Gee, who should we believe here, lawyers and bureaucrats or one of the world’s most distinguished astrophysicists? It shouldn’t be a close call. Some 97% of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere comes from natural sources and only about 3% from human activities. We exhale carbon dioxide. The Supreme Court and EPA can twist the meaning of “pollutant” to extend it to anything added to the air, including our breath, but that semantic trick has no scientific relevance. Dr. Singer is absolutely right: carbon dioxide is plant food, a net benefit to plant and animal life, and not a pollutant. Becker and Gerstenzang then quote me: “Most scientists do not believe human activities threaten to disrupt the Earth’s climate.” “Misleading, to say the least,” they write. “97% of climate scientists agree that humans are causing global warming.” This is such a cheap parlor trick that one wonders if alarmists realize how foolish it makes them look whenever they use it. Skeptics don’t say humans are not “causing global warming,” because we acknowledge that agriculture, building roads and airports and water treatment plants, and emissions of various kinds (including carbon dioxide) may indeed affect regional climates and may even be enough to have a discernable impact globally. But is it enough to “disrupt the Earth’s climate”? There is no evidence that it is. Surveys that supposedly show a consensus in favor of the hypothesis of man-made dangerous global warming invariably ask meaningless questions, such as “is climate change real?” that any skeptic would answer “yes” to. A close look at the latest “study” used by alarmists to back their claim actually found that barely 1% of published scientific articles support the claim of dangerous man-made global warming. (See D. Legates et al., “Climate Consensus and ‘Misinformation,’” Science & Education, DOI 10.1007/s11191_013_9647_9.) When asked about climate models, the source of most of the alarmists’ claims and predictions, most scientists say they are too crude and unreliable to be useful for policymaking. And think about this: If there were really a “consensus” among scientists about climate change, why are there 78 different climate models that vary widely in their “parameters” (assumptions) and outcomes? Becker and Gerstenzang make the familiar argument that the media shouldn’t allow global warming skeptics to air their views on their pages or as part of their broadcasts because doing so “equates serious climate science and evaluation of peer-reviewed reports with the declarations of individuals, most lacking academic degrees in climate research, who are often funded by those standing to profit if the United States fails to curb carbon dioxide emissions.” I count four falsehoods in that one sentence, not counting the authors’ hubris in assuming that they are on the right side of this complex scientific debate. Can you find them? The reports of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are not “serious climate science.” They are political documents produced to advance the political goals of the governments that created the IPCC, fund it, staff it, select the scientists who get to participate, and revise and rewrite the reports before their public release. Critics all around the world have pointed out how the IPCC’s reports are not reliable, not peer reviewed, and certainly not unbiased. NIPCC, in contrast, is a group of some 50 skeptical scientists, all of them highly qualified to speak to the issues they address, with no financial stake in the outcome of the global warming debate. Many of them, such as Singer, are emeritus professors, meaning they are no longer competing for grant dollars. No corporate or government funding at all was used to support NIPCC or the publication of its Climate Change Reconsidered series of reports. In the global warming debate there are two primary sources of reviews of the
for operating. With our understanding of neuroplasticity we now know that our body has the capacity to adapt but that it requires a consistent effort to reprogram the nervous system. Looking deeper, we see that the stress response triggers our nervous system to go into what we call the sympathetic mode. This is where our body sends most of our ATP or energy stores out to our muscles and our brains to help us achieve what we are working toward. The down side to this however is that this energy is shunted away from the very organs that can create more of this energy to drive our body and our organs. To counter this, we also have the parasympathetic mode - the capacity to heal and repair, detoxify and digest. Because the body can only be in the sympathetic or parasympathetic nervous system mode, any part of the body that is having trouble will be magnified under the influence of stress. Given these facts, today’s modern society stress reduction can be tremendously beneficial for everyone. Caprino: So, Tiffany, what are the easiest, most effective ways we can incorporate taking breaks into our daily life? Cruikshank: Taking breaks and reducing stress sounds simple, but for most of us it is easier said than done. The tricky part of treating stress is that it’s ongoing and typically affects us throughout our day. It takes patience. Enjoying the lasting effects of stress reduction come over time with consistent practice. Below are six of my favorite ways to take a break. Stress reduction is not one-size-fits-all program; try them all and see what is most helpful for you. Remember it’s the ability to stick to one or two of these for just a few minutes several times a day, everyday that is important, but just 3-5 minutes at a time can be enough. Six effective stress reduction strategies: Set a timer on your phone. The first thing I like to have my patients do is to start setting a timer on their phone around 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. or whatever time works best for them to stop what they are doing for 3-5 minutes. (They can snooze the time if they are in the middle of a meeting or something important). This step is key to help reprogram the stress response, the more often the better. I recommend starting with twice a day. See below for suggestions on what to do during that time. Stop and count your breath This one is simple but very effective. All you have to do is stop what you’re doing and notice your breath. I say it is simple, but it isn’t necessarily easy since the goal is to watch the breath without trying to change or regulate it. Just shifting the awareness to the breath will help to draw the body in the parasympathetic nervous system where the body and mind can shift into relaxation. Notice if it feels choppy or smooth, long or deep. Notice where you feel the breath in the body, more in the upper ribcage or lower, more in the front of the chest or the back. Don’t try to change it but notice how the breath reflects how you feel. Use a meditation app Meditation can be a great way to reduced stress and there are many apps that provide guided meditation exercises. My favorite is the Mindfulness app. It provides guided meditations for those newer to meditation or a simple timer with bells for those who prefer silence. They are also a great way to keep you on track by keeping track of how much time you spend meditating. Both short and long meditations are offered so you can adapt it to fit your schedule. Some other great apps to check out are Headspace and Calm. Lengthen your breath Deep breathing practices are a great way to induce some quick stress relief, start with a 4 count inhale and a 4 count exhale. Repeat for 1-3 minutes. Once you feel more comfortable with this you can try making the exhale a little longer than the inhale, this will help induce the parasympathetic response even more. The key to this one is to try to keep the breath relaxed as you go. A great app for guidance on this is called Breathe2Relax. Connect it to something you do everyday Making this break a part of your life is the key so connecting it to simple things you do every day is important for re-educating the nervous system, similar to training your muscles if you were to go to a physical therapist. Simple things are the most helpful, like noticing your breath (instead of planning your to do list) while you brush your teeth, wash the dishes or commute home from work. This one sounds small but it makes a huge difference for re-educating the stress response. Connect it to intense moments This one is the hardest, but possibly the most helpful. After some experience with a few of the previous ones now try taking it into the intense or stressful moments of your day. A good stress break is only as good as its ability to help you in times of need as well. Challenge yourself to see if it’s possible to notice your breath when you find yourself in periods of more intense stress or when you find yourself in a heated conversation or high-pressure situation. There’s no pressure to change it or even to relax in this exercise, but just notice the internal response. From there the nervous system can start to adjust and regulate the response appropriately. For more information or to find an expert yoga and meditation teacher near you, visit www.YogaMedicine.com. To build a happier, less stressful career, visit kathycaprino.com.The Senate Republican leadership intends to bring up the $612 billion National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) in the coming week, setting the stage for another major partisan battle on the Senate floor, with a White House threat to veto it looming over the proceedings. The bill has a number of controversial clauses, but the main bone of contention seems to be the $38 billion in extra Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) spending, a segment of the budget meant for “emergency military funding” but increasingly covering random expenditures, with the Pentagon allowed to juggle this portion of their spending around more or less at will. Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R – KY) expressed concern about a possible filibuster, the latest in a series of them coming to the Senate floor, and getting the 60 votes needed to end a filibuster might not be so easy, with most of the Armed Services Committee’s Dems opposed to the bill, and at least two Republicans, Sens. Rand Paul (R – KY) and Ted Cruz (R – TX) also in opposition. If the bill passes, which it will if it can overcome a filibuster, it then has to contend with the veto threat, with Defense Secretary Ash Carter urging Obama to follow through and veto it as “irresponsible.” Though the White House was already talking veto, he had threatened to veto the bill in past years and ultimately backed down. A lot of the Republican leadership seems to be betting Obama will not follow through on the veto again this time, and committee chair Sen. John McCain (R – AZ) is also threatening to hold up civilian defense nominees to punish the administration if the veto actually happens. Last 5 posts by Jason DitzThe tech industry is on Apple’s side when it comes to the dispute with FBI over the unlocking of the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone. This was, once again, confirmed through a research done by security vendor AlienVault. According to the company’s survey, which polled 1,500 IT security professionals, 33 percent support FBI, while the rest think unlocking the phone will do nothing but weaken overall product security. Almost two thirds (63 percent) believes Apple should not give in to FBI’s demands. But the opinion the surveyed have on overall security is what’s dismal here -- almost two thirds believe the government is already so intrusive and pervasive in its surveillance that it’s impossible to have a private conversation on any device. Moreover, 34 percent believe the government should monitor mass communications for national security purposes. "We are clearly at a turning point in the history of Internet surveillance and suspicions among those in the know are running high. IT and security professionals can see straight through the public arguments being made about the Apple case", said Javvad Malik, security advocate at AlienVault. "Many seem to view it as a power grab by the FBI, and an attempt to gain significant new powers that could undermine the communications infrastructure used by us all. But whatever the underlying motives may be, the outcome of this case will clearly have broader implications on future government attempts to access encrypted information, and the development of legal frameworks for state surveillance powers, such as the Investigatory Powers Bill in the UK". The FBI recently uncovered an iPhone 5c belonging to the San Bernardino shooter. The iPhone is locked and the authorities have no way of unlocking it to see if the phone has any leads on potential accomplices or future plans. The government asked Apple to help them unlock the iPhone, and has even gone as far as to ask phone makers to build special backdoors so that law enforcement agencies could have access to the devices. Published under license from ITProPortal.com, a Net Communities Ltd Publication. All rights reserved. Photo Credit: Shutterstock/ymgermanPlease select your country: United States Argentina Australia Austria Belarus Belgium Brazil Brunei Bulgaria Canada Chile China Colombia Croatia Cyprus Czech Republic Czechoslovakia (1945-1992) Denmark East Germany (1949-1990) Estonia Finland France Georgia Germany Greece Hong Kong Hungary Iceland India Indonesia Ireland Israel Italy Japan Latvia Lithuania Luxembourg Macau Macedonia Malaysia Malta Mexico The Netherlands New Zealand North Korea Norway Philippines Poland Portugal Romania Russia Saudi Arabia Serbia Singapore Slovakia Slovenia South Korea Spain Sweden Switzerland Taiwan Thailand Turkey Ukraine United Arab Emirates United Kingdom Uruguay Vietnam U.S.S.R. (1922-1991) Yugoslavia (1945-1992) Africa » Cameroon Africa » South Africa Worldwide Other Not an American user? Description Level 1 (Easiest) Level 2: The Kingdom is larger than Level 1, containing secret rooms and hidden items to add difficulty. Level 3 (Hardest): Similar to Level 2 but all objects/items are placed randomly throughout the Kingdom. Screenshots Promo Images A graphic dungeon quest inspired by the old mainframe game of the same name is a graphic action-adventure game where you use your joystick to wander around, collecting keys to explore castles, labyrinths and everything in between, whilst slaying anything that moves (i.e. Dragons & Co.) to get treasures.The game has 3 difficulty settings:Gameplay revolves around picking up (and dropping) items, hacking your way though dragons, finding keys to open the castle gates and using magic (i.e. reincarnation) in case you get swallowed by failing-to-follow-their-diet-plan-dragons. There are no promo images for this game Alternate Titles "Aventura" -- Brazilian title Part of the Following Group User Reviews Critic Reviews Forums There are currently no topics for this game. Trivia 1001 Video Games Easter Egg Each 2600 game was designed entirely by one person. But on the package it said basically "Adventure, by Atari." And we were only getting salaries, no cut of the huge profits. It was a signature, like at the bottom of a painting. But to make it happen, I had to hide my signature in the code, in a really obscure place, and not tell anybody. Keeping a secret like that is not easy. I decided that if I could not keep the secret myself--I was very tempted to tell my two main friends at Atari, Tom Reuterdahl and Jim Huether--how could I expect anyone else to keep the secret? So I didn't tell anyone, handed over the final version of the program, Atari manufactured and distributed several hundred thousand cartridges of "Adventure," and then it was too late for them to undo it. Of course, an adventure game, with multiple rooms, is perfect for secret things, because it's easy to make extra rooms that are really hard to get into. Multiplayer Awards FLUX Issue #4 - #35 in the Top 100 Video Games of All-Time list Game Informer August 2001 (Issue #100) - #47 in the Top 100 Games of All Time poll Retro Gamer Issue 46 - #4 in the Top 25 Atari 2600 Games poll Related Web Sites Video review of Adventure (YouTube reviewer Aqualung's review of Adventure on Atari 2600.) Scott Monster Adventure (Atari 2600) on Nov 28, 2003 (1010) added(Atari 2600) on Nov 28, 2003 The Atari 2600 version ofappears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.Adventure was perhaps the first video game to contain a hidden "Easter Egg." While playing levels 2 or 3, players who enter the black castle and use a bridge in the catacombs will find a single grey dot near the bottom of one of the rooms. Bringing this dot to the screen south and east of the gold castle will cause the wall to the right to become transparent as long as another object is present on the screen. Players can then pass through the wall to a secret room revealing the words "Created by Warren Robinett" in flashing gold letters.In an interview Warren Robinett explained his reasons for hiding his name in the game:Atari did not discover the presence of Warren Robinett's Easter egg room (an indulgence estimated as taking up 5% of the cartidge's storage space) until notified by a curious letter from a 12-year-old Adventure explorer from Salt Lake City. At this time, Warren had left Atari (in July 1979) and was unreachable for comment or explanation, traveling through Europe. Had he not just quit, he almost certainly would have been fired.Robinett worked on a multiplayer function, but had to abandon it because of lack of RAM.To “feed the world” by 2050, we’ll need a massive, global ramp-up of industrial-scale, corporate-led agriculture. At least that’s the conventional wisdom. Even progressive journalists trumpet the idea (see here, here, and here, plus my ripostes here and here). The public-radio show Marketplace reported it as fact last week, earning a knuckle rap from Tom Laskway. At least one major strain of President Obama’s (rather inconsistent) agricultural policy is predicated on it. And surely most agricultural scientists and development specialists toe that line … right? Well, not really. Back in 2009, Seed Magazine organized a forum predicated on the idea that a “scientific consensus,” analogous to the one on climate change, had formed around the desirability of patent-protected genetically modified seeds. If I must say so, my own contribution to that discussion shredded that notion. If anything, a pro-GMO consensus has formed among a narrow group of microbiologists — the people who conduct gene manipulations to develop novel crops. But no such accord exists among scientists whose work takes them out of the laboratory and into farm fields and ecosystems: soil experts, ecologists, development specialists, etc. The latest evidence against any consensus around Big Ag as world savior: In a paper [PDF] just published in Science, a team of researchers led by the eminent Washington State University soil scientist John P. Reganold urges a fundamental rethinking of the U.S. ag-research system, which is “narrowly focused on productivity and efficiency” at the expense of public health and ecological resilience; and of the Farm Bill, which uses subsidies not to support a broad range of farmers but rather to “mask market, social, and environmental factors associated with conventional production systems.” The Reganold team’s Science article distills their much longer report published last year by the prestigious National Research Council. While conventional wisdom holds that scientists who study agriculture think only lots of GMOs and agrichemicals can feed us going forward, Reganold’s team has quite a different set of recommendations in mind: “organic farming, alternative livestock production (e.g., grass-fed), mixed crop and livestock systems, and perennial grains.” They are by no means the only high-level researchers to reach such conclusions. Earlier this year, the U.N.’s special rapporteur on food, Olivier De Schutter, conducted “an extensive review of the recent scientific literature” and concluded that the case for Big Ag had been way overblown [PDF]. Defying agrichemical industry dogma about how organic agriculture produces low yields, De Schutter declared, “Small-scale farmers can double food production within 10 years in critical regions by using ecological methods.” Also this spring, another branch of the United Nations, the U.N. Environment Program, released yet another report making the case for organic and other low-input ag techniques (I wrote about it at the bottom of this post). And as far back as 2008, the largest-ever assessment of attitudes within the scientific community came out squarely against industrial agriculture as the true and only way to “feed the world” going forward. The International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science, and Technology for Development (IAASTD), a three-year study released in 2008, engaged 400 scientists from around the globe under the aegis of the World Bank and the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization. Far from pinning hopes for humanity’s future on the products of a few agrichemical firms, the IAASTD focuses on building resilience and health in communities through sustainable-ag techniques it groups under the rubric of the term “agroecology.” Now, I would never insist that there is a consensus among scientists that only organic ag can feed the world. There are clearly scientists, not all of them linked financially to the agrichemical industry, who would passionately argue against that proposition. But there is by no means a consensus in the other direction. What we have is a debate — one being snuffed out by the illusion of a consensus. As global population grows and climate change proceeds apace, making agriculture ever more tricky, food policy may well emerge as the question of our time. It’s time to air out that debate.There is a scene in the movie “Magic Mike” where the lead character — a male stripper — explains to a room of women the laws against having physical contact with a performer. Then he intones, “… but I see a lot of lawbreakers up in this house.” We know if we could look out through the Web browser, we could say the same thing. There’s a lot of gray zone activities considered commonplace. Have you ever ripped a CD or DVD to take with your on your phone? Gray; we won’t judge. A lot of the legal issues involved are thorny (and I should point out, I’m not a lawyer, so take what I say with a grain of salt). Do you own your car? Well, probably you and the bank, but certainly the deal you made involves the idea that you own the car. If it is paid off, you can do what you like with it, including — if you wanted to — stripping it bare for parts. Back in the day, your car was some wheels and some mechanical devices. These days, it is a computer (actually, a few computers) and some I/O devices that process gasoline into rotary motion. Computers have software. Do you own that software? The answer has, legally, been no. However, a recent decision by the US Copyright office allows car owners to legally analyze and modify their vehicle software (with some limitations) for the next two years. After that? We’ll see. Restrictions You still can’t mess with the entertainment system (because that might allow you to copy music or movies). There are a few other prohibited systems and modifications (such as disabling emission controls, which breaks other laws). ECUs, Ebooks, and DVDs This is very similar to the issues surrounding electronic books and videos. When you buy a paperback book, for example, you buy the physical object but not the contents (so the lawyers say). So the fact that you have a paperback book doesn’t necessarily give you the legal right to an electronic copy, even if you scan it yourself for your own use. Sure, it might fall under fair use, for example, but then again it might not. Same for a DVD. Ripping it to watch on another device is almost certainly illegal in the US. Not that people don’t do it all the time and there’s no real way to enforce it. So why is hacking your car becoming acceptable and hacking your DVD video isn’t? Easy. It is money. There’s a huge amount of money backing the idea that you should buy the same content over and over again for different devices. The opposite side, in the car case, is the repair business that wants in on the action of fixing or modifying systems with software. Of course, the car makers are less than thrilled and the next two years will be a battle of dollars to see who can buy enough politicians to prevail. Poor Ham Radio If that sounds overly cynical, just look at other similar cases. For years, the FCC declined to interfere with “private contracts” (such as homeowner association restrictive covenants) that prohibited ham radio antennas. The claim was that they had no authority to do so. When those same private contracts started interfering with people putting up satellite TV antennas, the FCC put a stop to that. There may now be some light in the darkeness for HAMs living under HOAs. So if you’ve been hacking your car computers in the US, congratulations! You, and our balaclava-wearing friend above, are legal. For a few years, anyway. Even if it becomes against the law again, like Magic Mike, I see a lot of lawbreakers up in this house.Last week, Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s use of racial and ethnic profiling cost Maricopa County at least $22 million to monitor and re-train those in the county’s employ. This week, Sheriff Arpaio announced that he is punishing 38 unpatriotic inmates by scaling back their diet to bread and water. Arpaio told CNN that “these inmates have destroyed the American flag that was placed in their cells. Tearing them, writing on them, stepping on them, throwing them in the toilet, trash or wherever they feel. It’s a disgrace…this is government property that they are destroying, and we will take action against those who act this way.” The Sheriff initiated what he called his “patriotic jails” initiative in November, according to which “[a]ny defacement or vandalism of the [United States] flags by inmates comes with the penalty of bread and water.” Also part of this initiative is the playing of “God Bless America” and the national anthem at intervals throughout the day. Arpaio’s harsh treatment of inmates in his care has cost the taxpayers of Maricopa County millions of dollars. In 2012, the family of Deborah Braillard sued the county for $3.25 million after the woman slipped into a diabetic coma and died. According to the Stephen Lemons of the Phoenix New Times, “Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s goons and goonettes denied [Braillard’s] pleas for medical treatment and ignored her as she moaned, defecated, and vomited on herself and others.” Six years earlier, a federal jury awarded the family of Charles Agster III $9 million after Arpaio’s detention officers forcibly restrained the developmentally-challenged man in a manner that led to his death.The GTX 1080 Founders Edition cards may already be up for order, but if you're an overclocking fanatic (and fan of liquid cooling), watch out: Corsair has its own model of the 1080 to keep an eye on. At Computex on Monday Corsair announced the Hydro GTX 1080, with a Corsair closed-loop cooler attached to an MSI 1080. Since the card is scheduled for Q3 of this year, details were scarce: Corsair's press release states "the Hydro GFX pushes the GTX 1080 to the limit thanks to its greatly increased GPU core cooling capacity," but doesn't offer up any specific performance numbers or a price. We expect to see those closer to release. Corsair's other major new product for the show floor follows in the footsteps of RAM companies like Avexir with a new memory stick outfitted with RGB LEDs. The Vengeance LED will fill the prestigious position of Corsair's fastest DDR4 RAM "with specially selected Samsung ICs driving kits to 4,333MHz and beyond." And, as the 'LED' in the name indicates, the Vengeance has a new heat spreader with LEDs built-in. Corsair's other new RAM module for Computex is a 'Special Edition' of the Dominator Platinum, with a couple new metal finishes (black and brushed aluminum) and selectively binned Samsung chips. If you're not fluent in the world of RAM, that essentially means the cream of the crop when it comes to performance, in the same way some CPUs can close in on 5GHz overclocks while others hit their limits at 4.3GHz. The Special Edition Dominators should be able to overclock to higher speeds than your average memory stick with less rigorously chosen memory modules. Corsair didn't offer a price or memory timings for the new RAM, either, but like the Hydro GFX 1080 they'll be available in the third quarter of 2016.While performing routine maintenance on a Titan II nuclear missile in 1980, a missile repairman accidentally fumbled a large socket from a socket wrench, dropping it over 70 feet into the missile’s underground silo. The socket ricocheted off the rocket’s fuel tank, piercing the thin metal skin and releasing a highly flammable propellant. A hastily assembled emergency response team was unable to prevent catastrophe when, one day later, the concentrated fuel exploded, destroying the silo, killing one worker, and shooting the missile’s nine megaton warhead over 100 feet from the facility’s entrance gate. Had safety features not prevented the warhead from detonating, the nuclear explosion would have had three times the explosive power of all the bombs dropped during World War II, including both bombs used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.'Mad Max' Director George Miller: The Audience Tells You 'What Your Film Is' Enlarge this image toggle caption Jasin Boland/Warner Bros. Jasin Boland/Warner Bros. George Miller's latest Mad Max film, Fury Road, has been nominated for 10 Academy Awards, but the director still isn't sure how the movie will hold up over time. Miller, who directed the first Mad Max film in 1979, says that a film's reception changes with time. "First of all, people write about it in reviews and... [then] after a while the audience starts to tell you what your film is," Miller tells Fresh Air's Dave Davies. "But... it will be a few years before I or anyone else will have any idea as to whether [Mad Max: Fury Road] really stuck." On the surface, it seems as if Mad Max: Fury Road has "stuck." The film, which tells the story of a post-apocalyptic road warrior (played by Charlize Theron) on a mission to liberate the wives of a tyrannical warlord, recently won a Screen Actor's Guild Award for its stunt work and is in the running for the Academy Award for best picture. Still, Miller says he feels "quite taken aback" when Fury Road fans stop him to show him tattoos inspired by the film. "I'm thinking, "Oh, tattoos are permanent and I hope the film sort of endures in some way so that they don't have to get them removed so painfully later on,' " Miller says. Interview Highlights Enlarge this image toggle caption Michael Buckner/Getty Images Michael Buckner/Getty Images On filming the stunts in an "old school" way It's a film in which we don't defy the laws of physics. It's real people in a real desert; there's no men in capes flying around or space vehicles and so on, so it wouldn't make a lot of sense to shoot it all digitally, or a large part of it, because it would lose a lot of authenticity.... Despite the amazing advances in 15 to 20 years of the digital world in filmmaking, it's still very difficult to make something feel really authentic. So we chose to do it old school and that means going out to a remote location with endless deserts and have real vehicles and human beings in that landscape. On shooting stunts safely With a film like this where it's a long shoot, it's 120 days out there, every day is a big stunt day, so you have to be almost fanatical about preparation and safety, otherwise things could go horribly wrong. So everything was very well rehearsed, very well prepared, and we had a wonderful stunt crew and rigging crew and effects crew out there and it got to the point where, with proper preparation, you're able to sort of get the actors who — all of them are pretty physical, athletic people in a lot of the shots. There's a moment when you see Max hanging upside down between the wheels of this war rig inches off the ground, while it's moving, it's going fairly fast, well that's Tom Hardy there, but he has two very, very secure harnesses supporting him and also nowadays you can erase [the harnesses] very easily, whereas in the past you couldn't. On casting Charlize Theron as Furiosa Charlize, actually, was the only actor I thought about for this role. She's somebody who's got a lot of stature physically and in her spirit, and she's pretty uncompromising. She shaved her hair, she said Furiosa would not worry about hair in the heat and the dust, and it required a bit of immersion from the actors and Charlize is one of those people who was able to do that. On whether he sees Mad Max: Fury Road as a feminist story Not overtly. I was very interested in the character and in the way that the Max stories are told — basically they're allegorical stories in the same way that the classic Western was that. Max is a character who gets swept up into this story who is that sort of wanderer in the wasteland, looking for some sense of meaning in a very stark world and he gets caught up in their story and because "the MacGuffin," as Hitchcock used to say, the thing that's in conflict is human and female, it just evolved — the characters go, they take you along in the story and that's sort of the sense that she was somehow a really interesting action hero female just arose organically out of the story. The feminist notions of the movie were the same, it was never the first agenda of the film, it was always story-driven and the rest followed. On inviting Vagina Monologues playwright and feminist Eve Ensler to do workshops with the actors It occurred to me that we needed somebody to really help the female actors find a way into their characters and their world, because everybody in this story, except Immortan Joe, is in some way a commodity.... As it happened, I was listening to the radio down in Australia and Eve [Ensler], who is extraordinary in the work she does for human rights in Africa... she just happened to be in the Republic of Congo around about the time we were in Namibia while we were preparing to shoot the movie. And she gave us a week in the middle of a very busy schedule and she came down and she ran wonderful workshops — a lot of them were quite intimate with just the five girls, and by osmosis it crept into the movie. I'm quite certain of that.... A sense that this story is one that has been fairly constant throughout history, meaning that women and indeed other human beings, have been basically the goods and chattels of the powerful. On directing both the Mad Max series and the family movies Babe and Happy Feet People do look at me weirdly. Even my mother said, "When you started making the Babes and Happy Feets I thought you were calming down, in some way, but then she saw the latest, Fury Road, she said, "Sometimes I wonder what goes on in your head."It looks like Marquis Daniels will ultimately be okay after sustaining a spinal cord injury in a scary fall during Sunday's game between the Boston Celtics and Orlando Magic. The team has announced that Daniels was released from a local hospital this morning. Marquis Daniels was released from the hospital early this AM. He was reported to have been joking and in good spirits. Daniels was transported to the hospital yesterday on a stretcher after lying on the ground for several minutes in front of a hushed T.D. Banknorth Garden crowd. The team deemed the injury a "bruised spinal cord," and general manager Danny Ainge said Daniels would probably miss the next 1-2 months. The injury occurred when Daniels tripped over Gilbert Arenas and had his forehead slam onto the ground. He laid motionless on the ground for several minutes, but did flash a thumbs up sign as he left the floor.The FBI revealed Friday it was reviewing a new batch of emails that "appear to be pertinent" to its previous investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a private server while she was secretary of state. "In connection with an unrelated case, the FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation," FBI director James Comey said in a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee. "I agreed that the FBI should take appropriate investigative steps designed to allow investigators to review these emails to determine whether they contain classified information, as well as to assess their importance to our investigation." A senior law enforcement official told NBC News Friday that the Comey letter was sent to the Hill "out of an abundance of caution" and to be extra-thorough. The official said the emails were discovered "on another device." There's no indication, the official said, that Clinton, her campaign or the State Department was withholding information. But the emails were not held by someone who was investigated in the Clinton email case, the official said. The politically explosive revelation, which came just 11 days before Election Day, appeared to catch the Clinton campaign by surprise. "No idea," a top Clinton campaign spokesperson told NBC News. Tim Kaine, Clinton's vice presidential running mate, who was at an early voting site in Tallahassee on Friday told reporters "gotta read a little more, gotta read a little more" before continuing on. The news comes as Clinton has been leading Donald Trump in the polls. Related: Read the Letter GOP nominee Donald Trump, at a campaign event in New Hampshire, praised the FBI for having "the courage to right the horrible mistake they made," an apparent reference to the agency's decision earlier this year to not press criminal charges against Clinton. "I need to open with a very critical breaking news announcement," Trump said to cheers that at times drowned out his remarks. "The FBI has just sent a letter to Congress informing them that they have discovered new emails pertaining to the former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's investigation." "This was a grave miscarriage of justice," he said, "it is about to be corrected." The Republican-led House Judiciary Committee also applauded the FBI's move. "The FBI's decision to reopen its investigation into Secretary Clinton reinforces what the House Judiciary Committee has been saying for months: the more we learn about Secretary Clinton's use of a private email server, the clearer it becomes that she and her associates committed wrongdoing and jeopardized national security," the Judiciary Committee said in a statement. Related: FBI Releases Notes From Interview With Hillary Clinton Over Emails But Comey, who is also a Republican and who took a lot of heat in July for his agency's decision to not charge Clinton with a crime, did not say in the letter that he was reexamining the FBI's previous finding, which concluded that her handling of the emails was sloppy but not criminal. Documents related to the case were released just before the Labor Day weekend and included a summary of Clinton's July interview with the FBI about her private email server, as well as a detailed investigative summary of the case. The FBI language in the letter to Congress made it clear that new evidence had been discovered and thus will be reviewed — meaning FBI agents will read these emails. It is unusual for the FBI to tell Congress it is looking over newly discovered evidence in a criminal inquiry that was otherwise closed. Federal practice is not to comment on ongoing investigations, or discuss details of concluded investigations. Comey previously explained his departure from that practice in his earlier congressional testimony, given the special nature of this case and congressional oversight inquiries. Still, some congressional Democrats told NBC News Friday that they are frustrated that Comey issued the letter reopening this issue without providing much in the way of specifics. This is a developing story. Please refresh for detailsIn late 2016, at the cost of many young lives, Syrian forces took back the eastern part of the city of Aleppo, occupied by NATO and Saudi backed terrorists for more than four years. The liberation of Aleppo, Syria’s second city and an ancient marvel, represents the most serious setback for the 15-year long Washington-led aggression on the entire region. An effective recolonisation of the region has stretched from Afghanistan to Libya, under a range of false pretexts. Invasions and proxy wars have been backed by economic sanctions and wild propaganda. But this great war of aggression – called the creation of ‘New Middle East’ by former US President George W. Bush – has hit a rock in Syria. The massive proxy armies bought and equipped by Washington and its regional allies the Saudis, Turkey, Qatar and Israel, have been beaten back by a powerful regional alliance which supports the Syrian nation. Prof Tim Anderson’s International bestseller, click image to order directly from Global Research The endgame in Aleppo involves a handful of foreign agents – US, Saudi, Israeli and others – said to remain with the last al Qaeda groups in a tiny part of what was once their stronghold. The US in particular is keen to secure their release, because their presence is further evidence of the foreign command of what was claimed to be a ‘civil war’. After a storm of western government and media misinformation (claims of massacres, mass executions and ‘civilians targeted’) over the evacuation of around 100,000 civilians and many thousands of terrorists, the UN Security Council authorised some ‘independent observers’ to monitor the process. However most of that evacuation is now over. Resettlement and reconstruction is already underway, and army reserves have been called up to defend the city. Syrian, Iranian, Russian and independent reporters (including Maytham al Ashkar, Shadi Halwi, Asser Khatab, Khaled Alkhateb, Ali Musawi, Lizzie Phelan, Murad Gazdiev, Vanessa Beeley, Eva Bartlett and the late Mohsen Khazaei) have already told us quite a lot. What they said bore little resemblance to the western apocalyptic stories. For example, outgoing UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, a close ally of Washington, claimed in his last press conference that ‘Aleppo is now a synonym for hell’. Those claims were based on stories from NATO’s desperate jihadists. Reporters on the ground told a different story. As Syrian forces smashed the al Qaeda
in her bed and her husband is suspected of murder," says Phil Birnbaum, a statistics analyst who reviewed the Diemer-Leeds study for The Mag. "He was home, and they had a big argument. So there is some evidence for the hypothesis that there was a murder. But there's other evidence that could explain the death too, such as the woman had a heart condition. And since people with that condition die of natural causes a thousand times more often than they get murdered, I'm going with natural causes." Diemer and Leeds counter by pointing out a second anomaly in their data that can't be explained away by any of Birnbaum's objections. It turns out that in regular-season games with 11½-point spreads, the favorites also win by a blowout far more than would be normally expected. That suggests that players on big underdogs are fixing games too (after all, who cares if you lose by 11 or 24). "As the incentives to point-shaving increase," Diemer says, "so too does the evidence." Still, Diemer and Leeds acknowledge that if point-shaving is widespread, it's also exceedingly difficult to pinpoint with hard evidence. In fact, only a handful of cases have been exposed over the years. In 1997 two Arizona State basketball players -- Stevin Smith and Isaac Burton Jr. -- pleaded guilty to throwing four regular-season games. More than a decade later, several football and basketball players from the University of Toledo admitted selling themselves to a pair of Detroit gamblers who fixed regular- and postseason games. A former point guard for Auburn, Varez Ward, is under indictment on charges that he threw a January 2012 game against Arkansas. And UTEP kicked three players off the team -- McKenzie Moore, Jalen Ragland and Justin Crosgile -- who are suspected of manipulating games. So if the crime is almost imperceptible, how do you prove it happened? The answer is, you get lucky, which is exactly what occurred when two FBI agents in San Diego began trailing a drug dealer suspected of moving large amounts of pot across state lines. THE FBI's San Diego headquarters lie in a heavily gated office building on the outskirts of the city, where 250 full-time agents police everything from Mexican drug cartels to corruption in Southern California's defense industry. The bookie at the center of the point-shaving conspiracy was Steve Goria, who, unfortunately for Johnson, doubled as a drug dealer. John Gastaldo/The San Diego Union-Tribune/Zuma Press In 2009 Nicholas Cheviron was one of the office's newer agents. He'd come from Bloomington, Ill., where he worked as a beat cop, and was paired with a veteran investigator named Greg Houska on the organized crime squad. Late that year, the duo got a file dropped on their desk about a routine traffic checkpoint in which a suspect was stopped in a Camry that reeked of weed. The U.S. Border Patrol agent who looked in the trunk found $104,900 in $100 bills, along with a map of Eureka, a Northern California city known for growing high-grade pot. The suspect was Steve Goria, and his troubles explaining where the cash came from led the Feds to seize the money and landed his file with Cheviron and Houska. Seeing him as a possible conduit to a larger drug-trafficking outfit, the agents put his photo on their corkboard. Every few weeks, they followed him as he made weekly visits to his mother's house, his local church and a social club where he played poker. One thing they learned quickly was that Goria loved to brag. He talked about how much money he was making peddling dope, his sideline as a bookie and all the girlfriends he had. But what really caught the agents' attention was when an informant told them that Goria was boasting about having a USD player on his payroll. They were already looking at a conspiracy charge involving drug-running and bookmaking. Now they had a new element to throw in: sports bribery. They also had a new name to give their operation: Hookshot. AT THE VERY moment Cheviron and Houska were expanding their investigation, the mystery player they were searching for was in North Dakota. Bismarck in the winter is about as far away from San Diego as you can get, and after being selected by the Dakota Wizards in the second round of the NBA's 2010 developmental draft, Johnson had struggled to adjust to his new surroundings. In fact, he was almost relieved when his left knee started swelling and the Wizards sent him back to Houston for several weeks to rest it. While Johnson was trying to begin the next chapter in his life, the FBI agents were closing in on his previous one. First, they subpoenaed Goria's phone records and found he'd been making hundreds of calls to Brown. Then, in December 2010, after they got permission from a federal judge to begin wiretapping phones, they asked an informant who knew Goria to call him and discuss Brown. On the phone, Goria told the informant that he paid Brown roughly $30,000 the year before in exchange for fixing three games. But recently, he said, their scheme seemed to have stalled. The problem wasn't Goria's willingness to keep paying Brown. The problem was that he didn't think Brown had anyone on the current squad who was as malleable as Johnson had been. "The thing is, I think he's bulls -- ing about this year," Goria said. If Goria was frustrated, the agents were even more so. They didn't want to rely just on wiretaps; they wanted to catch their suspects committing a crime. So they decided to turn up the heat by having the informant -- a cocaine dealer who was looking for help with his own case -- encourage Goria to rekindle his scheme. The informant even offered to kick in several thousand bucks if Goria could find a USD player willing to listen to an offer about shaving points. Goria relayed the offer to Brown, and on Jan. 30, 2011, Brown made the call the agents were waiting for. Johnson was watching TV in his Bismarck apartment when Brown phoned to let him in on the deal. "How much them n -- s trying to put on that game?" Johnson asked, according to a government transcript of the call. Brown said the going price was $30,000 a game. Johnson was astonished. Brown said, "Man, if they can get two, two of 'em, $60K out the door, n -- a." Johnson agreed to help Brown find a current Torero. But weeks dragged on with no progress. With only two games left in the 2010-11 season, the informant gave Brown one last pitch. As Brown soon explained to Johnson on the phone: "I was just chilling and these n -- s just came over in a Bentley, like talkin' big, big s --. [For] two games, they're like $70K. S --, these n -- s was talking." Johnson, who was in an airport traveling with his team, listened, stunned. After the call, he reached out to a Toreros sophomore he'd remained friendly with, a 6'5" forward named Ken Rancifer. A little while later, Johnson called Brown back. "I think I got this n -- a to be down, bro. He hit me, he just text me." "Oh, hell yeah," Brown said. Cheviron and Houska looked at each other, wide-eyed. Oh, hell yeah. EARLY IN THE evening of Feb. 23, 2011, the agents idled outside the doorway of a Qwik Korner Mart in Pacific Beach, eavesdropping on the meeting inside. Brown had arrived with Johnson's recruit, Rancifer, and they'd gone inside to meet Goria and his partners. But the vibe was strange; Rancifer was drenched in sweat. "There was some small talk," Brown says. "Then [Goria] said to [Rancifer], 'You know, if this doesn't work out, it's not going to be me knocking at your door.' " The idea that Goria was willing to bring in muscle clearly alarmed Rancifer. According to the wiretaps, the player thought he was getting money to listen to an offer, not get threatened by a wiseguy. Without accepting the cash, Rancifer fled the scene, running right past Cheviron and Houska. Soon after that, Brown called Johnson in a foul mood to let him know what had happened. "I'm heated, n -- a," he said. "I can't even believe this s --." "This n -- a a bitch, bro..." Johnson replied. "I'm about to text that boy [to say]... 'F -- idiot n -- a, you so stupid!'" The two men ultimately agreed the whole thing had been a total waste of time. But it wasn't to the FBI. Six weeks later, on April 9, Cheviron rousted Johnson in the early-morning raid and brought him back to Houston headquarters. Johnson still wasn't sure what the arrest was about. Then Cheviron played the wiretaps and Johnson heard his voice, and it all began to make sense. "Look," Johnson said, "that's not what it sounds like." Maybe not. But Johnson was all over the tapes, agreeing to help recruit Rancifer and boasting about how he was going to destroy the program he'd put on the map. Full of rage at his teammates from his final season, he had said to Brown at one point, "When all them white boys started filling up our program, I was like, man, f -- these n -- s." Furious at Grier, he had said: "F -- Coach. N -- a, I can make some money right now. S --, let a n -- a eat..." Worst of all, he had brazenly offered to fix games right up to the very end. "Actually, go ask them if they want me to throw a D-League game," he heard himself telling Brown on the wiretap. "I'll throw that s -- so quick, man." JOHNSON WAS ARRESTED on federal conspiracy charges regarding point-shaving on April 9. He was kept incommunicado in a Houston jail for two days, waiting to see a judge. On April 11, nine other people were taken into custody in San Diego on various conspiracy charges. That included Goria, who was arrested and indicted on drug and bookmaking conspiracy charges. "It was crazy," Johnson says now. "I was being talked about with drug dealers. I didn't know about any of that other stuff." At a packed news conference on the 11th, the U.S. Attorney, Laura Duffy, accused Johnson of a "betrayal" that was "not merely disappointing -- it is criminal and worthy of prosecution." On the USD campus, no one was more devastated than Grier. When Cheviron and Houska visited him before the news conference to describe what was about to unfold, he had to go to his kitchen and stand over his sink. "This is a kid who came to my office three times a week to talk," Grier says. "On the floor, he was so frantic at times, you'd never think he could be thinking those things. That's why it was so hard for me to get my arms around it." As the evidence collected by Cheviron and Houska mounted, the defendants, one by one, chose to plead guilty rather than risk going to trial. Goria admitted to using Brown to bribe Johnson and received a 30-month sentence on drug, bookmaking and sports-bribery charges. Two of his partners and his bodyguard, Gates, took deals as well. Finally, late in 2012, Brown and Johnson became the last to fold and admit that they too were part of the sports-bribery conspiracy. Brown received a yearlong sentence that was due to expire on March 3, while Johnson received a six-month term that ended in November 2013. They admitted to plotting to throw games by recruiting Rancifer, who was not charged in the case. But they went to jail insisting that they never threw games at USD themselves. (The U.S. Attorney decided not to press that aspect of the case in open court, satisfied by the two men's pleas.) ONE DAY THIS past November, having recently left a halfway house, Johnson walks into a Denny's, sits down and tries to pinpoint where things went wrong. "I used to be cocky, self-centered and too confident," he says. "But I never had bad intentions. While the college kids were leading college lives, I had to make every decision for myself. I wanted them to be like me, to be tough and survive. I used to look at them and think, Just toughen up. But I had a hard time delivering that message. I did have anger inside of me. I became coldhearted to a lot of people and hardened my heart to survive." He peers out through the driving rain onto the streets of Houston. "I can see a kid thinking: I'm broke. I'm at a school where all these other kids are successful," he says. "And the opportunity seems so easy..." He stops himself there, seemingly on the verge of admitting to point-shaving. But then he throws up his hands. "I don't know what it will take for you to believe me," he says. "I didn't shave points." He insists that he's different than he used to be and that he can't even recognize the voice on the FBI tapes. But the former star has no answer for why, in an unguarded moment, he told Brown, "I wish I woulda did every game." The best he can do is laugh it off as a joke and say, "We was just two guys blowing off steam." It's not exactly a mea culpa, but it's been enough to get Johnson back into basketball. He has a new agent and a contract to play with the Jacksonville Giants of the ABA. Looking out the window of the diner once more, he even clings to the idea that he'll be welcomed back to USD one day. "I gave them a lot of memories," he says. Follow The Mag on Twitter (@ESPNmag) and like us on Facebook.The story behind Carleton College's 100-inning softball game named after an obscure MLB player Photo Credit: Carleton College Facebook Marvin Rotblatt didn't have a long or very successful Major League career, but you can't deny he made his mark. While Rotblatt pitched for parts of only three seasons with the White Sox from 1948-51, posting a 4.82 ERA in 74 2/3 innings, he has found himself a part of history. While at the University of Illinois, he set the Big Ten record for strikeouts in a game with 18 until it was broken in 1965. He was the first Major Leaguer ever to enter a game via bullpen cart. He appeared on the 1951 quiz show "You Bet Your Life," hosted by Groucho Marx. And Carleton College used his name for its annual 100-inning softball game: "Rotblatt." And no, the pitcher never attended the small liberal arts school in Minnesota. The connection, like the game itself, is much more random than that. It all started innocently enough in 1964 -- 13 years after Rotblatt's final big league appearance and seven years after he stopped playing professionally. At the time, the college's official intramural softball league was overflowing and couldn't accept new students. So, a group of sophomores decided to start a new slow-pitch league. When they needed a name, the answer was simple: According to a fellow Rotblatter, "the founders were looking for the most obscure Major Leaguer from their childhood years." At first, it was an incredibly serious and competitive 12-team league, complete with a full set of statistics, including slugging percentage (yes, in a slow-pitch league). That began to change on May 20, 1967. Looking to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the college, 20 players came together for a centennial 100-inning game. The Class of 1967 described it thusly: "Divided into two teams, 20 boys became men that day, all going the entire 100 innings with each of us playing 10 innings at each position in the field. The SOTS, captained by high commissioners Mort (Ken Mortenson) and Mose (Marc Mosiman), walloped the Dirty Old Men by a fitting 100-81 score." The man behind the name even became a guest of honor at the event. After making his first appearance in 1966, he continued making appearances at his namesake sport. Attending one late '60s game, the pitcher "swung three bats over his head while in the on-deck circle, then pointed to left field when he stepped up the plate. His Babe Ruth impression was complete when he smashed the first pitch over the left-field wall and into the lake." (Photo via Carleton College Facebook) Rotblatt's son said his dad was a big fan of the event. "He just loved that he was a part of that. He knew he was picked as sort of a joke, but he was good at making fun of himself. He always said, 'The only thing worse than bad publicity is no publicity.'" While the league would hold on until the 1980s, it is no longer just a softball event. Instead, the game has become a massive schoolwide celebration with over 1,500 students taking part. Every year, another inning is added -- one for each year that the school has existed -- with students dropping in and out of the game. There is one rule, however: You have to play with one hand holding a beverage-filled plastic cup. Traditionally, there is a "no pants" inning, too. Because... college? In recent years, the school has started making shirts to commemorate the event. Usually based on a famous artwork or pop culture event, they're modified to include beer and baseball. The shirts are so popular that students have to wake up at dawn on game day to obtain one. Though Rotblatt -- the pitcher -- passed away in 2013 at the age of 85, this past spring saw the school celebrate the 150-inning Rotblatt game, though there's no word on whether all the innings were completed. Not a bad legacy for a pitcher with 35 Major League games to his name. Michael Clair writes about baseball for Cut4. He believes stirrup socks are an integral part of every formal outfit and Adam Dunn's pitching performance was baseball's greatest moment.It's been one heck of a January for Zooey Deschanel! The New Girl star is engaged to boyfriend Jacob Pechenik, E! News has learned! According to a source, her producer love proposed on Jan. 17, which also doubles as her birthday! The happy couple spent the day on Catalina Island. Just last week a rep for the She & Him singer also confirmed to E! News that she is expecting her first child with her now-fiancé, 42. "Jacob and I are over the moon," the She & Him singer told People. "We are so excited to meet our little one." The actress, 35, stepped out for the first time publicly with her producer beau in August 2014 after she split from screenwriter Jamie Linden. This will be Deschanel's second marriage, as she was formerly linked to Death Cab for Cutie's vocalist Ben Gibbard, but they split in 2012.For the first time in over a century, New York City will host an auto race. All-electric Formula E racing comes to the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal this weekend, pitting some of the top drivers on one of the sharper courses this season. “The location is going to be amazing with the backdrop of the Statue of Liberty and Manhattan in the background,” said NextEV driver Oliver Turvey. “It’s going to be a special Formula E race this weekend.” Now in its third year, Formula E is a fully electric, single-seat racing series sanctioned by the Federation Internationale de L’automobile. The series made stops in Hong Kong, Marrakech, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Monaco, Paris and Berlin this season before arriving in Brooklyn. Organizers call it “motor sport meets tech startup.” “I think it’s going to be one of the best races of the season,” said Techeetah driver Jean-Eric Vergne. “New York is an iconic city and we got really lucky to race in the best cities in the world.” New York City doesn’t have much of a racing history. In fact, the city's most notable race dates back to 1896. Six cars raced from the city to Irvington-on-Hudson in Westchester County and back, averaging 10 miles per hour, according to the Saratoga Auto Museum. This weekend’s Formula E race will go a shorter distance at a much faster speed in a much shorter amount of time. The doubleheader event will include races on Saturday and Sunday. Eat it. Drink it. Do it. Tackle the city, with our help. By clicking Sign up, you agree to our privacy policy. NYC E-Race Course Map EXPAND MAP “We wanted to create a new championship that focuses on team technology, electric cars, and we have come to fill a gap that motor sport needed to cover that appears to be relevant to society,” Formula E CEO Alejandro Agag said in a conference call on Monday. “This is a big event. There’s never been a car race, internationally, in the city of New York, so we’re going to make history in auto racing.” Bringing Formula E to Brooklyn took four years to accomplish. Agag and his team also considered Governors Island, Central Park and Liberty Island before deciding on the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal location in Red Hook, thanks to the help of Deputy Mayor Alicia Glen. “We are about to see some of the greenest, most advanced and fastest cars on the planet race through the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal, in the heart of one of New York City’s most iconic industrial neighborhoods,” Glen said in a statement. “It’s a showcase of innovation, technology, sustainability — and die-hard competition.” Having the race on the Cruise Terminal grounds avoids closing any public streets, a common theme for these kinds of races. It also allows for upgrades like new pavement at the terminal for smoother roads for the race. The bar and restaurant scene around Red Hook picks up around this time of year and most businesses are expecting increased foot traffic this weekend. “As far as we’re concerned, the more people that come to this neighborhood, the better,” said Rachel London, the co-owner of Brooklyn Crab in Red Hook. Danie Hutch, who manages Sunny’s Bar, is also preparing for the increased foot traffic. “We bought a lot of extra beer,” he said. “We’re going to serve hot dogs, which is cool because we don’t normally have food. We don’t normally have a band, but we booked live music Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights.” One of Formula E’s missions is pushing the theme of sustainability through electric cars. Compared to the more well-known Formula 1 cars, Formula E cars are much quieter and produce zero emission. “I believe this is the future of auto racing and automobiles as well,” said Michael Andretti, of Andretti Autosport. “This is to show that there is an alternative and that there is a future. And you get to see it perform on a racetrack.” Racing fans also know the big difference between F1 and FE cars. “You feel Formula 1. You feel the internal combustion engine. You don’t just hear it, you feel it,” said Billy D’Ambrosio, a Formula 1 fan from Westchester. “[Formula E] is an electric engine. It will create a sound so you get the feeling, but it’s a lot less than a Formula 1 race.” Tickets are sold out for the race this weekend. However, residents of Red Hook can go to locations such as the library at 7 Wolcott St. to pick up complimentary passes that give access to the Allianz eVillage fan zone, an entertainment space off the track for fans to experience the race’s events. With Christopher CameronDespite consecutive Pro Bowl performances by Clay Matthews as an inside linebacker, the Green Bay Packers are moving their golden-hair star back to his "natural position." Matthews will return to lining up as an outside linebacker in Green Bay's 3-4 system after almost two seasons in the middle of the defense. "I think it's my most natural position, my most impactful position," Matthews told ESPN's Rob Demovsky on Thursday. "And I think we'll see that on a more consistent basis this season." Matthews will operate as a book end opposite Julius Peppers on the edges of Green Bay's front seven, where head coach Mike McCarthy expects him to move without difficulty. "I don't really look at it as a transition," McCarthy said Thursday. "I mean, he's spent pretty much the majority of his time there and he looks good. We're in the tempo and teaching environment that you survive in this time of year, so - so far, so good. He looks good." Packers director of football operations Eliot Wolf confirmed that it's been "no secret" that Matthews "prefers to play outside," but the former All-Pro never made a fuss of playing the inside, or anywhere else. "I've always tried to be a team player," Matthews said. "I think I kind of exemplified that in making the switch. I don't think many players would do that with the success I'd like to think I had on the outside, but I think it really helped this team out. There were times that, I mean you look statistically where we went as a defense both in rush statistics as well as pass, but I think at the end of the day they see my most natural and most impactful position as a pass-rusher." Matthews is still expected to move around somewhat, but with the emergence of Jake Ryan and Sam Barrington, and the drafting of Blake Martinez, the Packers no longer need to rely on Matthews in the middle.2 Dead in Murder Suicide in Kelly Wisconsin Couple Allegedly Had Marital Problems In The Past Bayfield county officers responded to a call of a shooting in Kelly Wisconsin Sunday morning. When officers arrived at the scene, they found the bodies of Shelly Johanik and her husband Randy Loppnow in the front yard of the couple’s home. Johanik had died of apparent gunshot wounds. Loppnow was transported to St. Mary’s hospital in Duluth, where he later died. Investigators believe Loppnow deliberately shot his wife and himself, and made the call reporting the shooting. The couple allegedly had marital problems in the past. There was a petition for divorce a year ago which was reconciled, but police had never received any domestic violence calls from the household Johanik’s 13 year old daughter was asleep in the house when the shooting occurred. She is now with her biological father. The incident is still under investigation.Alice Ollstein contributed reporting. After a dizzying few days of horse-trading and last-minute changes, House Republicans passed their Obamacare repeal bill Thursday, checking off a years-long promise and unexpectedly overcoming an embarrassing false start earlier this year. The legislation would impose massive cuts to Medicaid, rework the Affordable Care Act, make many of the ACA’s consumer protections optional for state and eliminated many of the law’s taxes, which Republicans say will shore up savings for their tax cut plan. The vote was 217-213. “I don’t know if you remember what [then-Vice President Joe] Biden whispered in the President’s ear back when he was signing [the Affordable Care Act],” Rep. Bill Flores (R-TX) asked reporters, referring to Biden’s “this is a big f-cking deal” hot mic moment. “This is a bigger deal than that,” Flores said before Thursday’s vote. The process that got House Republicans to this point was a messy one. The bill, the American Health Care Act, was first slated for a vote in March, but was pulled from the floor the day of as GOP leadership faced revolts from both their hard-right and centrist wings. Weeks of further negotiating resulted in an amendment, unveiled last week, to allow states to opt-out of certain ACA insurer mandates, which in turned spooked the GOP centrists. Their support was bought back with another amendment, released late Thursday evening, to provide $8 billion more in funding for pre-existing conditions. Even still, hours before the vote, some moderate Republicans refused to say whether they would support it. “This is not ramming it through,” Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-VA), a conservative member of the Energy and Commerce Committee, claimed Thursday morning. “This is a rough and tumble exercise that the Founding Fathers anticipated and we’re doing it the way it’s supposed to be done.” In fact, the bill went through a curtailed committee process, did not wait for a score from the Congressional Budget Office as to the latest changes’ cost or levels of coverage, and went to the floor before the ink on its latest revisions was even dry. Some Republicans admitted to have not fully read the latest version of the full legislative text. ” I haven’t read the word by word,” Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) said Thursday. “I read the other one [Obamacare] word by word, but that was after it passed. By reading a brief you can get the full impact.” Wilson’s office later emailed to say he “misunderstood” the question and “has read the AHCA.” Thursday’s vote marks President Trump’s biggest legislative accomplishment since coming into office. He stayed mostly removed from the policy specifics, but employed his deputies, including Vice President Mike Pence and Health and Humans Service Secretary Tom Price to do a final round of arm-twisting this week. For Republicans more generally, after seven years of failing to coalesce around a single Obamacare replacement plan, they finally have a piece of legislation they can point to that won the support of one of their conferences. In a floor speech before the vote, House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) rallied Republicans in a call-and-response: “Are we going to meet this test?” “Are we going to be men and women of our word?” “Are we going to keep the promises we made?” As they voted, buses waited outside the Capitol to take GOP members to a party at the White House to celebrate the vote. Cases of beer were also spotted by reporters being rolled into the Capitol. Applause among the Republicans broke out when the vote total hit 216. Democrats, as the time ran out, sang “nah nah nah nah, hey hey hey, good bye.” House Republicans voted on the bill without an updated Congressional Budget Office score. The last analysis by the nonpartisan agency, conducted in March, showed the bill resulting in 24 million fewer people having health insurance coverage over the next decade than current law, while bringing the government $150 billion in savings. Health experts have warned that the changes since could cost many more their insurance and the funding recently allotted last night would not be enough to subsidize their coverage. At one point during Ryan’s pre-vote floor speech, as he hailed the bill’s “deliberative” process, a Democratic member heckled him: “Where’s the score?” While the last week of the negotiations around the bill focused on how it could expose consumers with pre-existing conditions to losing their coverage, the legislation’s far bigger impact stands to be on Medicaid. The GOP plan would begin phasing out Medicaid expansion in 2020, while imposing whats known as a “per capita cap” on the general program. Starting in 2020, states would receive a set amount of money from the federal government per Medicaid enrollee as opposed to the current unlimited match rate. Since the cap will increase at a lower rate than medical inflation, the bill is expected to slash $880 billion over 10 years from the program, according to the CBO’s analysis of the original version of the bill. The legislation will next travel to the Senate, where House moderates have said they hoped some of the issues they have with the bill’s Medicaid provisions and its weakening of pre-existing condition protections will be addressed. Some House conservatives have warned that if the bill is moved anywhere closer to the center by the Senate, they would oppose it in their final vote on it. “The bill will change in the Senate,” said House Freedom Caucus Chair Mark Meadows (R-NC), a pivotal conservative in House negotiations who says he’s already spoken 14 senators about the legislation. “I believe it will get better in most parts but I also believe is that what we’re going to see is that there’s been real work done with individual members of the Senate to hopefully have consensus that happens in a very quick order,” Meadows told reporters before the vote. Regardless of the next steps, Democrats are already warning that House Republicans’ approval of the American Health Care Act, which polls at 17 percent among the American public, will be a toxic issue for them in the 2018 mid-term elections. Even Republicans acknowledge the potential risk. “In 2010 Democrats were not right. We can debate policy, but politically they thought that thing would become popular,” Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK) told reporters Thursday morning. “It didn’t, and it killed them over several election cycles. We run that risk here.”The next Aston Martin Vantage will have "more than 500hp and 505lb ft of torque" when it is revealed on the 21 November. Aston Martin dynamics chief engineer Matt Becker revealed the statistics and also that the Vantage will have a dry weight of 1530kg in a new promotional video (below), which features Red Bull Racing ace Max Verstappen. 2018 Aston Martin Vantage revealed Verstappen has provided Aston Martin engineers with feedback on the car as part of the brand's partnership with the Formula 1 racer's team. Part of his stint in the car, which will use the Mercedes-AMG V8 engine recently launched in the DB11, is shown in the video. The Vantage's 4.0-litre twin turbocharged V8 is supplied as part of a technical collaboration between Aston Martin and Mercedes-AMG and will use the former’s software. In the V8 DB11, it's good for 503bhp, suggesting the Vantage could produce the same. That extra power over the existing 430bhp in the current V8 Vantage is set to help undercut the outgoing 0-62mph time of 4.8sec, edging the car closer to 4.0sec. The top speed will exceed 190mph. Aston Martin is expected to offer the new Vantage with a choice of a six-speed manual or dual-clutch automatic transmission. Becker also confirms that the car's wheelbase is 100mm shorter than the DB11 in the video. The new car's aluminium structure is based on the one used by its larger sibling, but will be engineered to offer enhanced agility and adjustability. The car featured in the video is a second-phase development model, having come after the first mule and with two more cars due to follow. Although the Vantage's design is yet to be finalised, the current test car offers a good insight to how it'll look.It’s ugly. Anybody with two eyes and a brain could see that what happened in Knoxville on Saturday was the sign of bigger problems. Losing 41-0 at home to a division foe as about as inexcusable as anything if you’re Tennessee. Well, except for maybe going wire-to-wire with a winless Group of 5 team at home. Whoops. Tennessee is a full-blown disaster and we’re in the first week of October. All but gone is any legitimate shot of making it to Atlanta after losing to Florida and Georgia, both of which were in their own devastating fashion. There are plenty of people calling for Butch Jones’ job. Right now, it appears safe. If the Vols lay a few more eggs in October, that might be a different story. This week will be a much-needed bye for Tennessee. At least for one Saturday, Jones and the Vols won’t have to drown in a chorus of boos from their home fans. They have two weeks to get back to the drawing board to try and figure out a way to resurrect their lifeless season. Here’s where they should start. 1. Make the quarterback change It has to happen. Jones said that he would “be open” to putting in Jarrett Guarantano for Quinten Dormady. I’m not saying Guarantano has been an upgrade in his limited snaps, but Jones has to see what he has in the redshirt freshman. Jones cannot use Guarantano’s age as an excuse not to start him. Guarantano has to be able to start and finish a game. There shouldn’t be anymore of this business where he comes in the second half of a close game for one series. See what the kid can do when he gets enough snaps to get into a rhythm. If there was ever a situation to make a midseason quarterback change, this is it. The Vols get a bye week to prepare for a home game against a South Carolina team that just lost to true freshman quarterback Kellen Mond. Tennessee has plenty of time to draw up a game plan for Guarantano that doesn’t put him in difficult situations. He’s more mobile than Dormady, which at least give him a little better chance to survive the Vols’ lackluster offensive line. Speaking of that … 2. Open up competition across entire offensive line Tennessee OL Brett Kendrick said that the Georgia loss happened because of the offensive line. He’s got a point. The Vols were man-handled up front by a vastly superior unit. If they don’t improve, it won’t matter if Peyton Manning is back there. And yeah, the butt fumbles have to go. This wasn’t the snap Tennessee needed right now. pic.twitter.com/BSfQ8N5owM — CBS Sports (@CBSSports) September 30, 2017 Sure, this unit has been banged up. What unit hasn’t though? There was no excuse for playing like that. There’s also no excuse for allowing 12 tackles for loss against UMass. Jones said he’s opening up every position. This is a great place to start. Nobody has a starting spot unless they earn it in these next two weeks of practice. If a little in-house job competition doesn’t provide a swift kick in the pants, nothing will. 3. Get the ball to John Kelly by any means necessary In Jones’ defense, Kelly is on his way to out-touch the entire SEC. He had 20-plus touches in all five games, which obviously cannot change. Kelly should be Guarantano’s new best friend. The more dump-off passes and screens to him, the better. Shoot, line him up in the slot and get him on a quick drag. Target him on a wheel route. Whatever. Get him the rock
can’t afford to piss off more than two Republican senators, and right now he's working the the last nerves of a whole bunch of them. So everyone should probably have a pair of Christmas PJs tucked away in their desks, just in case. If you would like to receive the Levin Report in your inbox daily, click here to subscribe. Chuck Grassley fact-checks Trump’s tall tax tales Speaking of people who are sick of Trump’s schtick—in this case, his penchant for trafficking in “alternative facts”—Republican Senator Chuck Grassley took to Twitter today to tell the president that the claim he’s ushering in the yugest tax cut ever is about as accurate as Trump’s insistence that he’s doing a great job in Puerto Rico. Goldman Sachs is getting into the house-flipping business If Christina and Tarek can get $456,000 for slapping some cheap finishings on a 1970s ranch and billing it as mid-century modern, why can’t I, is what we assume was the thinking on Lloyd Blankfein’s part that led to this: Goldman Sachs is acquiring Genesis Capital, a private Los Angeles firm that backs investors seeking to buy, renovate and quickly sell single-family homes, according to people familiar with the matter. Genesis, founded in 2007, has been growing rapidly as the housing market continues to recover. Last year, the firm lent $1 billion, up from $50 million in 2013. Equifax should probably just pack it in at this point Did you recently visit Equifax’s Web site to check your credit score, out of fear yours had been affected by the massive breach that occurred over the summer? Congratulations, your computer is probably infected now. Embattled Equifax said Thursday that its website was used to serve “malicious content” to consumers. The issue was due to code created by an unnamed vendor that Equifax was using to collect performance data on the company’s Web site. Equifax, already under scrutiny for its security practices, moved one of its webpages offline amid reports of a possible hack on Thursday, and has removed the vendor’s code from its webpage and took the page offline “to conduct further analysis.” Equifax systems weren’t compromised, the company said in a statement. Next up: sign up for free credit monitoring, and Equifax will send someone to your house to punch you in the face. Elsewhere! Fed Study Suggests Trump May Have Fed to Thank for Stock Rally (Bloomberg) JPMorgan Profit Tops Street Estimates, but Bond Trading Revenue Plummets (CNBC) U.S. Banks Pinched by Trump Policy Gridlock (Financial Times) Bitcoin Can Now Buy You Citizenship in One of the World’s Happiest Countries (Bloomberg) House G.O.P. Moves Toward Keeping Partial State and Local Tax Deduction (W.S.J.) Mnuchin Backs Key Provision in Trump Tax Plan That Would Hit Democrats Hardest (CNBC) Warren Buffett Having Second Thoughts About Immortality (Dealbreaker) As “Unicorns” Emerge, Utah Makes a Case for Tech Entrepreneurs (Dealbook) Trump Interviews Stanford Economist John Taylor for Fed Chairman Job (W.S.J) New York School Makes Record 504-Foot Sushi Roll (UPI)All Things Queer talks homelessness and marriage equality RTRFM 92.1’s LGBTIQ+ program All Things Queer will focus on two major issues that face the LGBTIQ+ community; homelessness and marriage equality. Bayswater Councillor Catherine Ehrhardt will be in the studio discussing the recent announcement that her council will be discussing a motion to support marriage equality. Bayswater could be the second council in Western Australia to urge the federal government to create equal marriage laws, following the support of Port Hedland council last year. Perth Inner City Youth Service (PICYS) CEO Andrew Hall will also be speaking with the hosts about youth homelessness and the prevalence of LGBTIQ+ kids who seek help after being displaced from their homes. You can also check out our recent chat with a young trans woman named Syrena and her experience with PICYS in the April issue of our magazine. Tune in to RTRFM 92.1 from 11am for an hour of All Things Queer every Wednesday morning.Transgender America's Next Top Model contestant lands major new American Apparel campaign American Apparel continues to create a stir with its provocative advertising by casting transgender model Isis King in their latest print campaign. The America's Next Top Model alum, 26, appears in a series of eye-catching shots that not only promote the brand's clothing but endorses June's gay pride month. As a show of support for the LGBT community, the stick thin model, who started life 'in the wrong body' wears a series of screen printed tees with pro-gay slogans such as 'legalize gay'. Proud! Isis King, 26, America's Next Top Model alum and transgender model and designer, appears in American Apparel's new ad campaign American Apparel's advertising campaigns have angered many over the years as young models have been featured wearing next to no clothes and baring nipples, pubic hair and everything in between. But the choice to hire Ms King for the latest marketing ploy shows a more political stance than just shock factor. The new line will feature t-shirts and tanks made in partnership with the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD). 15per cent of proceeds from the sales of the garments adorned with other slogans like 'Gay O.K.' will be donated to the organisation and help its fight against homosexual prejudice. Poster child: As a show of support for the LGBT community, the stick thin model, who says she started life 'in the wrong body' wears a series of screen-printed tees with pro-gay slogans such as 'legalize gay' Clever: American Apparel's decision to use Ms King will not only keep people talking about its edgy advertising but shows its support for the LGBT community who celebrate Pride this month The proceeds will also contribute to GLAAD's participation in the upcoming Pride marches across the nation. An old hat at modelling, Ms Isis had been walking runways for seven years before first appearing in Tyra Banks' adored reality show in its eleventh cycle in 2008 and again for an 'all-star' line-up in 2011. But appearing in an American Apparel campaign is a big win for the clotheshorse after failing to triumph in either season. Delicate: A make-up artist works on Ms King during filming for American's Next Top Model, the show that propelled the fashion fanatic to fame Ms King joins the likes of Jean Paul Gaultier muse, Andrej Pejic, and Lea T, both of whom have played major roles as the fashion world opens its mind to the idea of transgender models. It's certainly a far cry from the existence Ms King eeked out while living in an assisted living development before Ms Banks noticed her in the background of homeless-themed photo shoot.A study of 30 years of data on diarrhea in Botswana found something pretty gross: As the climate changes, it’s probably going to mean that more people contract diarrheal disease. The Daily Climate reports: Kathleen Alexander, an associate professor of wildlife at Virginia Tech’s College of Natural Resources and Environment, says climate drives a large part of diarrhea and related disease, increasing the threat which a changing climate poses to vulnerable communities. The analysis of 30 years of data by her team found an unexpected peak of diarrhea during the hottest and driest part of the year, when there were most flies. Not to get too deep into the dirty details, but there are a few ways that diarrheal disease can spread. Generally, experts will point to dirty water as the main problem, but there are other possible exacerbating factors. In this case, because the researchers found more cases of diarrhea in the dry seasons, they suspect the flies are the direct cause of the spike in diarrhea cases. And the dry weather is the direct cause of the flies. And guess what climate change will bring? Drier weather. Hopefully it will pick up some toilet paper too.Article written by Marshall White for LiftBigEatBig.com Lately Brandon has been posting quite a few videos of the LBEB team smashing some huge lifts. The fun thing is that myself in particular has been catching some shit for my use of assistance gear while training. By assistance gear I mean straps, knee wraps, oly shoes, belts, etc etc. While I truly appreciate a purist mentality and using absolutely no assistance gear while training is badass the FACT is all of the things we use for assistance serve one purpose and one purpose only: to make us OVERALL stronger. So many people say “using straps while deadlifting is cheating” and all that crap. This may be true if you’re a competitive powerlifter or olympic lifter but for a strongman that is not the case. They are allowed in most competitions. Them being allowed in competition is beside the point, we are talking TRAINING here. More importantly we are talking training tools. Using straps while deadlifting in training allows you to overload every other muscle in your body because the weak link is taken out of the equation. Be honest with yourself and think this through logically: if you are pulling 600lbs with straps do you honestly believe holding onto 550lbs without straps is going to be a problem? You will be so much more explosive with the 550 that it will be in the hands less time and it will seem overall lighter on your body. Not to mention as you approach 550 your confidence will be sky high since it is so far below what you know you are actually capable of. I’ve noticed that the crossfit community loves to take pride in their lack of assistance gear and I applaud you guys and gals for that, but are you trying to take pride in something or are you trying to become the best athlete you can be. How many times have Vibrams been defended on LBEB? Again, I appreciate this, I’ve even done some shoeless yoking in my day. The fact is though I was smashing 1000lb with the proper footwear before my feet were strong enough to go 800lb shoeless. Putting on some oly shoes to take your overhead up a notch is not cheating, it’s simply utilizing a tool to overload your body and prepare your cns for big weight. Example? Let’s say your current overhead max is 200lb in a pair of vibrams, and just by adding oly shoes to the equation you start putting the bar in a better position, etc and now you’re hitting 250lb. If you decide to take those oly shoes off the day of the competition I think we can agree that a 225-235 overhead should be an easy accomplishment, again, because it is so sub-maximal. A lift that far below your max doesn’t necessarily even need to be positioned correctly because you can “muscle” it into position if you have to. In my training I try to utilize everything I can to “eek” out every little pound from my lifts that I can. When I use knee wraps it is so I can go heavier on the squat, thereby conditioning my cns for heavy loads, but also go heavy on yokes or farmers later in the week without messing up my knees too bad. In my opinion being able to go heavier more times during the week seems nothing but beneficial. I use tacky when loading stones to reduce stress on biceps, thereby shortening my recovery time between bicep heavy events like, log cleans, tire flips, etc. If I can recover faster between events, I can do more events during the week. How can this not be helpful? Let’s talk powerlifting gear for a second because I don’t want to get too crazy with the gear. There are certain squat suits and bench press shirts that can add as much as 3-400lbs to these lifts! I do not advocate the use of these on a regular basis because in my opinion people become reliant on this type of gear in order to stroke their egos and make them feel like they are strong when in fact they are not. That being said, even these types of suits and shirts have their place in training. Let me explain. Most people do not have a problem with coming out of the hole on a squat, it’s usually the top end where the squat slows down and sometimes fails. A squat suit works by basically making the squat lighter in the hole and as you ascend the lift becomes more and more your body doing the work. See where I’m going with this? If you are using a squat suit you are overloading the top end of your squat while still getting the feel of ridiculously heavy weights on your back and practicing full squat form. When used sparingly and intelligently this can be a very easy way to add massive amounts of pounds to your raw squat. There you have it, a nice explanation of how assistance gear can be used to increase your performance when you’re not using it. Before I get crucified for this article really think about what I am saying and maybe even try out these things before you dismiss them. Sure I am belted up when I take an 1100lb yoke for a stroll but because of this I can yoke 1000lb without a belt and yes I slather myself in tacky when loading a 500lb stone but because of this I can load 400+ without tacky, so I would say I’m pretty dam strong with or without gear. These things are simply TOOLS to increase performance. Lifting big is not about being proud you squatted 300 without a belt and being happy with that. It’s about taking that 300lb squat to the next level, and a really efficient way of doing that is by adding in some assistance gear. Hopefully you’ll try some of these out and put aside your pride as well in order to get bigger lifts. If not I hope you enjoy your lifting plateaus because you’re going to be hanging out there for a while. Facebook Twitter Google+ LinkedInThe sleeping habits of horses are somewhat different than humans. Most human sleep is usually a long stretch – about eight hours in a 24-hour day. Horses rest for short periods during the day more frequently. They are not strictly nocturnal or diurnal, like most humans. Horse’s sleeping patterns change depending on their age. Foals lie down for frequent naps and spend about half of their day sleeping until they are about three months old. As the foal gets older, the frequency of the naps becomes less, and they are more likely to stand rather than lie down. The weather can make a big impact on how a horse sleeps. During really cold, wet and nasty weather, your horse may not be able to get comfortable enough to sleep. Bringing your horse in or making sure it isn't harassed when trying to nap in a run-in will help your horse relax. Your horse needs a comfortable secure place to rest, whether it is stabled or kept our on pasture. Foal lying down while sleeping. Lisa Bird / EyeEm / Getty Images How the Adult Horse Sleeps Mature horses most frequently rest in a standing position. The'stay apparatus' of the forelegs and 'check apparatus' (functions of the leg tendons and ligaments) of the hind legs allows them to rest and relax while not falling down. Lying down is actually more stressful for a horse than standing. Their own weight causes pressure on their internal organs. However, most horses will lie down for a brief rest every day if they have a comfortable place to do so. Some will become so relaxed that they twitch and snore, just like a dog. That's why it's important to provide a dry, sheltered area like a run-in shed or roomy stall, so your horse can stretch out safely. How Long Horses Sleep Adult horses sleep for about three hours each 24-hour period. The length and type of sleep is affected by diet, temperature, workload, gestation and gender. The period of each sleep phase is very brief, lasting only a few minutes at a time. Young horses tend to sleep more than mature horses. Senior horses may doze more frequently. Sleeping Positions It is true that horses sleep standing up. A sleeping horse will most carry its weight on the two forelegs and one hind leg. One hind leg will relax with the hoof resting up on its toe. The rotation of the hips triggers the stay function of the hind legs. The head and neck droop, and during deep sleep, the ears are relaxed, the eyes close and the lips may droop. Some horses do sleep stretched flat out on the ground and may even snore and twitch as though dreaming. This may have been equivalent to the REM phase of sleep in humans. Of course, apparent snoring may be caused by the increased weight on the respiratory system. MOKUDEN_photos / Getty Images Sleeping Habits Horses will lie down to sun themselves, and it is not unusual for several horses to lie down at the same time for a communal sun bath on a warm spring day. Often while several lay down, one or two others will remain standing as if on watch. Horses tend to spend less time lying down in cold snowy conditions, although on a sunny day, some will snooze stretched out in the snow. Each horse has its own sleeping habits. Some will sleep only at night while others sleep during the day as well.Russian Navy fleet corvette Soobrazitelny gets a new commander, captain lieutenant Aleksandr Slonov. Immediately, there are tensions between him and one of the ship’s junior lieutenants, Leonid Karakash. However, Slonov is determined to make Karakash change his ways. Meanwhile, the rest of the corvette’s crew begins preparation for a military exercise. They are to compete against the Magnitogorsk submarine under the command of Vladimir Nagornov and his crew. They only have 20 days to properly prepare. But first, the corvette’s new sailors must be initiated. Russia’s Baltic Fleet was formed in 1703 under Peter the Great and is the oldest formation in the Russian Navy. Throughout its history, it has fought in many military conflicts, defending its country’s borders and perfecting its battle techniques. Today it boasts the most modern vessels, formidable weaponry and experienced seamen the Russian Navy has to offer. Meet the crews of two of its vessels, the corvette Soobrazitelny and the submarine Magnitogorsk, to learn more about life in the Baltic Fleet. Joining the crew of Magnitogorsk, commanded by Captain Vladimir Nagornov, you'll find out about the procedures required for diving and surfacing, as well as certain superstitions shared by those on board. You'll also learn about the jobs required to keep the boat operational, how a submarine locates its targets covertly and discover more about the torpedoes it carries. Aleksandr Slonov, Commander of Soobrazitelny, and his crew will take you along to a military parade, give you a guided tour of the ship and explain how the corvette's missiles are launched. With marines joining its ranks, you'll get the opportunity to accompany them to an armoured vehicle test track, where you can pick up some tips about how to handle these impressively versatile vehicles. In the end, the two crews will engage in a competition to determine which of them is the best-prepared and most skilled in military combat. Pick your side and may the best team win. Watch this series in RussianLua is a deceptively simple language. Its designers have done such a good job of keeping it downwardly scalable to simple uses that it’s easy to overlook the advanced parts. One of these is its polished implementation of coroutines. Why Coroutines Matter The combination of coroutines, tail-call optimization, and closures means that many sophisticated control structures can be implemented in Lua pretty easily. Rather than turning functions inside-out and nesting them inside an arbitrary primary function, untangling them and giving each its own main loop often simplifies things. Allowing individual closures to suspend and resume means that backtracking, lazy streams, constraint propagation networks, and so on can be expressed cleanly. Also, asynchronous IO can be coordinated with functions like luasocket.select scheduling coroutines; each can still be read linearly, and there’s no need to CPS-transform everything by hand with callbacks. Lua’s coroutines are similar to Python’s generators and Ruby’s fibers, and lessons learned with them will mostly transfer. (Lua has had them since at least 2003, though. Python is unlikely to ever get proper tail calls, and it sounds like they are still a work in progress for mainstream Ruby implementations.) For people familiar with Scheme, single-use continuations can be implemented in terms of coroutines, and vice versa, though my experience has consistently been that coroutines are a better fit for most problems. (Even Oleg agrees that full continuations are probably the wrong abstraction!) The main limitation of Lua coroutines is that, since they are implemented with setjmp(3) and longjmp(3), you cannot use them to call from Lua into C code that calls back into Lua that calls back into C, because the nested longjmp will clobber the C function’s stack frames. (This is detected at runtime, rather than failing silently.) I haven’t found this to be a problem in practice, and I’m not aware of any way to fix it without damaging Lua’s portability, one of my favorite things about Lua — it will run on literally anything with an ANSI C compiler and a modest amount of space. Using Lua means I can travel light. :) (Also, coroutines allow concurrency, but not parallelism — they won’t take advantage of multiple cores. Multiple Lua VMs can be run in one process without any GIL problems, though, so parallelism via message-passing is still an option.) How Do you Use Lua Coroutines? create coroutine.create(f) returns a new coroutine. f must be a function (possibly anonymous) that takes 0 or more arguments. As per the usual Lua function calling style, arguments not provided will be nil, and extra arguments will be discarded. resume coroutine.resume(c, [args]) returns (true, [results from yield or return]) or (false, error_message) This can be used to pass new values into a coroutine as it is resumed, and the caller will receive any results the callee passes to yield or resume, or any error messages from the coroutine’s execution. running coroutine.running() returns a reference to the current coroutine and a boolean for whether execution is currently in the main coroutine. (This is typically useful when the coroutine itself is used as a key in a table.) status coroutine.status(c) returns any of the strings “running,” “suspended,” “normal” (live but not running), or “dead” if complete or error’d out. yield coroutine.yield(...) suspends the current coroutine, returning its arguments to the caller. If subsequently resumed, yield will return any arguments that were passed to resume, and pick up where it left off. wrap coroutine.wrap(f) wraps a function so that it can use coroutine.yield like a coroutine, but called with the normal function call syntax. This is typically used to conceal whether an API is actually using a function or a coroutine internally. Closing While the coroutine API is pretty simple, it’s a major boost to the expressiveness of the language. Coroutines make function calls more expressive, and allow many important constructs to be represented cleanly.After moving to the NHL this summer, Evgeny Medvedev had an up-and-down season withe Philadelphia Flyers. The KHL veteran showed many good things in the NHL, and struggled in other areas. In this translated interview, originally appearing on the popular Russian website SovSport.ru, Evgeny Medvedev blamed himself for his unsuccessful season, declared that he wants to stay in Philadelphia, and discussed Ilya Kovalchuk. * For the original SovSport.ru interview by Natalia Bragilevskaya, click here. – Why are you missing all these game lately? Health problems? Coaches’ decisions? – Little injuries mostly. This year I am missing a lot of games, and I spend a lot of times trying to heal. There are some cases where I am not finding game practice even for one or two weeks. – Is it because you didn’t heal to the 100%? – I healed everytime. But sometimes I miss some conditioning. I try to compensate it during the off-days, I take extra practices. But I’ve been told that his is some kind of a “firs NHL season syndrome”. – It hits mostly European players. – Yes, it looks like that. And I am no exception. – You have a one-year contract. Did you already started negotiating for the next season? – I can’t say anything about my future NHL career. This isn’t a yes, and isn’t a no. When there will be something concrete, and when I’ll sign a contract, then I will be able to talk about it. But so far no negotiations. – Do you want to remain in the NHL? – Of course! I truly want to keep on playing here [in the NHL]. – You weren’t included in the Team Russia preliminary roster for the World Cup. Do you think you’d have more chances if you kept on playing in the KHL? – No, I don’t agree. In any case this is just my first [NHL] season. And it was a step forward for me. Yes, I had some injuries, some conditioning problems. But now I know the way I should get ready. I think that the next season for me will be completely different. – Did you talk with Team Russia staff regarding the IIHF WC? – I recently talked with [Team Russia head coach] Oleg Znarok. He said that he is waiting for me. I am ready to play for the national team, just as I always was. I’ll try to show my level. http://gty.im/490674740 – Did you follow the situation around Ilya Kovalchuk? – I don’t really know what the problem was. But they reached a compromise and now Ilya is playing in the series against Dynamo Moscow. Such situations never help teams, but SKA won the first playoffs series against Lokomotiv Yaroslavl. Journalists write that all SKA’s problems were tied with Kovalchuk. I don’t think that it was like that. Ilya is always an important part of his teams. He can inspire other players and is a true leader. He’s yet to have said his last word this year. – When things don’t go well for Kovalchuk, NHL rumors appear right away. – I don’t know what I’d do if I were him. He played many years in the NHL and was a big star. I don’t know what he wants to do. He still has one year of contract with SKA. But if I were in his shoes, I’d take the risk and get back to the NHL if I had the chance. – How do you get alont in the United States? – My family likes the conditions here. The rhythm of life. All is very quiet. There are no unpleasant moments. My daughter goes to the kindergarten, where there are both Russian and American children. She is already teaching me to talk in English. Sometimes he suggests me some words. – Does your wife talk in English? – She talks better than me. She studied English for three years in Russia. Unfortunately, I did not have time for this. – Many Russian hockey wives complain that it’s boring for them in America as they don’t have the same entertainment they have in Russia. – Why is that? We attended the opera in New York. It was great. Of course we miss our friends and also the language a bit. But we don’t complain. But once you grasped the language, everything will fade away. http://gty.im/505697400 – What are your plans for the summer? – We’ll go to Russia for a month, a month and a half. All depends on my future career. If I’ll sign a contract here [in Philadelphia] or with another team. But I really want to stay. – Why? – I like Philadelphia, the team itself. The guy accepted me very well in the team and they supported me every time. I understand myself that my season hasn’t been that good. I’m not satisfied myself. I am really thankful to the coaches and the management for their patience with me and because they gave me a chance to play in the NHL at 33 years of age. You need time to get all this, and they gave it to me. – Do you talk with the coaches? – Yes, and more and more often without a translator. The fact that I’m not playing now it’s just my fault. – Maybe they’re just giving you a break, and this is why you’re not playing now? – I don’t think so. I really didn’t play well in February. I think everyone noticed that. Not even the coach, even I understood that my conditioning wasn’t enough. But every player has this periods. Slowly they fade away. I think that everything will be alright. – What did you prepare to last summer when you got to the NHL? – I was ready to everything, even for this kind of events. I knew where I was going. Giving the fault to someone else doesn’t make sense. And my experience is helping me in surviving to this moment. Believe me, I had worse in my life… RELATED: Evgeny Medvedev Excited About First Season In The NHL. Can’t get enough hockey? Want to talk about it with our writers, and fellow fans? Join The Hockey Writers Group on Facebook today for the best hockey conversations on the web! * Featured image provided by Amy Irvin.Licensed games almost always give players an instant headache. That’s not exactly a shocking thing to hear. So many licensed games are clear cash grabs, from boring re-skins of older successful titles to rush jobs that are so barely thought-out that they’re essentially unplayable. Still, it doesn’t hurt to have a little bit in faith in the usual kiss of death that comes with a game about your favorite piece of media. In the world of videogames, Batman was able to fight his way out of mediocrity with the Arkham series and it can (and has) happened in boardgames. For example: every game on this list. They are all top quality boardgames based on licensed properties. If you are a fan of the franchise in question, every one of these games is pretty much a must buy; even if you’re not, they’re all worth playing. In no particular order, here are our picks for the best licensed boardgames. 1. Battlestar Galactica Not only is Battlestar Galactica considered to be one of the best licensed boardgames, it is also one of the best games of all time, period. Battlestar Galactica is a semi-cooperative thematic game where players take on the role of one of the ten characters from the Sci Fi Channel series. You can sense where things will go next—players have to work together and overcome their weaknesses to survive for the good of the human race. The kicker is that one (or more) of the players is secretly on the side of the Cylons. Things will get very tense and can take the turn for the worst with a single card draw. Don’t expect the game to calm down during the three hour (if not longer) session it will take to play, especially since a second set of traitor cards will be passed out as you near the end of your mission. This is a must own for fans of the series and for anyone interested in a thematic game in space. 2. A Game of Thrones: The Board Game I love Game of Thrones. The action, the romance and the political intrigue over the Iron Throne is the perfect recipe for a great TV show. Does that apply to a boardgame? Well, it depends on how much you value friendship. A Game of Thrones: The Board Game has a good chance of destroying relationships that have taken years to craft in a measly three hours. Although it’s technically based on the source material of the HBO series, I have never witnessed a boardgame fit a theme as well as this. At face value, the game is a war game where your kingdom must control the most land, but it can be gained through carefully crafted diplomacy instead of the force of a powerful army (Littlefinger v. Stanis). A Game of Thrones: The Board Game is notorious for its backstabbing element—there is no way to win without backstabbing at a certain point. It’s up to the player to decide the right time to do so, and whether to give any of the players even a shred of trust. It’s a perfect way to get your mind off waiting for the new season on HBO—you won’t regret it (but your friends might). 3. Star Wars: Imperial Assault Are you a fan of RPGs and Star Wars? If you are, you’ll fall in love with Star Wars: Imperial Assault, a dungeon crawler in the Star Wars universe complete with a plethora of miniatures. The game, which had an incredibly anticipated release last year, has a huge fan-base, as you would expect to see with Star Wars in the name. An Internet search will pull up tons of pictures of the gray miniatures being painted vivid colors. In Imperial Assault, one player plays the gigantic Galactic Empire, while up to four players take control of the Rebel Alliance in an attempt to take them down. The game is a reimplementation of Descent: Journeys in the Dark, which is known for its dice system. In the system, players will be building their sets of dice up to allow for different sets of attacks and moves. Match that dice system with a set of command cards that players will gain throughout their skirmish and you have an experience that will be a bit different every time. Even if you’re not a fan of Star Wars you won’t regret picking up Imperial Assault. 4. Spartacus: A Game of Blood & Treachery When you think of a series on Starz, you don’t automatically connect it with enough success to cause a release of a boardgame, much less an excellent one. The goal in Spartacus: A Game of Blood & Treachery is to become the most influential house in the land, which you’ll attempt to do through both diplomacy and battle. Players will receive three cards each turn, and it’s up to them whether they want to sell or trade them. These decisions can lead to some interesting choices that will reek of betrayal. Luckily, you can get that sweet payback in the arena by choosing to fight your choice of an opponent. The game is immersive to the point that you will feel like hanging out in a colosseum. Or maybe that’s just because you’re about to take your revenge on your backstabbing friend a bit too far. If you are a fan of the Starz series, love backstabbing your friends or are just looking for a fun game to play on a Saturday night, check out Spartacus. 5. Star Wars: X-Wing Miniatures Game OK, this will be the last Star Wars game on the list. In all fairness, the Star Wars franchise has a plethora of solid boardgames, as well as some mediocre ones, but Star Wars: X-Wing Miniatures Game has such a cult following it would be a shame for it to miss the list. It’s a tactical combat game that features some of the most gorgeous miniatures that you’ll ever see. In fact, the miniatures are so well detailed that they are popular among collectors who will never bring them onto the battlefield (shame). Each ship in the game has a unique set of possible movements, which is decided in secret during each turn in any of the chosen missions. Mix that with a taste of randomness decided by a set of cards and dice rolls and you’ve got a game that has enough replay value to be the main event at worldwide tournaments. Even though the base game has enough to get you started, be well aware of the potential money sink headed your way before making the jump—it’s hard to resist the miniatures. If you’ve got a friend to play with and plenty of tablespace, X-Wing should be a given. 6. Firefly: The Game If I passed by the Firefly: The Game box in a store, I’d normally run far away like it had the plague. But then I’d be wrong. Very, very wrong. The game is a standard pick up and deliver title—the goal is to use your ship to complete a variety of different tasks for money. The money you gain on jobs is then converted to points at the end of the game. Throughout the journey you will be upgrading your ship, hiring new members to your crew and trying to sneak some illegal goods on the way. Firefly is a simple game that has a huge luck factor, but there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. The game fits the theme very well and would be a ton of fun for anyone into space-themed games. It’s not heavy, but it’s not trying to be. If you’re looking for a game to play at your favorite bar with some friends, Firefly is a great choice. 7. Legendary: A Marvel Deck Building Game Just like Star Wars, it’s not shocking that you can find a quality boardgame in the Marvel Universe. Plenty of players know the deckbuilder genre pretty well through competitive experiences like Dominion and Star Realms, but Legendary: A Marvel Deck Building Game flips the genre on its head by turning it into a cooperative experience. Players will pick out a villain from the Marvel universe to defeat that will be controlled “automatically.” Players will individual build their decks to their liking to take turns attacking the enemy. Hopefully the villain’s henchman won’t get away, because if enough do, you and your team will lose. Although there’s no way to avoid working together, there is a competitive element. You will keep track of all of the bad guys that you’ve defeated, which will add to your tally of points. If you have the most points, naturally, you’ll come out as the winner of the table. But hey, it’s still a shared victory for mankind at the end of the day. If you love card games, Marvel and/or games you can play with your friend, Legendary: A Marvel Deck Building Game deserves to be in your collection. 8. Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game Civilization V is one of my favorite video games. Thinking about throwing that experience onto my table leads me to nothing but happy thoughts. Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game is a heavy boardgame that gives you the responsibility of guiding your civilization through the ages and hitting on all of the big decisions that go with trying to create the world’s greatest dynasty. That means balancing technology, economy, culture and military—and doing it better than your friends at the table. Just like in the videogame, you can choose your path to victory, which instantly increases the different ways to play the game, even just between the players at the table during a single session. The best part about this game is that you can get through an entire session in much less time than the videogame, although you’ll still need to block off at least three
Please! I’m shocking with parallel parks! I need to make this as quick as possible. And I think it’s Todd Greenberg’s car behind me. I don’t want to ding it. Bunker: Ok Jared, bottom right vision has you coming in perfectly. Come back, come back, stop. Move forward, straighten, now reverse. Come back, come back, stop. There. Parallel park perfectly done. Oh and our records show it isn’t Greenberg’s car, it is in fact Ricky Stuart’s car that’s behind you. Maxwell: Really? Maxwell then repeatedly reverses his car into Stuart’s. Maxwell finally makes it into the conference room with Tony Archer. After being chastised for his tardiness, the meeting gets under way. Archer: Look Jared, I asked you along for this chat because prior to the season’s commencement you assured me that you weren’t going to rely too heavily on the video bunker. I turn on the Rabbitohs/Roosters match on Sunday to see you reviewing everything. Maxwell: I never said I wouldn’t rely on the video bunker. Advertisement Advertisement Archer: On the 25th of February you explicitly assured me that you would not use the video bunker as a crutch. Maxwell pulls out his mobile and holds up a finger to Archer as if to say, “one moment please”, much to Archer’s surprise. Maxwell: Yes bunker, it’s me again, can we confirm whether or not I promised Mr. Archer here that I wouldn’t use the bunker as much? Bunker: Gladly. Maxwell: (whispers to Archer) Bunker’s on it. Archer: (shaking his head in disbelief) Unbelievable. Bunker: All four screens confirm that you did in fact promise Mr. Archer that you wouldn’t use the bunker too often. Maxwell: Oops…. AdvertisementWinner highlights growing pressure for greater public awareness and information transparency as a way of dealing with environmental woes When Liu Futang left the confines of Chinese government service and opened his first microblog last April, the retired forestry official could not have imagined that a year later, he would be celebrated as a shining light of citizen journalism. Yet that is what happened on Tuesday when the 65-year-old's exposé of illegal forest clearance joined mainstream media stories on oil spills, hazardous smog and toxic water pollution as a winner at the Chinese environmental press awards. At first sight, it is hard to imagine anyone less like the typical Chinese blogger than Liu. But the quiet, former bureaucrat is an example of the growing pressure from journalists, bloggers and activists for greater public awareness and information transparency as a way of dealing with the country's environmental woes. Liu stirred up an online fury last year when he revealed that developers had destroyed one of the world's last groves of water coconut trees to make space for a yacht marina. "The degradation is terrible," said Liu. "The local media hasn't written a single word, but I've posted 40 articles that have been followed up by newspapers and TV from across the country." The citizen journalist prize is a new category in the awards, which are jointly organised by the Guardian, chinadialogue and Sina, the leading Chinese web portal, with funding from the Guardian Foundation and SEE, a Chinese charitable body. Now in its third year, the awards highlighted the gains – and continued challenges – faced by Chinese journalists. The past 12 months have showed significant progress in the efforts to improve transparency, but also major obstacles. Internationally, the highest profile success was a campaign by journalist-turned-environmental activist Ma Jun to make Apple provide more details about pollution and labour standards violations in its supply chain. Domestically, the biggest breakthrough is probably on air pollution. Most of China's cities have been plagued by smog for more than a decade, but until now the authorities have provided scant information about the pollution that caused the haze and threatens the health of millions. This changed dramatically after Chinese bloggers and journalists picked up on tweets issued from the US embassy monitoring station and other sources, with environmental authorities in Beijing starting to release more detailed pollution data earlier this year. Feng Jie, who was named environmental journalist of the year, wrote a darkly humorous piece on the efforts of Beijing citizens to set up their own monitoring stations. In another in-depth report, she revealed how a massive oil leak into the Bohai Sea was withheld from the public by the State Oceanic Administration and drilling platform operators, CNOOC and ConocoPhillips. Reporters in the state media were ordered to keep quiet but the problem emerged via microblogs and was then confirmed by local government and corporate sources. Such cases illustrate why Feng believes China has made little progress in information disclosure since she started her career six years ago. "When I started out, I was optimistic that things would improve. But now I realise that if you want to tell your readers real information rather than bullshit, then you have to spend a lot of time building up connections with insiders. If you simply call up the press office, you get nothing," she said. Newspapers and websites also have to race to get stories out before censors issue blocking orders. The best breaking news story of the year was a report on the cancer risks posed by 5,000 tonnes of cadmium tailings that contaminated water systems near the source of the Pearl River. The article was put out by the Yunnan Information Daily, but its partner in the investigation, the Southern Metropolis Daily, was ordered not to run the story when it tried to do so one day later. While many participants cited censorship as the biggest problem facing Chinese journalists, the spread of microblogs has made it far more difficult for the authorities to control the flow of information, which is now coming from so many different and unexpected directions. "There is more transparency, but it's not yet at a fundamental level. That is the biggest difficulty in China's environmental journalism," said Gong Jing, who picked up an award for revealing how cadmium pollution through the soil is contaminating rice stocks. "A lot of information should be public, but journalists have to work very hard to get it." That hard grind is paying dividends. Media analysts and environmental NGOs said journalists, bloggers and civil society groups are opening up new information territory. "There has been an improvement from the bottom up," said Li Yan of Greenpeace. "But there are still too many environmental issues that have not gained sufficient attention from the government." Liu Ruisheng of the China Academy of Social Science said public demands for transparency have increased. "This has pushed the government to open more information. Even if it is under pressure, the government cannot do things as it did in the past," he said. These topics were raised in a debate that followed the award ceremony. Among the 100 or so audience members, fewer than one-fifth believed that China's environmental problems have peaked, but the majority were optimistic of improvement within the next 10 years. A more cautious note, was struck by the most senior government participant, Sun Zhen, deputy counsel at the National Development and Reform Commission. "I don't think we will see the peak that soon," he said. "The improvements can't keep pace with the speed of destruction." Winners list for the China environmental press awards Journalist of the year: Feng Jie, Southern Weekend Recognised for Bohai oil spill special report, north China cities facing water supply crisis and monitoring air quality for my country. Citizen journalist of the year: Liu Futang Recognised for an exposé on the destruction of water coconut forest. Most influential report: Cadmium rice murder By Gong Jing of Caixin Best breaking news story: Here comes 5,000 tons of chromium By Feng Wei, Liu Wei of Yunnan Information Daily Best in-depth report: Drought destiny facing rivers and lakes By Zhao Shilong, He Guangwei, Guo Liping, Zhou Huan, Long Jing of Time Weekly Best nature report: Everest expedition: wildlife on the Qinghai-Tibet plateau By Yang Xiaohong, Fang Qianhua of Southern Metropolis Daily Honourable mentions: Cui Zheng of New Century for Environmental hormone ambush Zhang Ke, First Financial Daily for Rodeo at the Bird's Nest in Beijing Lu Zongshu, Zhang Qing, Zhu Yang, Shen Nianzu of Southern Weekend for Growing vegetables Yang Chuanmin of Southern Metropolis Daily for Concerns for the South China Sea Xie Liangbing and Tian Peng of Economic Observer for Yangtze River fish emergency Yuan Yue of Sanlian Life Weekly for The Death of the Earth – report from the Durban climate conference Wang Yan of China News Week for The terrifying Yajiang River Ma Jinhui of Xiaoxiang Morning Daily for Guanyin MountainShare. A return to his spiritual roots. A return to his spiritual roots. During July’s BitSummit game expo in Kyoto, game director Swery told IGN about his intention to become a Buddhist priest. And now he has actually done it. Swery is best known for his PS3/Xbox 360/PC cult hit Deadly Premonition, a strange but brilliant work that split audiences upon its original release in 2010. This Kafkaesque survival horror game could be lonely, oppressive and alienating, but its balance of human drama with surreal humor made it endlessly endearing. Swery was raised in a temple by his parents, who were also priests, and he has often cited this as a factor behind his determinedly humanist games. During a hiatus from game development as he recovers from reactive hypoglycemia (and writes a mystery novel starring a cat), Swery says he felt the desire to return to his spiritual roots. Since Swery intends to eventually return to making games, rather than full-time priesthood, we asked him to share his spiritual journey with IGN, and the effect he believes it will have on his games. IGN Japan: What memories do you have of your childhood in a temple? Swery: When I was young, it simply felt like a very large and old-fashioned house. But looking back on it now, I remember devotional exercises that were carried out at set times, talking with family, the various types of books and records in the house – so many ways in which my childhood was closely linked with Buddhism. As a child I went through a rebellious stage, because I felt embarrassed to be different from the other kids, but with hindsight I think it was a good thing. IGN Japan: How did your Buddhist upbringing affect your approach to making games? Swery: I have always felt the desire to make games with a ‘human’ quality to them. In order to move the player, it is essential to have human drama; and if the player cannot empathise with the characters in a game, they will not be moved. Growing up in a temple meant that I encountered a lot of different people from a young age. These were not always happy people; much of the time they were angry, or sad, or suffering in some way. I think this gave me a natural interest in humanity, and it also taught me that the spirit can be fraught. So perhaps my work portrays a sense of things that are beyond human comprehension as a result. IGN Japan: What prompted you to recently pursue the qualification of Buddhist priest? Swery: I actually became a qualified priest while I was a high-school student. Some 25 years later, I had forgotten this part of my identity – that I was also a monk. But last year I became seriously ill and had to take a prolonged period off work. During that time I had more opportunity to talk with family and friends, to listen to music, venture off to faraway towns, acquaint myself with nature, stroke animals, smell the smells, read books and even write one, and I had a lot of time to reconsider things. For some reason, while doing all of this I became naturally magnetised to the world of Buddhism. IGN Japan: Please explain the process of earning the certification. What did you study and what did you learn? Was there a lot of reading, or practical learning, or maybe something else? Swery: I spent time living communally in a temple in Kyoto. Every day began at 5:30am and ended at 11pm, with a strict daily routine. History, doctrine, devotional exercises, sermons, etiquette, morality, music, law; we followed a regime of when to rest and when to study. It goes without saying that devotional exercises were not missed on a single day. We sat in the seiza position (kneeling with your back straight and your feet tucked beneath your bottom) for maybe 10 hours a day. IGN Japan: Did someone guide you in the process? Perhaps your parents? “ I have always felt the desire to make games with a ‘human’ quality to them. In order to move the player, it is essential to have human drama; and if the player cannot empathise with the characters in a game, they will not be moved. Swery: My parents and relatives. All my relatives live together in a temple as monks. IGN Japan: What is the proper name of the certification and your new position? Swery: I am qualified as a ‘kyoushi’ (which translates literally as “teacher" but is used to describe a Buddhist priest). IGN Japan: How long did the process take, in total? What were some of the challenges or difficulties? Swery: First I became a standard-level monk while I was at high school, a qualification called ‘tokudo-shuurai’. Later, while working, I took a three-year correspondence course with a Buddhist university, and eventually became qualified to study for the ‘kyoushi-kyoushuu’ ceritifcation. By the way, taking a correspondence course took much longer than simply studying a special training course at a university, which is what most people do. Finally, the actual ‘kyoushi-kyoushuu’ qualification can be obtained in as little as 10 days. For me those 10 days felt like a long time and a short time all at once. IGN Japan: What responsibilities or powers do your qualification give you? Swery: With this qualification I could take a distinguished position such as chief priest. I could inherit such a position as well. With this comes a heavy responsibility, and I must do my best to avoid acts that disparage the dignity and grace of a monk. That goes without saying, obviously. IGN Japan: Going forward, how will this experience affect the way you create games, books and other works? Do you feel a connection between the spiritual world and the world of entertainment? Swery: I have always created works with the belief that the world of entertainment and the spiritual world are connected. Both are intended to appeal to human beings on an internal level; they are concepts not of physical value, but which lead to the satisfaction of the heart. For example, we could survive without books, but books will never disappear from the world. The same goes for art, music, film, TV, manga, games and so on. These are all the first things to go when money is scarce and we need to tighten our belt. But they never disappear, because after our fundamental life-support systems, these are essentials that satisfy the heart and bring value to our lives. I wouldn’t want to make an exaggerated statement like ‘Games are just the same as faith!’, but I do believe that they are something greater than simply a means of generating money, or pieces of mere entertainment to be consumed. I strive to make games that can be considered even a little bit as art or something eternal. IGN Japan: Your previous games are known for their sense of irreverence, while religion and spirituality can be somewhat serious themes. Is there something about that mix that appeals to you? Swery: As far as I am concerned I was mixing those things already! In future I will try to express ‘hope’ and ‘wisdom’ in a way that is easier to understand. IGN Japan: Would you ever consider giving up creating entertainment content to become a full-time priest? Swery: No, I have never considered that. My only concern until now has been how to balance the two. And going forward, how can I balance them while making good work. And how to use religious practice in a way that can serve society. Those are the things I plan to concern myself with from now on. This has been rather a strange interview, hasn’t it? Interest in faith varies from person to person, along with religion and the occult, and horror as well. Faith is different from self-centered prayer, too. It’s a somewhat difficult theme. But the very fact that it is a difficult theme to comprehend makes it one that is worth spending time to consider, I think. I hope that everyone will see for themselves how these influences will manifest in my future work. I want to thank everyone for their support, and I ask that you stay with me until I am able to return to making games. I Love You All!! Exit Theatre Mode Daniel Robson is Chief Editor of IGN Japan and Esra Krabbe is a writer, video guy and presenter at IGN Japan.About Nanohive is a small device that plugs directly into the wall. It is a personal server, personal cloud, and hub to share and transfer files at blazing speeds. Nanohive is the result of years of frustration with the framework of the Internet. We created a better way to host websites, store data and share files, all while giving you the ability to own your digital property. Visit nanohiveserver.com to see a 360° view of Nanohive on a website hosted on one of our prototypes. Hosting / Own Your Site. If you've ever put up a website you know it's expensive and confusing. Hosting companies charge upwards of $120 a year (or several hundred a month for a dedicated server) to rent space on their servers. With Internet speed increasing rapidly, it's time to host your own website. Nanohive provides an effortless option to host a website without monthly or annual fees. Upload your website files. Set your domain name. Boom, you're live. Nanohive gives you a free domain name at (YourChoice).mynanohive.com, or you can purchase your own and connect it directly to your Nanohive. We developed our platform off of Linux that's highly optimized to handle heavy traffic and interaction on your website. Your Cloud. Nanohive allows you to backup or share files with 100% privacy, 0 monthly fees and no limits. You can share or store anything from pictures to game mods, a movie collection to an entire music library, whether you have a Mac, PC, Linux, or mobile OS. Adding external USB drives gives Nanohive extended storage capacity. Permissions can be created for any number of users allowing them to upload, download, or only see a certain file. Users can login from any Internet browser. There are no required software installations on your devices, Nanohive handles it. Open a browser and type in your cloud address. You never have to remember your files again.Bait is something that is used to lure fishes. Clickbait is similar to that. It is used to lure humans to websites. However, studies have found that humans are more intelligent than fishes and more dangerous too. Facebook started with detection of clickbaits in late 2014 and recently announced that it is going to reduce the number of clickbaits that appear in news feed (http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2016/08/news-feed-fyi-further-reducing-clickbait-in-feed/). With the penalization of clickbaits, it becomes important to check whether the content written by content writers consists of clickbait titles. In case it does, it will mean the content will be penalized and will appear in the top search results or facebook news feed very seldomly. This study gives an overview about what clickbaits are and how to recognize clickbaits using machine learning. What do clickbait titles look like? Some examples of clickbaits are as follows: 10 things Apple didn’t tell you about the new iPhone What happened next will surprise you This is what the actor/actress from 90s looks like now What did Donald Trump just say about Obama and Clinton 9 things you must have to be a good data scientist How owning an iPhone boosts up your sex life and there are many more.... We see a pattern, don’t we? The titles are very interesting! And in some way they are frustrating too. Users would like to click on them and know more about what the title wants to say. Of course, these kind of titles very seldomly have good content. Thus, they are classified as clickbaits. One very popular website for these kind of clickbait-y titles is Buzzfeed. Well, it’s not just buzzfeed. There are thousands of sites that that which rely on clickbaits to get traffic. But with Google and Facebook penalizing them, how long is it going to last? Not so long, I guess. Unlike other applied machine learning posts, this post will not include the very basics of machine learning rather we would dive right into the topic and the analysis. Detecting Clickbaits To detect clickbaits, we must first collect some data. To create a dataset of clickbait titles and non-clickbait titles and approach them as a supervised learning problem, we crawled the titles from websites likes Buzzfeed Buzz, Clickhole, etc which belonged to the former category and titles from trusted content websites like The New York Times and other news websites belonged to the latter category. This way we collected ~10K titles. ~5000 from either categories. I used two different models for identification of clickbait which have been discussed in the following part: Method 1: Term Frequency - Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) The first method was a very simple TF-IDF analysis. I used both character and word analysis and an n-gram range of (1, 1), (1, 2) and (1, 3). Everybody in the machine learning community knows about scikit-learn (http://scikit-learn.org/stable/) and that’s what we used. For character analyzer: And for word analyzer: The TF-IDF vectorizer is very powerful and often provides with a great performance. The following graph shows which words contribute most for clickbaits: Similarly, for non-clickbaits, the top words are: We see how numbers are very clickbait-y. This is because most of the clickbait titles start with a number [X things no one ever told you about something] or [X things you won’t believe about something unless you see this]. I used two different machine learning models, namely Logistic Regression and Gradient Boosting. To evaluate the performance of the model, I used the following metrics: Area under the ROC Curve (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Receiver_operating_characteristic) Precision (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_and_recall) Recall (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_and_recall) F1-Score (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F1_score) Without going into the details of these evaluation metrics, let me just tell you that 1.0 is best score one can get and 0.5 is random score. 0.0 is obviously the worst. To avoid overfitting (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overfitting), I used 5 fold stratified sampling. The following figure tells us how random sampling is achieved. In case of stratified sampling, we have the same ratio of positive and negative labels in validation and training set. After some simple tuning of hyperparameters for the machine learning models mentioned above, the following scores for the aforementioned evaluation metrics were obtained: For Logistic Regression: ROC AUC Score = 0.987319021551 Precision Score = 0.950326797386 Recall Score = 0.939276485788 F1 Score = 0.944769330734 And the ROC Curve: For Gradient Boosting: ROC AUC Score = 0.969700677962 Precision Score = 0.95756718529 Recall Score = 0.874677002584 F1 Score = 0.914247130317 And the ROC curve: We see that these models are good enough (actually very good). But TF-IDF doesn’t necessarily capture everything all the time. Using the models above title like “Barrack Obama” got 80% probability of being a clickbait while “Donald Trump” got 15% and I instantly knew that this model isn’t enough to capture everything and we needed something more powerful. I decided to give word2vec a try and this has been discussed the following subsection. Method 2: Word2Vec Word2Vec creates a multi-dimensional vector for every word in the english vocabulary (or the corpus it has been trained on). Word2Vec embeddings are very popular in natural language processing and always provide us with great insights. Wikipedia provides a good explanation of what these embeddings are and how they are generated (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word2vec). Word2Vec can be used to represent words and words which have similar meaning will be very close to each other in the word2vec space. An example has been shown in the following figure: Similarly, we can also represent sentences using word2vec: We represent each word (and each sentence/title) as a vector of 200 dimensions. The best way to visualize word2vec embeddings is decomposition of these large vectors into two dimensions using t-SNE (https://lvdmaaten.github.io/tsne/). This visualization is presented in the following figure: We see how using only the word2vec can distinguish between clickbaits and non-clickbaits without even using a model on top of it. Which means, a machine learning model on top of these vectors will surely improve our classification. We used the same two machine learning models on the processed data. The evaluation scores are provided below: For Logistic Regression: ROC AUC Score = 0.981149604411 Precision Score = 0.936280884265 Recall Score = 0.93023255814 F1 Score = 0.933246921581 And the ROC Curve: For Gradient Boosting: ROC AUC Score = 0.981312768055 Precision Score = 0.939947780679 Recall Score = 0.93023255814 F1 Score = 0.935064935065 And the ROC Curve: We can see the scores have improved quite substantially in case of gradient boosting model. To enhance the results and to incorporate both TF-IDF and Word2Vec features we used an ensemble of the above mentioned models from both the methods. The results seem to be surprisingly awesome. Conclusion: Stop using clickbaits. They might give you some extra traffic for now but it’s not going to last long. P.S.: This article was previously titled as “10 things no one ever told you about clickbaits” ;) I can be reached at: abhishek4 [at] gmail [dot] comThe reasons why and the implications of falling foul of Chinese regulations By Eunice Ku Apr. 6 – The State Administration of Industry and Commerce (SAIC) is the national governmental organization directly under the State Council that coordinates local Administrations of Industry and Commerce (AICs). Among the many SAIC and AIC functions and responsibilities, those highly relevant to the foreign investor include: Overseeing the registration and supervision of enterprises, including punishing businesses without licenses; Managing IPR registration and protection, including investigating and punishing IPR infringement activities and handling IPR disputes; Enforcing Anti-Trust Law, including investigating and punishing unfair competition, commercial bribery, smuggling and other illegal economic activities; Categorizing enterprises by creditability and publicizing basic registration information; Supervising trade in food commodities; and Supervising advertising activities. The “AIC blacklist” is part of an enterprise “credibility supervision information system” shared between AIC bureaus, but not made available to the public. Specifically, the list categorizes enterprises into four categories (A, B, C, D) based on their creditability. If your name is listed in a key position of a company in categories B to D of this list, this may inhibit or prevent you from participating in a key position in new FIEs in the future. Furthermore, while the directly relevant AIC policy does not state consequences for individuals beyond the legal representative, it is worth noting that during company establishment, the names of all people in key positions of an enterprise are registered with the AIC. Many people do not even know that their name is on the blacklist before applying to register a new FIE. This article was taken from the April issue of China Briefing Magazine, titled “The China Manager’s Handbook.” Stories of expats having their name added to the Administration of Industry and Commerce “blacklist,” or being “trapped in China” for company legal proceedings, encourage a careful consideration of key positions in an FIE. This issue of China Briefing Magazine aims to shed a little light on this topic. “The China Manager’s Handbook” is temporarily available as a complimentary PDF download this month on the Asia Briefing Bookstore. Dezan Shira & Associates is a boutique professional services firm providing foreign direct investment business advisory, tax, accounting, payroll and due diligence services for multinational clients in China, Hong Kong, India, Singapore and Vietnam. For further information on the risks and responsibilities you have as a foreign manager in China, please email china@dezshira.com, visit our web site at www.dezshira.com, or download our brochure here. Related Reading Doing Business in China Our 156-page definitive guide to the fastest growing economy in the world, providing a thorough and in-depth analysis of China, its history, key demographics and overviews of the major cities, provinces and autonomous regions highlighting business opportunities and infrastructure in place in each region. A comprehensive guide to investing in the country is also included with information on FDI trends, business establishment procedures, economic zone information, and labor and tax considerations. Internal Control and Audit This issue of China Briefing Magazine is devoted to understanding effective internal control systems in the Chinese context and the role of audits in detecting and preventing fraud. Annual Compliance for FIEs Prior to distributing and repatriating profits, foreign-invested enterprises must complete annual compliance, involving an audit, tax filing and inspection. These procedures are not only required by law, but are a good opportunity to conduct an internal financial health check. Also in this issue, we take a look at individual tax filing procedures for expatriates living and working in China. The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and its Impact on China Subsidiaries This issue of China Briefing Magazine is dedicated to helping companies understand the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and establish controls to prevent (and, if necessary) resolve FCPA noncompliance.Jenna Rachelle Jones Brown, among a group charged with Engaging in Organized Criminal Activity, is shown in photo provided by the Harris County District Attorney Office during media conference at Paradise Bingo Hall,1520 College Ave., Friday, Aug. 19, 2016, in South Houston. ( Melissa Phillip / Houston Chronicle ) less Jenna Rachelle Jones Brown, among a group charged with Engaging in Organized Criminal Activity, is shown in photo provided by the Harris County District Attorney Office during media conference at Paradise Bingo... more Photo: Provided By The Harris County District Attorney Office Photo: Provided By The Harris County District Attorney Office Image 1 of / 49 Caption Close Twelve arrested in organized crime sweep at bingo hall 1 / 49 Back to Gallery Harris County District Attorney Devon Anderson announced Friday a massive sweep of an alleged gambling and organized crime ring at a local bingo hall and five other game rooms. Twelve people have been arrested on charges of engaging in organized crime, and investigators seized the Paradise Bingo Hall on College, along with cash, guns and ammunition. Authorities also found several safe and a bunker that held a cache of firearms, ammunition and military-style provisions made for long-term storage until they are needed. "There was a bunker here; it may be something more Doomsdayish," said Anderson, who stressed that the investigation continues. "Every weapon will be looked at, ever serial number run to see if they were stolen or used in any other crimes," she said. Lt. Ruben Diaz, of the Harris County Sheriff's Office, said it was as many weapons as he'd ever seen confiscated at one time. "It was enough to start a small war in this area if they wanted to," he said. "They were pretty scary to have in this building." The firearms, along with the ammunition were allegedly purchased with illegal gains from the operations. Those charged were allegedly part of a ring that made money off illegal gambling machines that were housed at some of the bingo locations as well as stocked automatic teller machines with their illegally gained cash. The investigation by members of the special crimes division and the Harris County Sheriff's Office took nearly a year and involved undercover work as well as surveillance aimed at the alleged leaders of the organization that allegedly did millions of dollars in business. "This place is closed," an unidentified officer told a motorist who pulled up to the building Friday in an SUV and parked in a disabled parking spot before driving away. Orange notices stuck to the windows of the bingo hall indicate it was seized as criminal contraband. The white building, with a large signs reading, "Daytime Bingo" and "Nighttime Bingo," is in a largely empty commercial shopping center beside a Waffle House and Dairy Queen. The bingo hall, outfitted with at least four surveillance cameras focused on the parking lot, also features a peeling Chamber of Commerce sticker stuck to the door. Inside are tables and chairs for a few hundred people, with an American flag hanging at the front of the large room above an automatic teller machine. A listing of "house rules" includes #8: Absolutely no gambling of any kind will be allowed. Plaques of thanks on the wall from the Shriners and the South Houston Police also hang on the walls.Three university presidents issued statements Sunday urging Indiana leaders to address the "damage done" by the passing of the state's Indiana's Religious Freedom Restoration Act IU President Michael McRobbie, Butler University President James Danko and DePauw University President Brian Casey said they were reluctant to join the debate, but felt they had to speak up. Ball State President Paul W. Ferguson and Purdue President Mitch Daniels issued statements Monday afternoon.Purdue works hard every day to be an open and welcoming institution, and we stand by our university-wide policy on nondiscrimination, which prohibits "discrimination against any member of the University community on the basis of race, religion, color, sex, age, national origin or ancestry, genetic information, marital status, parental status, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, disability, or status as a veteran." We will continue our proactive and persistent efforts to ensure that all members of the University community feel welcome and supported. While a longstanding Board of Trustees policy precludes Purdue taking institutional positions on matters such as the current controversy, we wish to take this opportunity to affirm our unwavering commitment to our principles and our opposition to any governmental measure that would interfere with their practice on our campuses. "In the context of the current state and national conversation related to Indiana's recent legislation, it is important to reaffirm that Ball State University has long been committed to a vibrant and diverse community and will not tolerate discrimination. The university expresses this in many ways, including our Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action Policy, which clarifies that Ball State will provide equal opportunity to facilities without regard to race, religion, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity/gender expression, physical or mental disability, national origin, ancestry, or age.""The recent passage of the Indiana Religious Freedom Restoration Act has brought significant negative attention to the state of Indiana throughout the nation and indeed the world, because the law is widely viewed as signaling an unwelcoming and discriminatory atmosphere in our state."While Indiana University hopes that the controversy of the past few days will move the state government to reconsider this unnecessary legislation, the damage already done to Indiana's reputation is such that all public officials and public institutions in our state need to reaffirm our absolute commitment to the Hoosier values of fair treatment and non-discrimination."For its part, Indiana University remains steadfast in our longstanding commitment to value and respects the benefits of a diverse society. It is a fundamental core value of our culture at Indiana University and one that we cherish. Indeed, in 2014 the trustees of Indiana University reaffirmed our commitment to the achievement of equal opportunity within the university."To that end, Indiana University will recruit, hire, promote, educate and provide services to persons without regard to their age, race, disability, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, marital status, national origin, religion, sexual orientation or veteran status. Equally importantly, we will not tolerate discrimination on the basis of any of these same factors."These are not merely words written in a policy and soon forgotten. These are core values by which every member of the Indiana University community is expected to treat his or her fellow colleagues, students and visitors."I want to reassure the entire Indiana University community, including our students, faculty, staff and alumni, that each and every one of you is welcome and appreciated for the unique qualities that you bring to our community. We are all better as a result of our shared experiences, as different as those experiences in life may have been.""As president of Butler University I am particularly sensitive to the importance of supporting and facilitating an environment of open dialogue and critical inquiry, where free speech and a wide range of opinion is valued and respected. Thus, it is with a certain degree of apprehension that I step into the controversy surrounding Indiana's Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA).However, over the past week I have heard from many Butler community members—as well as prospective students, parents, and employees—who have expressed concerns about the impact this law may have on our state and our University. As such, I feel compelled to share my perspective and to reinforce the values of Butler University.While I have read a variety of opinions and rationale for RFRA, it strikes me as ill-conceived legislation at best, and I fear that some of those who advanced it have allowed their personal or political agendas to supersede the best interests of the State of Indiana and its people. No matter your opinion of the law, it is hard to argue with the fact it has done significant damage to our state.Like countless other Hoosier institutions, organizations, and businesses, Butler University reaffirms our longstanding commitment to reject discrimination and create an environment that is open to everyone.Today, more than ever, it is important that we continue to build, cultivate, and defend a culture in which all members of our community—students, alumni, faculty, staff, and the public—can learn, work, engage, and thrive. It is our sincere hope that those around the country with their ears turned toward our Hoosier state hear just one thing loud and clear—the united voice of millions who support inclusion and abhor discrimination.Butler is an institution where all people are welcome and valued, regardless of sexual orientation, religion, gender, race, or ethnicity; a culture of acceptance and inclusivity that is as
rebel bases in northern Iraq in a series of air strikes last week which killed up to 160 rebels, Turkish officials say. There has been an increase in attacks by the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) on Turkey's army this summer, casting doubt on the chances of peace talks. The Turkish military has said that it would monitor rebel activity in the region and continue strikes until the rebels were "rendered ineffective". Artillery fire supported the strikes. The strikes follow a deadly attack by the separatists in mid-August that killed nine Turkish troops and injured 14 in the district of Cukurca, in Hakkari province close to the border. "Turkish air forces jets efficiently hit the targets of the separatist terror organization in Zap and Gara regions between August 25-28 in 21 sorties," a statement on the army's website is quoted by the AFP news agency as saying. Heavy artillery fire was directed at 38 targets "in coordination with the air operation", it said. Correspondents say there is little talk now of renewing the so-called "democratic opening", an initiative from two year ago, which aimed to end the conflict in the south-east by expanding the rights of the Kurdish minority. The PKK, designated a terrorist organisation by Turkey, the EU and the US, has waged a 26-year insurgency against the Turkish state. More than 40,000 people have been killed in the violence.Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Chip music band Starscream employs aged video game and computer equipment to create their unique sound Nintendo Game Boys and Commodore 64s are the types of aged devices one might find in a childhood closet or stuffy attic. But imaginative musicians in a gamer-centric subculture have been using this antique technology to develop a breed of music that is slowly peeking its head into mainstream culture. Chiptune music, or chip music, is produced using video game consoles and old-fashioned home computer technology, primarily from the 1980s. And tech-minded musicians use third-party software to tap the machines' sound chips to produce original forms of output through the devices. Electronic beats and sometimes more traditional instruments are then blended with retro-sounding beeps and bleeps from the doddery hardware. Image caption Digital art is frequently projected on to walls behind musicians during chip music shows When playing, chip music composers rhythmically strike buttons of the devices, like the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), Nintendo Game Boy and Commodore 64 computer, to form musical patterns of notes. Chiptune is not actually a genre, but rather simply a process for producing the music, which can range in sound from fast, upbeat punk to a slow, dispirited, ambient sound, says Damon Hardjowirogo, of the band Starscream. "It's a means of producing new compositions using a specific type of hardware," says Mr Hardjowirogo, who uses two Game Boys and a Commodore 64 when performing. Most electronic music is so produced. And it's not that I don't like electronic music, but it's cool to hear a really rough version of it, something a little edgier Ary Warnaar, Guitarist, Anamanaguchi The old electronics have limited ranges of sound, and chip musicians say the raw sounds the machines produce when you push the limits of their internal chips is what's attractive about composing on them. Mr Hardjowirogo and drummer George Stroud formed Starscream three years ago when they were in high school - where they wrote songs on their pocket-sized consoles between classes. The band have toured England, Canada, Germany and Hungary and have hauled their musical gadgets and drum equipment to countless live shows since their formation. "The chip music scene is very much global. You have members in the strangest of places that you would not expect," says Mr Hardjowirogo, adding that the scene was primarily brought together by the website 8bitcollective, which boasts more than 25,000 members. Live performances A trip to a live chip music performance today will often offer up sights of sweaty tech heads bouncing over consoles and computers, while snapshots of games like Donkey Kong or Mike Tyson's Punch Out flash on screens behind them. Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Anamanaguchi's song Airbrushed But chip music is more about the gritty sound of the antiquated sound cards than about the gaming aspects of the music, says Ary Warnaar, a guitarist for the band Anamanaguchi. "Most electronic music is so produced. And it's not that I don't like electronic music, but it's cool to hear a really rough version of it, something a little edgier," Mr Warnaar told the BBC, from the South by Southwest (SXSW) Music festival in Austin in the US state of Texas. Anamanaguchi has experienced a surprising amount of growth during the band's four-year run, having played festivals to thousands of listeners and written the soundtrack to the video game Scott Pilgrim v the World, released after the movie of the same name. But Mr Warnaar, who describes his band's stylings as electronic, pop-punk, dance party music, says he wasn't even allowed to play video games at home as a child. He adds he and his bandmates, who blend guitars and drums with melodies they write for the NES, have always been interested in pushing the boundaries of music. Chiptune beginnings The chip music movement traces its roots back some three decades, says Jeremiah Johnson, a longtime chip musician who goes by the name of Nullsleep. Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Jeremiah Johnson speaks about the technicalities of creating chiptune music "Since the 1980s, people have been writing music with Commodore 64s and Ataris, and those early home computers. But no-one had really started taking it out into the clubs and started performing concerts," says Mr Johnson, who began performing in 1999. "The audiences very early on didn't understand what was going on and thought you were actually playing a video game." Mr Johnson says chiptune music was originally derived from the Demoscene of the 1980s, a computer art subculture which saw musicians, graphic designers, and algorithmic programmers joining forces to produce real-time artistic presentations on computers. "The goal was really to do technically impressive things with these pieces of hardware. Sort of push them to their limits," Mr Johnson says, referring to the 1980s movement. "In many ways, chip music was born into that scene and splintered off into its own movement," he says. Chiptune was alluring because of its use of simple, digital sounds to build up compositions, Mr Johnson says, speaking before his performance at SXSW. He says in the early years of playing live, audience members would yell out the names of video games, requesting their soundtracks. "You had to berate the audience sometimes and teach them what it was all about. And over time people got to actually understand that the music was actually tapping into the sound chips within these pieces of hardware," he says. And listeners may be learning. Events like Blip Festival, an annual chiptune concert series in New York City, have been propelling the music from the console to the ears of scores of new listeners, Mr Stroud says. "I do want us in five years to be gaining more and more popularity, but I'd just like to be able to keep making the music because I really like it and think other people would like it, too. And if we make money off of it, that's awesome."Unlike the Arthur C Clarke awards, the Nebulas or the Kitschies, the Hugo science fiction awards are voted on by the public. In an often elitist genre, this has to be a good thing There are few things as entertaining as the ruck that follows the announcement of literary awards, and the Hugos, handed out for both written work and dramatic presentations in the science fiction field, are no exception. In fact, few awards divide opinion as much as the Hugos, which are named after the founder of the science fiction magazine Amazing Stories and have been awarded every year since 1955 with a suitably phallic rocket-shaped trophy. Why "suitably"? Because the Hugos – which were announced at WorldCon in San Antonio, Texas, on Sunday night – are, despite their longstanding provenance, an antidote to SF's more worthy literary awards. And some elements of the very vocal SF fan community don't, it seems, like it up 'em. The discussion of this year's shortlists was a case in point. The Ruthless Culture blog said: "Like many people surveying the shortlists, I could not help but feel irritation and regret over the fact that genre literature's most prestigious and well-known award continues to get it wrong all too often." The Staffer's Book Review was more concise: "The Hugos are utter twaddle." First, the headlines. Best novel went to John Scalzi's Redshirts, which deconstructs the Star Trek mythos with a nudge-nudge-wink-wink. Published by Tor in the US, Redshirts took as its focus the ubiquitous disposable crewmen from USS Enterprise on the TV show, usually the first to die on any given mission. It's sort of a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead for the SF crowd, and perhaps a signal of its popular appeal was the Forbes magazine review that said, "You don't have to be a hardcore sci-fi fan to enjoy Redshirts." There was a UK edition courtesy of Gollancz, though the book – starting off as sort of a comedy, then becoming a bit more meta – had its biggest success in the States. Best novella was The Emperor's Soul by Brandon Sanderson, an author renowned for hugely popular housebrick-sized epic fantasy novels, and for finishing off Robert Jordan's immense Wheel of Time series after his fellow American died. Pat Cadigan took a Hugo for best novelette – long overdue, in many people's opinions – for The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi, and the best short story was Mono no Aware by Ken Liu. All worthy winners. But the Hugo awards come in for a lot of stick every year, for two main reasons: one, the voting system. And two, they are seen as (gasp) populist – at least in the States, where the winners are most well-known. That voting system first. You can read the full details on the Hugos website should you wish, but essentially those who attend the annual WorldCon, which takes place in a different city worldwide every year, are eligible to nominate their favourite works in each category. There then follow several rounds of balloting. The Hugo organisers themselves admit the voting system is complicated: "While the process is indeed involved, the basic idea is simple and the intention is laudable. Basically the idea is to make sure that the winner has majority support. In ordinary governmental elections it is possible for the winner to be someone that 40% of the people like and 60% of the people hate, because that 60% could not agree among themselves on a candidate. The Hugo voting system is designed to avoid results like that." This differs from the other major SF awards: the Arthur C Clarke award, the Campbells and the Kitschies are all decided by an appointed jury. But is what is essentially a public vote rather than peer-judgment necessarily a bad thing? Cheryl Morgan, a science fiction critic and publisher, has won four Hugos. She says: "The Clarke has a small, expert jury. The Nebulas are voted on by professional writers. The Hugos are voted on by fans. It is also worth noting that the Clarke and Nebulas are both limited by country of publication, whereas the Hugos are not. The results are bound to be different." Author Charles Stross, himself nominated for Hugos half a dozen times, said of the Hugos. "It's a beauty contest … Fun, but shouldn't be taken too seriously." The aforementioned blogs make for thoughtful, in-depth reading. The Staffer's Book Review piece mentions another oft-voiced concern: that the Hugos electorate – essentially those who pay to attend a convention – perhaps isn't completely representative. "The Hugos are nothing more than an amalgamation of like-minded WorldCon members, or agendised voting blocs," it says, "bent on vociferous back patting." Personally, I've always liked the Hugos purely because they do follow the populist line. The SF world is richly represented by awards that honour different works for different reasons. The Clarkes go for the big, cerebral SF novels of the year. The Kitschies give a nod to the edgy and unconventional. The Hugos celebrate the popular. In a genre whose fanbase is often seen as elitist, this is a very good thing – especially when it comes to perhaps opening it up to a wider, mainstream audience.For most medical school students, summer means fun in the sun and a much-needed break from studies. But Aljanee Whitaker was hard at work in mid-June, having just started a year-round UC Davis program that fast-tracks primary care doctors to graduate in three years instead of four. About a dozen medical schools in the nation now offer a three-year medical degree program. Many focus on primary care, an area where low-income patients say it’s almost impossible to find a doctor. The U.S. is expected to face a shortage of 45,000 primary care physicians in the next eight to 10 years. The problem may be worse in California, where 5 million new patients are enrolled in coverage through the Affordable Care Act and in need of general physicians. Health care reform happened as many primary care physicians were retiring, and few young doctors were coming in to take their place, said Dr. Calvin Wheeler, institutional director for undergraduate and graduate medical education at Kaiser Permanente Northern California. During the last four years, the American Medical Association has given out millions of dollars in grants to fund “competency-based” programs, which push students through the pipeline based on skill level rather than time spent in school. Cutting down on school time and payments is a key way to draw students into primary care, which tends to be less lucrative than specialty practice. Medical school at UC Davis costs about $40,000 annually for California residents and $52,000 for other students. Sign Up and Save Get six months of free digital access to The Sacramento Bee “Over the last 15 years, physicians looking at the increasing cost of medical school, and the increasing debt to pay it back, began to look at specialties where the salaries were higher,” Wheeler said. “There’s been a shift toward dermatology, radiology.” Whitaker, 27, is one of six students in the new cohort of the Accelerated Competency-based Education in Primary Care program offered through UC Davis and Kaiser Permanente. Launched in 2014, the program just graduated its first group of doctors, who are now in medical residencies throughout the region. Another 19 are working toward degrees. Students skip summer break, instead splitting their time between classes and clinical observation. “What really drew me to the three-year program is it allows me to do what I want to do, faster,” Whitaker said. “Financially, it’s easier. For me, knowing I don’t have to pay for another year of medical school makes it much more attractive. Later on when I start my practice, I won’t have to worry about debt – I can focus on serving patients.” Unlike traditional medical school students, Whitaker and her classmates won’t spend time during their senior year interviewing at residency programs all over the nation. Instead, UC Davis and Kaiser Permanente work together to place primary care students in residencies at the UC Davis Medical Center, Kaiser Permanente Napa-Solano, Kaiser Permanente Santa Clara and other regional hospitals, said Dr. Tonya Fancher, associate dean of workforce innovation and community engagement at UC Davis. During their three years, students learn how to interact with patients in a clinical setting, and how to treat common primary care conditions such as diabetes, obesity and high blood pressure. The program gets several hundred applicants per year, Fancher sid. “We think of the clinical exposure as the framework to learn all the other stuff in medical school, which flips the way medical school usually is,” Fancher said. “You can learn anatomy and biochemistry and then see patients after two years. But you can see patients and experience the joy of taking care of them, and then you learn the anatomy and say, ‘That’s what’s going on.’ ” Some leaders in education have questioned whether students can thoroughly learn the skills needed to be a primary care physician in just three years. Dr. Fredric B. Meyer, dean of the Mayo Clinic School of Medicine, said it’s doable, but difficult. “It’s going to be a little more intense, and it’s going to require students to really commit to that effort, and it’s going to require more work,” he said. “It’s going to be a little harder to preserve a ‘wellness’ approach in a three-year medical school, because inherently things are crammed closer together.” Whitaker said she’s used to giving up summers to study or gain practical experience. Currently she and her classmates take courses three days a week and shadow a doctor in clinic two days a week. On top of that, Whitaker spends about four hours each day reading case studies and preparing for class. “(Working in the clinic) really gives purpose to your book work,” she said. “Thursday we were learning about chest pains, and on Friday at clinic I knew why the doctor was asking certain questions. It really clicked and helped solidify the information in my head.” SHARE COPY LINK As Sacramento adds new high-tech school for training medical assistants and ultrasound/MRI technologists, Sutter Health and economic development officials describe why these jobs are in big demand.JERUSALEM — Israel’s summertime protest movement, which was occupying “Wall Street” before it was cool, can now celebrate their first major tangible success. At a Sunday cabinet meeting the government approved the restructuring of Israel’s tax system, shifting a few degrees of the social burden onto corporations and the very rich. On Monday, during the opening day of the winter session of parliament after a three-month summer break, legislators received the new tax plan for approval, alongside a lengthy list of demands for financial reform and social justice that were nonexistent when the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, was last in session and which have been catapulted to the forefront of a pre-electoral year. As lawmakers gathered it became clear that Likud, the party of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, hoped the government’s imprimatur of approval on significant changes in taxation would shift credit from the young protest leaders to the party itself. Occupy Wall Street: Stalwarts of the Arab Spring offer their advice Speaking to journalists, a Likud party source said, “The only question is whether the public will give credit for the benefits it receives to us, to the [coalition] government, or to the leaders of the protest movement." Jockeying for credit seems to be the name of the game, even before any legislation is passed. Social protest leaders, many of them still students, who had organized several demonstrations nationwide for Saturday night in honor of the reopening of parliament, found themselves in the enviable position of appearing calm and collected next to the lawmakers, who months into the protests still appeared to have been caught unaware. Stav Shaffir, one of the protest leaders, described the movement as “a wide open social network filled with hope.” Defying predictions that winter would tamper the fervor of protest participants, and mentioning her unheated, overpriced apartment, a significant reference for the protesters who have pleaded for the recognition of tenants’ rights, Shaffir said, “We are a country in eternal drought that hates the winter, fears the rain and is quick to forget. We forget the good with the bad, we rapidly ignore despair … and at the same pace we disregard hope. Unlike my flat mate, the prime minister is surely happy winter is coming, but not because our arid land is dry.” The weekend’s protests were disrupted by a new eruption of skirmishes on Israel’s southern border with Gaza. On Saturday, Israeli drones bombed a group preparing to fire Grad missiles into Israel, killing five members of the Islamic Jihad, which responded with a shower of some 20 missiles, during the next 48 hours, over Israeli population centers. Related: Security fears douse Israeli protests Schools and universities were closed and all public gatherings were curtailed by the Southern Command. On the Israeli side, several wounded were reported, and one fatality, a resident of Ashdod in his 50s who was hit in the stomach as he emerged from his car. Both Egypt and Hamas appeared to try and calm tensions along the border between Israel and Gaza, with the three parties “tacitly in agreement,” according to a military source, that Islamic Jihad, which menaces all three, needed to be brought back under control. Islamic Jihad, a minority participant in Gazan public life, is the party that seems to have lost the most since the agreement to release 1,027 Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails in exchange for the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit was announced two weeks ago. Egypt, which brokered the final deal, is eager to regain regional standing after a rocky beginning for the military junta that now rules it following the unseating of president Hosni Mubarak last February. With Hamas still reaping the benefits of having secured the release of the prisoners, Islamic Jihad, which was quick to claim credit for the missiles lobbed into Israel, appears to have wanted to re-enter the game. Egypt is now acting as a broker between Israel and Islamic Jihad to resolve the current crisis. More: Foreign press plays catch up on Israeli protests The social justice demonstration in the main city of Israel’s South, Be’er Sheva, was cancelled as a result of the unrest and only 20,000 people participated in the main rally in Tel Aviv. Despite the significant regional instability threatening the country, however, Netanyahu faces an electorate focused instead on internal political demands — such as the breaking up of industrial cartels, the need for massive investment in public housing and tenants' rights. The mere mention of “only” 20,000 protesters shows how far Israel’s political arena has shifted in the two months since half a million people took to the streets around the country, in what was the largest demonstration in the nation’s history.The ability to envision actions of the future in the present lays the foundation for a successful enterprise. 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Milanovic likes to call it, “How the world changed between the fall of the Berlin wall and the fall of Wall Street.” The vertical axis measures real income growth (measured in constant dollars on a purchasing power parity basis) between 1988 and 2008. The horizontal axis shows not time but income levels, from lowest to highest. For example, the second dot on the chart marks the 10th percentile of income, meaning people who outearned just 10% of the world’s population; that group saw its real income rise more than 40% over that 20-year period. The top 1% clearly did well during the period under study, but Milanovic notes that the biggest gains occurred further down the income ladder. “It is there…that we find some 200 million Chinese, 90 million Indians, and about 30 million people each from Indonesia, Brazil and Egypt,” he writes. “These two groups — the global top 1% and the middle classes of the emerging market economies — are indeed the main winners of globalization.” Even among the bottom third of the global income distribution, real incomes have risen significantly; overall, Milanovic writes, “[i]t was probably the profoundest global reshuffle of people’s economic positions since the Industrial Revolution.” The “losers” are the bottom 5% (mostly people in Africa, Milanovic says), and people clustered around the 80th percentile. Most of that latter group live in developed countries — some in post-Communist countries that haven’t adapted well to globalization, but also the lower middle classes of advanced economies such as the U.S. and Germany. Does that prove that Asian gains have come at the expense of U.S. workers? Milanovic is very cautious on that point, saying that while “[g]lobal income data do not allow us to establish or reject the causality…they are quite suggestive that the two phenomena may not be unrelated.” Category: Chart of the Week Topics: Globalization and TradeThe IRS mess is edging ever closer to Obama, with the news that his White House counsel and other top administration officials knew about an inspector general investigation into IRS targeting nearly a month ago. But White House spokesman Jay Carney says Obama was not told. "There was nothing the president could or should do" until the official findings were released, he said, and Obama moved fast once that happened last week. That seems preposterous to some, and has at the least made Obama seem disengaged, but McInturff calls it a plausible scenario. "People don't want to tell the president bad news," he says. "If things get messy, the furthest thing from your mind is, 'Oh, I think the president needs to know about this.' " He says he expects Americans to give Obama the benefit of the doubt, as they have to past presidents. "People say he can't know everything. They don't expect him to. Nobody could." Of course, that all could change with new information. With Congress in investigative mode on the IRS, the AP incident, and last year's fatal attacks on U.S. personnel in Benghazi, there remains the prospect of more shoes dropping. In the meantime, both parties are claiming political advantage. The trio of controversies is giving the GOP "enormous fuel" in its drive to recruit House and Senate candidates for 2014, McInturff says. Greenberg sees an empowered tea party that could be instrumental in nominating unelectable candidates--the same problem the GOP has had in the past. "It's a very mixed bag of whether the energy created here helps Republicans," he says. The other problem for the opposition, as Greenberg sees it, is that the GOP probes and rhetoric are landing in a framework of "months and months of Republican gridlock motivated by partisanship." To much of the public, he says, this just seems like more of the same. The favorability gap between Obama and the Republican Party is substantial, with views of Obama well above 50 percent favorable in most polls and Republicans hovering at 60 percent unfavorable. The generally good impression of Obama is periodically reinforced by events in and out of his control. For instance, his commencement address at Morehouse, a college for black men, was a highly personal speech about overcoming adversity, his own fatherless childhood and his not always constructive race-consciousness, and the need to take personal responsibility to break cycles of poverty and broken families. Clips of the speech on the network news served to remind people not just of the history he represents but of the personal qualities that hold appeal across party lines. The tornado in Oklahoma is also intruding on the news cycle in a way that shows Obama at his most caring. "The people of Moore should know that their country will remain on the ground, there for them, beside them as long as it takes," he said Tuesday, his words similar to what he said after Hurricane Sandy, the Newtown shootings, the Boston bombings, and the Texas plant explosion.A boy inspects his school, which activists say was damaged in an airstrike carried out by the Russian air force in the Syrian town of Injara, in Aleppo province, on Jan. 12, 2016. (Khalil Ashawi/Reuters) Russia’s military intervention in Syria is finally generating gains on the ground for Syrian government forces, tilting the battlefield in favor of President Bashar al-Assad to such an extent that the Obama administration’s quest for a negotiated settlement to the war suddenly looks a lot less likely to succeed. The gains are small-scale, hard-won and in terms of territory overall don’t add up to much, in keeping with the incremental nature of war. But after 3½ months of relentless airstrikes that have mostly targeted the Western-backed opposition to Assad’s rule, they have proved sufficient to push beyond doubt any likelihood that Assad will be removed from power by the nearly five-year-old revolt against his rule. The gains on the ground are also calling into question whether there can be meaningful negotiations to end a conflict Assad and his allies now seem convinced they can win. “The situation on the ground in Syria is definitely not conducive to negotiations right now,” said Lina Khatib of the Paris-based Arab Reform Initiative think tank. Peace talks scheduled to start in Geneva next week are already in doubt because of disputes between Russia and the United States, their chief sponsors, over who should be invited. The alliance between Russia and the regime of Bashar al-Assad goes back decades. Here's a bit of historical context that explains why Russia is fighting to prop up its closest ally in the Middle East. (Ishaan Tharoor and Jason Aldag/The Washington Post) Russia and the Syrian government are objecting to a U.S.-backed list of opposition delegates drawn up in the Saudi Arabian capital of Riyadh last month that includes representatives of some of the main rebel groups, saying that they won’t negotiate with people they term “terrorists.” Russia is pushing instead for the inclusion of a group of government-approved opposition figures who have remained loyal to Assad and also of Syria’s Kurds, who are fighting a somewhat different war on their own behalf in northeastern Syria. [Is it too late to solve the mess in the Middle East?] U.N. spokesman Farhan Haq told reporters in New York on Monday that the U.N. Special Envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, would not issue invitations to the talks until Russia and the United States agree on who should represent the opposition. He did not rule out that there could be “slippage” on the Jan. 25 date. U.S. Secretary of State John F. Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov are expected to try to hammer out the differences at a meeting Wednesday in Zurich, five days before the scheduled start of the talks. Even if the guest list is agreed upon, however, it is far from clear whether the opposition will attend without some gesture on the part of Russia and Syria to demonstrate that they are negotiating in good faith. A group of 33 rebel groups issued a statement last week saying they would not join the talks unless Russian and Syrian warplanes stop striking civilian targets, release political prisoners and send humanitarian aid to besieged towns such as Madaya, where people have been dying of starvation. [23 people starve to death in besieged Syrian town, medical charity says] The opposition is also seeking clarity on the agenda of the talks, which are officially supposed to conform to a formula drawn up by Russia and the United States in Geneva in 2012, at a time when the rebels appeared to be winning, and was more recently were endorsed by a gathering of world powers in Vienna late last year. The Geneva process never clearly stipulated that Assad should relinquish power, but the opposition and the United States said they thought that was the intended goal. Nearly four years later, with Syrian troops and their allies gaining ground on multiple fronts in the north, the south and the center of the country with the support of Russian airstrikes, there is no longer any reason for Assad to feel pressure to step down, and the United States has pulled back from its insistence that he do so. Nor is there any reason to think that either the government or the Russians will be willing to make concessions, whether before or during negotiations, analysts say. Rather, Khatib said, it appears that both the Russians and the Syrian government are intent on buying time in order to continue to grind down the opposition. “Russia’s strategy is to weaken the Syrian opposition to the point of elimination, so that in the future Russia may well be able to argue that there is no one to negotiate with,” she said. If the talks don’t take place anytime soon, it will be a serious setback for a key goal of the Obama administration’s foreign policy. With the Iran nuclear deal now in the implementation phase, putting an end to the bloodshed in Syria has emerged as one of the Obama administration’s top priorities. U.S. officials say they recognize that other foreign policy goals, including the defeat of the Islamic State and halting the flow of refugees from Syria, cannot be fulfilled without ending the war, which is thought to have claimed in excess of 250,000 lives and displaced more than 11 million people so far. [How the battle against the Islamic State is redrawing the Middle East map] Instead, it seems likely that the killing will continue, with pro-government forces seeking to capitalize on the steady weakening of rebel forces. The Russian intervention got off to a rocky start last October, with initial attempts by Syrian government forces to advance under Russian air cover stalled by an onslaught of dozens of antitank missiles that had been supplied to U.S.-vetted groups by the United States and its Arab allies. The intervention came after gains by rebel forces had called into question Assad’s ability to survive, and seemed intended to reinforce his increasingly shaky hold on power. To that extent, the airstrikes have worked. The supply of the missiles has since slowed down, rebel fighters say, as the intensity of the airstrikes has steadily increased. The targeting by Russian warplanes of supply lines from Turkey has impeded access to weapons as well as food and humanitarian supplies, according to the rebels. At the same time, Syrian troops have advanced on several key fronts. After driving the rebels out of
by now, "the Russia investigation" is Deep State dinner-theatre. I wrote a while back that, in today's Hollywood, what Hitchcock used to call "the MacGuffin" - the pretext that sets the caper afoot, the secret papers, the microfilm - has degenerated into a MacNuffin: there's no longer even a pretense that these stories are about anything. The "Russia investigation" is the ne plus ultra of MacNuffins, so smoothly transferred from Los Angeles to Washington that one vaguely suspects some studio vice-prez who bundled for Hillary came up with the idea as a reality-show pilot that accidentally bust out of the laboratory. How do we know there's no there there? Well, consider Marco Rubio's question to Comey: Rubio marveled at how many leaks have occurred during the Trump-Russia investigation, saying "we've learned more from the newspapers sometimes than we do from our open hearings." "Do you ever wonder why, of all the things in this investigation, the only thing that's never been leaked is the fact that the president was not personally under investigation, despite the fact that Democrats and Republicans and the leadership of Congress knew that and have known that for weeks?" he asked. It seems Comey doesn't ever "wonder" about it, being too busy - like everybody else - leaking stuff himself. The leaks, as have often been pointed out, are the only actual crimes here. But Rubio's right: Trump is not "under investigation". That's a significant fact, and the only unleaked fact. Everything else leaks non-stop: Someone who met with someone who once worked for Trump in some hotel near Trump Tower two months before he launched his campaign once had business dealings with someone who knows a Kazakh oligarch who used to be close to someone close to Putin... This is thin gruel. It only thickens and congeals and sticks if in the general atmosphere Trump himself is believed to be "under investigation". He isn't, and never has been. Comey confirmed that to Trump three times. As far as I'm aware, I'm not a suspected Russian agent, but I know something about being mired under a cloud of suspicion. In the Mann vs Steyn case, I have made the point in court filings to the various lethargic jurists that being an alleged defamer is a serious slur on one's reputation that should entitle one to a speedy trial. To no avail, of course: we're about to enter our sixth year in the clogged toilet of DC justice, and no nearer a trial date in that joke jurisdiction than we were on Day One. Likewise, were my local paper to report "unnamed sources" claiming that the sheriff's department was investigating me as a suspected drug dealer, I would expect the sheriff to issue a statement saying that there was no such investigation. How much worse is it for the incoming chief of state of the global superpower when false rumors are circulating that he's a Russian agent? And these rumors are being disseminated with the express intent of crippling his incoming administration before it's even come in? Comey's rationale for refusing to announce in public that Trump isn't "under investigation" was that that situation might conceivably change in the future. That's like the sheriff refusing to confirm that I'm not under investigation because he doesn't know whether I'll hold up a liquor store next week. Given the damage done by the leaking of every vague guilt-by-association rumor but not the central fact of the case, Trump was right to fire this guy - in the national interest. As is now plain, it's a "Russia investigation" because Russia is the easiest MacNuffin. Anything else is too complicated: If Trump were alleged to be an agent of the ayatollahs or Kim Jong-Un, that would place it too close to the real world of actual geopolitical concerns. But "Russia" is just the generic Cold War bad guy from byzantine double-agent plots like Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, New York Real Estate Developer. The real scandal here is that the vast all-seeing permanent bureaucracy is investigating its political opponents - for no good reason, only for a general fishing expedition. The "Russia investigation" is a misnomer for what it really is: a domestic investigation of US citizens without any probable cause. They've come up empty, or you'd know it by now. 5) So what exactly has "the Russia investigation" been investigating for over a year now? Aside from arseholing around at taxpayer expense leaking the identities of US citizens they've improperly surveilled, what the hell do they do all day, every day, for months on end? If that's not a crime, it ought to be. But we do know that, whether or not the surveillance is improper, the leaks therefrom are certainly a crime. Yet they're now such an ingrained habit at the FBI that the lads occasionally forget themselves and leak stuff that's nothing to do with "the Russia investigation" - like the Manchester bombing info shared by the Brits that Theresa May got so mad about. Being flattered by ideologically simpatico journalists as an "unnamed source" can become addictive. Nevertheless, it's damaging US credibility with allied intelligence services, and that will have consequences. 6) What happens if Trump is impeached and removed from office? Easy: Having tasted blood, "the Russia investigation" will move on to Mike Pence, and Comey's successor will announce he can't confirm or deny whether Pence is under investigation. So Pence will be impeached and removed, and Speaker Ryan will become the next person whose status as crack Russian undercover operative can't be confirmed or denied, and so it will go all the way down through the President Pro Tem of the Senate and the Secretary of Transportation and the Director of the Bureau of Paper Clips. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia, and Trumpiana has always been in league with Russia. Or to return from Orwell to Hitchcock: in North by Northwest, Cary Grant plays a blameless New York advertising executive mistaken for a spy called "George Kaplan". There is no "George Kaplan": He's an invention of someone who describes himself as being "part of the alphabet soup" of federal agencies. To create the impression there is a real "George Kaplan", they check him into hotels across America and have his suits sent for drycleaning - in order to make the Russians expend vast resources chasing him from town to town. Sound familiar? All that's changed is that the roles have been switched, and the "alphabet soup" has now set Americans chasing imaginary Russians. Okay, that's half-a-dozen points. But enough: This is the all-time greatest MacNuffin. I repeat the key question: What do the "invesigators" of the vast money-no-object "Russia investigation" do all day? At this rate, we'll be so busy investigating whether a school chum of Barron's has parents who considered employing the sister of the Russian Embassy's Deputy Under-Assistant Chargé d'Affaires' Hispanic nanny that Putin will steal the 2020 election for Reality Winner - and no one will even notice. ~If you're one of the many Mark Steyn Club members who happens to be a Russian agent every other weekend, feel free to use the super-secret back channel of our comments section. Comment Club privileges are one of the benefits of Founder Membership. For more on The Mark Steyn Club, see here.Opioids are the most effective and widely used drugs for pain treatment. Morphine is an archetypal opioid and is an opioid receptor agonist. Unfortunately, the clinical usefulness of morphine is limited by adverse effects such as analgesic tolerance and addiction. Therefore, it is important to study the development of novel opioid agonists as part of pain control. The analgesic effects of opioids are mediated by three opioid receptors, namely opioid μ-, δ-, and κ-receptors. They belong to the G protein-coupled receptor superfamily and are coupled to Gi proteins. In the present study, we developed a ligand screening system to identify novel opioid μ-receptor agonists that measures [(35)S]GTPγS binding to cell membrane fractions prepared from the fat body of transgenic silkworms expressing μ-receptor-Gi1α fusion protein. We screened the RIKEN Natural Products Depository (NPDepo) chemical library, which contains 5848 compounds, and analogs of hit compounds. We successfully identified a novel, structurally unique compound, that we named GUM1, with agonist activity for the opioid μ-receptor (EC50 of 1.2 µM). The Plantar Test (Hargreaves' Method) demonstrated that subcutaneous injection of 3mg/kg of GUM1 into wild-type rats significantly extended latency time. This extension was also observed in a rat model of morphine tolerance and was inhibited by pre-treatment of naloxone. The unique molecular skeleton of GUM1 makes it an attractive molecule for further ligand-opioid receptor binding studies. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.SINGAPORE: A 72-year-old architect is on trial for allegedly punching a driver along Telok Ayer Street in 2014 when he refused to move his car to make way for her Ferrari. Shi Ka Yee honked and shouted at the driver, 39-year-old Raphael Chong Yen Ping, before getting out of her red Ferrari, approaching Mr Chong’s car, a BMW, and reaching through the window to punch him in the face. Advertisement This was after he pointed out there was more than enough room for her to pass, Mr Chong said on Monday (Jun 5), the first day of Shi’s trial. Telok Ayer Street is a one-way street, but it was “wide enough for even tour buses to drive through”, Mr Chong said. He added that in the five to 10 minutes he spent idling by the side of the street waiting for a parking space, “plenty” of other cars and buses had passed him. The incident with Shi took place at about 5pm on Feb 25, 2014, when Shi stopped her Ferrari next to Mr Chong’s car and demanded he move so she could pass through. A passer-by intervened and offered to help direct traffic – Shi had stopped her car in the middle of the street, causing traffic to be backed up – but she refused. Shi got out of her car, walked to Mr Chong, who remained in his car in the driver’s seat, and punched him. Mr Chong, who suffered a cut above his right eyebrow, said he was “in a state of shock”. “I told her I’d report this to the police, and she told me ‘go ahead’”, Mr Chong told the court. Advertisement Advertisement Shi drove off – despite her claim that there was no room for her Ferrari to pass – before the police arrived, District Judge Chay Yuen Fatt heard. Shi’s lawyer Irving Choh claimed his client had not punched Mr Chong. “It was only a slap”, Mr Choh said, “because of what you had said to her”. According to Shi, Mr Chong had “uttered vulgarities” at her and insulted her, Mr Choh said. He said Shi had slapped Mr Chong “instinctively”. “I DIDN’T EXPECT THAT FROM A LADY”: WITNESS But the prosecution’s second witness, Mr Stephen Choy Ying Whye, said he heard Mr Chong say nothing of the sort. Mr Choy said he had asked Shi whether she wanted his help to “guide her through the spot”, but she refused. “I thought because her car was an expensive car that she didn’t want to take the chance”, Mr Choy said. But he pointed out that a large pickup truck ahead of Shi’s Ferrari had driven by without trouble, “so I was confident the Ferrari could pass through”, Mr Choy said. He added that he heard Mr Chong tell Shi: “Don’t blame me if you’re a lousy driver.” And that’s when Shi reached into the car and punched him, Mr Choy said. "It was a punch", he repeated, when Shi's lawyer asked him if it "could have been a slap". Mr Choy could not recall whether Shi threw the punch with her left or right hand, but remembered that “it was the hand with lots of rings”. A cut above Mr Chong’s right eyebrow started bleeding immediately, Mr Choy said. Shi tried to punch Mr Chong a second time, but the driver managed to dodge her. Then Shi “stomped off and drove off”, he told the court. Deputy Public Prosecutor Zhuo Wenzhao remarked that Mr Choy could remember the events that took place over three years ago well - to which Mr Choy responded: “Something like this doesn’t happen every day. “I was quite taken aback … I didn’t expect that from a lady.” The trial continues on Jun 29. If convicted of causing hurt, Shi could be jailed up to two years and/or fined S$5,000. SHI FACES MORE CHARGES FOR HARASSMENT, TRESPASS, WRONGFUL RESTRAINT Shi faces six more charges unrelated to the incident, including for harassing her neighbour Mr Nasrat Lucas Muzayyin and trespassing on his property. The incident involved a rain tree on Shi’s property at 12 Astrid Hill, which had branches hanging over the Muzayyins’ property next door. When Mr Muzayyin hired an arborist to trim the branches of the tree, Shi allegedly told him: “You cut my tree, my tree is living thing, I hope your kids die (sic).” Shi also removed the key from the ignition of the arborist’s cherry picker, leaving the man stranded up on the rain tree for an hour. To stop Shi from getting away, Mr Muzayyin stood in front of her Porsche as she prepared to drive off – but this did not stop her. Instead, Shi revved her engine and edged her car towards him. The neighbours’ dispute ended up before the High Court after Mr Muzayyin sued Shi “for the nuisance of her ever-growing rain tree”, for Shi’s trespass onto his land and for assault, because Shi had put him “in fear of injury”. Mr Muzayyin won, and Shi was ordered to pay thousands in damages. Shi’s appeal was later blocked by the High Court. Justice Choo Han Teck said: “There is no merit in letting this case incur any more court time when cases with greater social issues are waiting in line.” Shi was subsequently slapped with criminal charges arising out of the incident on Feb 17, 2015. She faces another two charges for allegedly stopping her car in the middle of Orchard Road, bringing traffic to a halt, to tell another driver to “return to China”.0 Former priest arrested for sexual abuse in Westmoreland County WESTMORELAND COUNTY, Pa. - A former Westmoreland County priest is charged with involuntary deviate sexual intercourse with a child from an incident more than 25 years ago. John Thomas Sweeney, 74, was arraigned Monday afternoon at the magistrate’s office in Allegheny Township. The allegations stem from the St. Margaret Mary School in Lower Burrell. During a news conference Monday afternoon, Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro detailed the alleged sexual abuse by Sweeney against a fourth-grade boy in 1991. TRENDING NOW: While few details about the larger investigation were given, the attorney general emphasized it is still open and ongoing. During the news conference, Shapiro made it a point to show a list of the churches where Sweeney worked during his career. He retired from Holy Family Parish in West Newton in December, but it's unclear if that was linked to this investigation. Shapiro says he wanted to charge Sweeney with more than just the one count of sex assault, but the statute of limitations on the other charges expired. If found guilty, Sweeney faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. FIVE THINGS WE KNOW NOW ABOUT THE CASE The victim is now a member of the United States Coast Guard. "He was motivated to come forward and tell the difficult truth about Sweeney because of his concern that this could have happened to other children and other children could be harmed if Sweeney was not held accountable,” Shapiro said. "This courageous young man found his voice and brought that voice before the grand jury." At this point, Sweeney is the only priest charged in this case and it's unclear if there are more possible victims of Sweeney's. Shapiro is asking any other victims of sex abuse at the hands of Sweeney or another priest to come forward. Shapiro said the arrest and subsequent charges are the result of a broader investigation into sexual abuse by priests that began last September. This is the first charge to come since the investigation began. Father John T. Sweeney is the 1st church leader charged since @PAAttorneyGen's investigation expanded to Greensburg and Pgh in Sept. #WPXI pic.twitter.com/OHxSM0INOe — Aaron Martin (@WPXIAaronMartin) July 24, 2017 "They might not see justice for themselves because of their statute of limitations, but it helps them heal because they see somebody is actually taking action," said Frances Samber with the Survivors Network for those Abused by Priests, or SNAP. Shapiro is now calling for changes to the statute of limitations law on the state level. © 2019 Cox Media Group.(CNN) — The delicate snow crab chawanmushi features steamed egg custard with shimeji mushrooms and crab meat. Chicken oysters, Norwegian salmon and shishito peppers with moromi miso, charred quickly at 1,000 F, slide off grill sticks onto chopsticks. Miso Yuan black cod is cooked to perfection, with crispy skin and house-picked hajikami ginger and lotus root on the side. Can't decide what to order at Brush Sushi Izakaya, a months-old Japanese gastropub just outside Atlanta, Georgia? Chef Jason Liang serves omakase at the bar, preparing his favorite sushi and other dishes for each patron. Beyond the Southern fried stereotype Best known as the childhood home of Martin Luther King, Jr. and where "Gone With the Wind" author Margaret Mitchell resided, Atlanta has long been a hub of southern cooking, fried chicken and the classic "meat and three" restaurants, where diners pick one meat and three side dishes. Yet Southern US cooking has never been that simple stereotype. Influenced by the mix of free European immigration, enslaved Africans and their descendents, and the more recent waves of Latin American, Asian, African and Middle Eastern immigration, Atlanta's food scene is bustling with choices from around the world. l e v a r t "There's an ongoing reappraisal of traditional southern food, and, running on a parallel track, a deepening appreciation for the cooking of newer immigrants," says John T. Edge, executive director of the Southern Foodways Alliance. "Chefs are interpreting both at the same time, examining the deeper southern path that informs the city and embracing our region's multicultural future. That's what a mature town does -- grapple with the past and look to the future. " Here are our eight picks for the greater Atlanta area's bustling dining scene. Brush Sushi Izakaya What Decatur didn't have was a Japanese bar. Liang offers several choices of sake, including a few on tap. With Japanese fish and rice flown in and fresh Georgia chicken and vegetables, Brush is farm-to-table cuisine with a twist. Brush Sushi Izakaya: High-end sushi comes to Decatur. Courtesy Brush Sushi Izakaya "We wanted to create a destination restaurant, with authentic cuisine like when you eat at a high-end sushi restaurant in Tokyo, " Liang tells CNN. "People care about the food. They are not here to be seen. A lot of customers even bring their kids and teach them about the different kinds of interesting fish." Brush Sushi Izakaya, 316 Church Street, Decatur, GA; +1 678 949 9412 Staplehouse A sense of purpose and community pervades Staplehouse, Bon Appetit's pick for America's best new US restaurant of 2016. The restaurant is run by the family and friends of the late chef Ryan Hidinger, whose community raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for his living expenses when he was diagnosed with stage IV gallbladder cancer in 2013. Hidinger died in 2014. Chef Ryan Smith cooks high-end, nose-to-tail, farm-to-table cuisine, and the restaurant is fully booked as quickly as reservations open mid-month for the next month. All profits go to the Giving Kitchen, a non-profit Hidinger's widow, Jen, and friends set up to support food workers in need. "Staplehouse acts as like a lighthouse for guests who come to dine and come to feel inspired and be a part of something," Jen Hidinger tells CNN. "It's something tangible." Staplehouse, 541 Edgewood Ave. SE, Atlanta, GA; +1 404 524 5005 Miller Union Miller Union: Chef Steven Satterfield's take on multicultural cuisine. Heidi Geldhauser At Chef Steven Satterfield's highly regarded Miller Union, the influences of a multicultural city often makes their way into his seasonal menus. "I take cues from other types of cooking because Atlanta is a multicultural city, and people are open to experiencing new food ideas," says Satterfield, who worked for longtime Atlanta chef Anne Quatrano and former Watershed chef Scott Peacock before opening his own restaurant. "I think that's how southern food evolved." "We've dug deeper into our roots for historical context in the last 10 years to see how cultures can meld together on the plate." The duck breast on his current dinner menu, offered with sweet potato, savoy cabbage, farro spaetzle and maple gastrique, is cooked with ginger and a little cardamom. "It's subtle but it works and it tastes great," he says. Miller Union, 999 Brady Ave NW, Atlanta, GA; +1 678 733 8550 Spice to Table That creativity can also be seen at Spice to Table, a low-key Indian lunch restaurant launched by chef Asha Gomez, who was born and raised in Southern India and moved to Atlanta after she married more than 20 years ago. (She also credits Quatrano for inspiration.) Her fried chicken has been dubbed some of the best in country, with its 24-hour brine with secret spices, coconut oil, mango sauce and roasted curry leaves. (It's only available Friday and Saturdays for lunch, until they run out.) So has her spiced carrot cake, which people drive hundreds of miles to eat. Her version uses fresh carrots, clove, cardamom and black peppercorns, and it's also in her new cook book, "My Two Souths." "My food and what I put on plate is the sum total of my life experiences," says Gomez, who previously ran the high-end Cardamom Hill. "I love my roots and heritage, and I love this new home and southern cuisine." Spice to Table, 659 Auburn Avenue NE Suite 506, Atlanta, GA; +1 404 220 8945 The General Muir The General Muir: Deli classics include the Reuben sandwich. James Camp/www.photojcamp.com The General Muir near Emory University, which takes a New York Jewish deli upscale, is one of food writer Susan Puckett's favorite restaurants with a sense of place. There's high-end seasonal cuisine, but the all-important reuben sandwich, pastrami sandwich, bagels and lox and more are generally available. So are menus for the Jewish High Holidays. "Restaurants opening now are more connected to the community, have more of a distinct personality and are more a reflection of chefs and owners as well as their surroundings," Puckett says. "Whenever I go there, I feel this sense of community." The General Muir, 1540 Avenue Place Suite B-230, Atlanta, GA; +1 678 927 9131 Bacchanalia and more Bacchanalia: Chef Anne Quatrano is a local legend. Andrew Thomas Lee Photography An inspiration to countless other local chefs, chef Anne Quatrano and her husband Clifford Harrison first opened the high-end, organic farm-to-table Bacchanalia in 1993 and the European-influenced Floataway Café in 1998, supplying much of the produce from their farm. Back then, companies spent millions to open flashy restaurants that were destinations, Quatrano says. "Now it's chef-driven and awesome food is the priority, not costs, like with the big restaurant groups," Quatrano adds. "The chef is making the food decisions, so money is going into the food." More than two decades later, Quatrano shows no signs of slowing down. She's moving Bacchanalia and her adjoining Star Provisions food store into new quarters in spring 2017. Bacchanalia/Star Provisions, 1198 Howell Mill Road, Atlanta, GA; +1 404 365 0410 Buford Highway Many chefs, restaurant workers and food lovers still head to Buford Highway and the outer Atlanta suburbs, where many Asian, Latin American and other mom and pop dining spots serve authentic ethnic cuisine. "We've finally woken up to the amazing array of food along Buford Highway," says Hugh Acheson, chef/partner of Atlanta's Empire State South and four other Georgia establishments. His current Buford favorite is Nam Phuong for excellent Vietnamese pho. Nam Phuong, 051 Buford Hwy NE, Atlanta, GA; +1 404 633 2400 Ponce City Market Spiller Park: Damn fine coffee. Andrew Thomas Lee Don't want to choose? There's a way to do that at the restaurants at Krog Street Market or Ponce City Market's food hall in midtown Atlanta, which is a who's who of the city's top chefs. A bowl of Japanese ramen at Guy Wong's Ton Ton can be followed by a Cuban sandwich at Hector Santiago's El Super Pan, followed by fresh pasta at Bellina Alimentari and Indian street food at Botiwalla. Quatrano fans can stop by her W.H. Stiles Fish Camp, while Restaurant Eugene's Linton Hopkins has his lovely take on burgers and chicken at H&F Burger and Hop's Chicken. Finish it all off with an espresso shot at Acheson's Spiller Park Coffee, and that's a food tour of Atlanta.Not only is our friend Dan Sullivan over at Gathering Together Farm a compost guru, he is also a very passionate seeder of delicious corn, whether it be sweet corn, or grain corn. That’s probably because the two go hand in hand, corn loves to eat compost, and compost loves to feed corn. As corn is a heavy eater, “corn is a great way to see field fertility, it will show you real quick where the weak spots are.” There is so much to learn as beginner farmers and pollinating corn is just one small thing on that list. When we first met Dan back in March at the PSU Farmers Market, we talked about different crops and just getting started on our small farm in Salem. We ended up on the topic of corn; he seeds quite a large field of organic sweet corn over at GTF (Gathering Together Farm). He was also growing a test seed plot of dent corn that he acquired from Nash Huber of Nash’s Organics in Sequim, WA. Unsure of the actual name of the corn, he just knew it was a strong 40-day early season dent corn. Dan being as passionate about growing corn as he is, when we told him that we had some organic heirloom Floriani Red Flint corn, that we acquired from Pie Ranch in Pescadero, CA, his eyed widened and he jump at the chance to help us start growing it. This type of red flint corn is considered to be some of the most delicious polenta corn in the western hemisphere, originally from Italy, with very few people growing it in the United States. One of letUMeat’s dreams in the near future is to be seeding beautiful red flint corn, milling our own corn, and feeding delicious polenta to our eaters. After getting about six hundred successful plants seeded, the next part is pollinating those plants for a strong seed stock for next year. Since GTF is a pretty big farm and mainly seeds sweet corn for the eaters, our small-scale grain corn project required some extra attention and hand pollination. Normally in large plots the wind naturally takes care of the pollination. In our case we were trying to ensure that we did not cross-pollinate the grain corn with the sweet corn, also ensuring that the two long rows of grain corn were directly pollinated. Although some cross-pollination is likely to occur, it will be very easy to tell if it has occurred. Pollinating corn is actually quite simple. The best time to pollinate is in the mid morning between 9 and 11 am after the dew has dried. Once the anthers, the male flowers of the tassel are ready with their yellow pollinating magic dust, and the female silk has emerged from the ear, it is time. This window of opportunity doesn’t last long, only 4-7 days or so to ensure proper pollination. Once the plants are ready to pollinate, all you have to do is snap the tassels off the stalk and shake the magic pollen dust “like a feather duster” over the freshly emerging silks. Make sure you have direct contact between the pollen and silk, as each strand of silk corresponds to one kernel or potential seed of corn. That’s it, pretty simple! Learned something new. The other part of the day’s lesson was to ensure that we did not cross the sweet corn with grain corn. To do this we enlisted the help of our trusty friend the Machete. After a quick sharpening with the file, we were able to have some fun with it along with working out some frustrations, you know the old saying “killing two birds with one stone!” We took the machete to the adjacent parallel three rows or sweet corn and chopped the tassels off in the opposite direction of the grain corn rows. Hopefully that will keep the wind and mother nature from blowing the sweet corn pollen all over the dent and red flint corn silks. If everything works out as planned, we will have plenty of seed stock ready for next year, for the seeders to seed, so that the feeders can feed the eaters, and the eaters can EAT. letUMeat!! Farmer Dan Sullivan in the Red Flint Corn at Gathering Together Farm in Philomath, OR The male part of the corn plant: the anthers The female part of the corn plant: the silk Farmer Dan Sullivan using the machete to trim down the adjacent corn plants and reduce the chance of cross-pollination Farmer Dan Sullivan using the machete to trim down the adjacent corn plants and reduce the chance of cross-pollination letUMeat crew member Cory Melanson happily helping out with the machete workIn a clearing in a small wood, just off a narrow lane a few miles outside Glasgow, a group of men sit talking around a wood fire. They’re wearing shorts and the brightly coloured tops of cyclists everywhere. Expensive road bikes rest against trees, and laughter and banter rise up with the smoke from the fire. The men have craggy, worn, lean faces, but every one has a sparkle in his eye. Some are in their late seventies, some older. One man, Bobby Brodie, is 89. All have ridden here, some covering more than 20 miles. Later, they’ll ride home – and next week they’ll do it all again. Sometimes someone is unwell, or the weather is so foul not everyone can get out, but there are always some of the group pedalling along the lanes on their swift, slim machines. They descend on this spot, a few miles south of the city, light a fire and then talk bikes, tell old stories and rib each other endlessly. I first come across them after a chance encounter with Bob Mair, a retired tax officer. Bob, from East Kilbride, is on his bike climbing a long hill across a moor; I’m out for a walk in a brief bit of autumn sunshine. We stop to talk, and he mentions there’s a fire lit at a spot down the road. A little later, I make my way over a stile and into the trees to find the group. The welcome is instant, the men are relaxed, and there is the feeling that laughter could break out at any time. I think of my own parents, around the same age, cooped up in a nursing home with locked doors and constant care, coping with the awful decrepitude of stroke and dementia, and I hope to heaven my old age is like this. From somewhere or other, blackened tin cans, wires threaded through their rims for handles, are produced and propped up among the embers. The water boils and I’m given tea. Then someone takes pity on me for having no food, produces a couple of sausages and cooks them for me. Listening to the stories the men tell, I realise I have stumbled on a piece of a world that is almost gone. There was a time, starting after the First World War, when men and women poured out of cities such as Glasgow and Edinburgh, Dundee and Aberdeen every weekend, to escape the factories and foundries, offices, shipyards and docks, and the smells and smogs of town. They didn’t come in cars, ready to drive back as soon as they got wet or hungry or needed to sleep, but on bikes, in buses, by thumb and on foot, with rough camping gear, old cans for kettles, and battered penknives. To begin with, many were walkers and climbers. By the 1950s, hundreds of others would cycle out from Glasgow and the surrounding towns, part of clubs such as the Nightingale, St Christopher’s and the Glasgow or Glenmarnock Wheelers. They would race, time-trial or just enjoy the long, looping rides around the Campsies, Loch Lomond and Strathaven – and often further afield. The men I meet were among them. They talk of lighting campfires on the shores of Loch Lomond, where smoke could once be seen rising from a dozen such “drum-ups” of a weekend. Sunday night meant a return home for work the next day – and if you were slow packing up, the rival clubs would ring their bells as they passed, challenging you to send out your best men for the weekend’s finale. The groups would start to cluster on the road, and with the first lights coming on at the edge of the city, the unofficial race, or habble, began. Eighty-year-old Charlie Donnelly joined the Gilbertfield Wheelers as a young man in the 1940s. “After a run, we’d be coming down the Loch Lomond road and we’d meet the Douglas Cycling Club,” he says. “We’d be talking nice to these guys as we rode along: ‘How did you do in your 25-miler?’ ‘Oh, very good, and how was your 50?’ “Then one of them jumped [raced ahead] – and that was the habble. Two racing clubs, the whole road, and it was a race into town, heads down and arses up, to Anniesland to see which club was top.” Donnelly is a former shipyard worker, and the sheer physicality of his life when he was in his twenties is startling. Every day, after doing a manual job, he was cycling on track or road, weightlifting or indulging in his other great passions, ice hockey and skating, before Sunday’s racing finale. He and his friends would think nothing of pedalling down to Blackpool for a holiday, sleeping in barns on the way. “It was the freedom of it we loved: the bikes could take us anywhere.” Now this weekly gathering is probably the last of the drum-ups. Landowners have become stricter and cafes more popular. The hordes of riders have shrunk away and there are not so many who remember those hard, happy days. Tales of war and industry Over the next few weeks I pass by the drum-up a couple of times, and call in to chat. There’s a steady core of eight or 10 men there, but there are also younger cyclists they’ve met on the road, and acquaintances from years back. Tales of wartime Glasgow spin out, the bombing and fire-watch duties; then later of working in the foundries, and the old days when Springburn was a centre of the rail industry. Then there were the races and the time trials, from Port Glasgow to the Cloch at Gourock and back, and the long runs to the Highlands or the Borders and into England, and the trips cycling in America and Europe. Camping by Loch Lomond on the way to Inverness in the late 1940s, one man put all the soaked leather cycling shoes to dry by a fire. The heat shrank them to the size of children’s shoes, so they cycled barefoot to Fort William before they could buy more. I’m sitting next to Jimmy Docherty, and he’s telling me about a new Cannondale bike he’s acquired, and how he still has the cycling shoes he bought in 1948. He’s 78, and says he often cycles about 20 miles to meet up with the gang, coming up the long way round on a good day. His wife wants him to carry a mobile phone, but he’ll hear none of it. Her concern would be understandable given his age alone – but the fact he was half-paralysed by a stroke 22 years ago, and still has limited use of his right hand, makes it rather more so. “You won’t stop me cycling,” he says with a smile. Eddie Brown, a former steel worker aged 77, has been riding since he was a teenager. He shows me a photograph of himself – a shy-looking, dark-haired boy – out on the road in the early 1950s. He still gets out cycling twice a week. “It doesn’t make you live longer,” he says. “But it does make you happier. When I got to my fifties, lots of fellows I knew went down with heart disease and strokes, and I could have been one of them. But I was able to keep going. Doing things like this makes you enjoy life more, makes it worthwhile.” A few weeks ago, Eddie tells me, he caught a salmon on a stretch of his local river. “Getting out, doing stuff … that’s the secret.” The others feel the same. Bob Cunningham is 80 and works two days a week at
that with software becoming core to every industry, coding skills have become as important as reading and writing."Digital technology is invisibly embedded into everything we do," says Ghosh. The new initiative is part of Accenture’s Skill to Succeed programme that aims to equip 3 million people globally with the skills to get a job or build a business by 2020.Accenture will teach basic coding to 1,400 students in classes 8 to 10 across 10 schools in 6 cities by 2016-end. Over 150 volunteers fromAccenture have signed up for the initiative and they will collectively dedicate over 1,200 volunteer hours. It will begin in Bengaluru and then spread to Pune, Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad and NCR.“The whole IT landscape is changing. The people skills that is required today is very different from what was there yesterday. At Accenture, we started talking about it a few years back, that every business is a software business. We say it’s a software-driven world. Code is the first building block of software. Coding is the raw material for the industry, necessary to make the IT industry future-ready,” said Ghosh.The company has also launched an alumni programme where employees go back to their colleges to talk about the new IT that is disrupting the tech landscape, including cloud, mobility and analytics. To begin with, Accenture is targeting 10-15 colleges across seven cities.Accenture will also dedicate volunteers from its centres to train faculty in select campuses on cognitive computing. Ghosh said the nature of the IT business is undergoing a paradigm shift where applications are becoming more intelligent with the use of robotics and artificial intelligence (AI). Some applications have self-learning and self-healing capability."This module will enable college faculty with industry insights, equipping them to further coach their students for the corporate world,” said Ghosh. Accenture will train 400 computer science faculty across 100 colleges in seven cities in two phases between now and 2016-end.University of Nevada, Reno via YouTube As self-driving vehicles seem to be steering themselves ever closer to the mainstream, a team of researchers has completed Mexico's longest-ever journey in an autonomous car, traveling 1,500 miles in a special high-tech Volkswagen. Raul Rojas, a professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, led a team that traveled from Nogales to Mexico City this month. The car used for the journey, a 2010 Volkswagen Passat station wagon named Autonomos, was sent to Reno from Berlin, where it's been legal for road testing since 2011. Autonomos is equipped with seven laser scanners, nine video cameras, seven radars and an incredibly precise GPS unit, all of which were used in various combinations to navigate during the trip. Rojas and company preprogrammed the route into the self-driving software, but the car handled maneuvers like braking and lane changes on the fly. Autonomos' feat is the latest milestone on the journey toward bringing self-driving vehicles to the general public. In September, details emerged about Apple's reported interest in the market and about Google's efforts to make its self-piloted vehicles behave less like robots and drive more fluidly. In early October, Japanese carmaker Toyota said it planned to have autonomous cars commercially available by 2020. And a year earlier, Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk said we'll see fully autonomous driving in Rojas has worked with intelligent systems since 1986 and with autonomous cars since 2006. His team consisted of two researchers from Freie Universität Berlin and an employee of an autonomous-vehicle research company. Prior to departure, the crew covered 4,000 miles in and around Nevada, collecting as much data as possible. Afterward, they scrutinized the information to ensure the system was glitch-free. With everything looking good, Rojas headed down to Nogales. For the length of the hands-free journey, he and his party took turns driving, with the remaining team members poring over data coming from the vehicle's autonomous equipment. The trip went smoothly, with the only issues occurring when the car encountered fresh pavement without lane markings. Despite the "significant issue," as Rojas put it, the car arrived safely in Mexico City approximately one week after its October 12 departure. Autonomos covered between 250 and 300 miles per day. Though this remains a significant achievement for autonomous driving, Rojas warns we're not ready to roll out these systems to the public just yet. "Autonomous cars require special maps in order to operate safely, maps in which the number of lanes, the structure of the highway markings and also the position of exits, intersections and possibly of traffic lights are marked," he told a reporter at his university. "Such maps are not commercially available for all countries, and therefore every autonomous car project still has to produce its own maps." Tesla faced the same struggle when creating its almost-hands-free Autopilot 1.0 system. The automaker had to create very detailed maps to give its vehicles the ability to change lanes and otherwise navigate safely. Autopilot 1.0 recently captured its own record, as a trio of enthusiasts drove from Los Angeles to New York in a Tesla Model S largely free of driver intervention.Saturday during her opening statement on Fox News Channel’s “Justice,” Jeanine Pirro delivered an emotional monologue directed at national anthem protesters and NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, who responded to President Trump’s “divisive” comments where he said he wishes NFL owners would let go of any national anthem protesters. “The biggest issue facing our country today is the tip-toeing and political correctness that has brought us to the brink of disaster in national security, politics and sports,” Pirro began. “The question: Do we have the fortitude, courage and determination to stand up to those who threaten our values?” Pirro went on to say the athletes should all put their money and time to fix the “social injustices” instead of “disrespecting our country.” “Shame on you. Shame on all of you. And shame on you, too, Roger Goodell for not showing that you love this country as much as the president does when you had the chance,” she added. Follow Trent Baker on Twitter @MagnifiTrentCaffeine is America’s favorite drug, bar none. And while we’ve extolled the culinary and social aspects of coffee over the years, sometimes people don’t have time for a leisurely cup of joe and just want a quick fix. Today Ben Yu, 21, one of Peter Thiel’s 20 Under 20 fellows, and his partner Deven Soni, have introduced a patent-pending form of caffeine that you spray directly on your skin. (This is not to be confused with Aeroshots, another novelty energy booster that is a powder you spray in your mouth.) The marketing materials claim that caffeine diffuses through your system more gradually through the skin than through drinking. Plus, at $15 for 40 doses, it’s wayyy cheaper than Red Bull. Yesterday morning, I tried it. 6:15 am: It’s my morning to get up with my toddler daughter. She is super psyched to be alive as usual. I am moving a little more slowly. 9:20 am: I miss my morning coffee. Cold brew from Brooklyn roasters Oslo with milk and two packets of raw sugar. Instead I take the four-inch-long atomizer and deliver 4 sprays to the inside of my left wrist. The foamy liquid delivers no residue on the skin. I sniff–no aroma whatsoever, let alone a rich, roasty one. Sigh. 9:27 am: My eyes pop open like Betty Boop’s. 9:43 am: Whoo-hoo! The rush is a little bit disconcerting. Despite the claims, it feels like I drank my coffee very, very quickly. The tiny bottle contains 40 doses, 160 sprays. It’s recommended not to take more than 20 sprays in a day, but it would be pretty easy to overdose with such a small bottle, or if you just lose count.It's a truly bad port, got home and I've been testing this out. Visuals This is the blurriest 1080p game I've seen with no AA, I even increased brightness to max in-game and it's still blurry. The game does not look 1080p sharp at all. I'm thinking it's the inexistent texture filtering, and yes, it's awful. NO AA and NO AF is a travesty in this 6+ year old game, every stage especially training stage looks like a soupy mess. In training Stage doing trials, Dan's Avatar is borked, his pink costume seems smeared way beyond his shoulder/face in the top right, similar to guile's fireball glitch, where you see guile stretching past his grounded position and you see his reflection booming away in his own projectile. Sound They need to fix the high/lows in the game, playing a game online the game audio seems much lower than offline arcade mode audio. After you play a game online sound gets much louder going back to arcade mode, it's not balanced right. They should allow me an option to hear the announcer declare the title screen on my tv speakers instead of my DS4. Lag The menu lag is awful, it loads and slides super slow both offline and online, it's especially distracting online, because you get the feeling that's how the match is going to run, and sadly most times this is how it runs online, as molasses as the menus. Nothing below a green bar is smooth so far. I noticed there maybe some input lag when I tried Zangief's 17th trial, it requires perfect timing and there seems to be a slight delay from going from a crouching normal to chaining a few standing jabs, it seems off compared to all other versions I've tried. It's hard to time it here. I hope it's not me trying to adjust to the DS4 pad. Doing other trials and playing arcade mode seems fine for the most part, I can pull of most combos just fine, but something feels amiss still. Suggestions Having said all that, I think the issues here can be fixed in short order. Just add 16xAF and some AA (8xAA at least) and that takes care of most of the visual issues. Fix the glitches with fireballs and avatars. Fix the sound level issues and you have a good start to correcting this mess as it is. I've not noticed the name duplicating issue or text issue that some have had however. After they've done that they can move on to sorting out the issues with Evil Ryu missing an Fadc or the game glitching in trial mode etc. It's really a sad state of affairs but I'm thinking they should fix the most glaring issues over the next few days and sort out the rest in the next two to three weeks. Who knows what is causing some of these issues maybe it's the driver from Lab Zero which may have some incompatibility issues, but they better source it and kill it right away. The biggest problem I see these guys having is sorting out the matchmaking and quality of online bars. I just searched for a ranked game online and it came up with one yellow connection and all the rest were greyed out, meaning not even a red beyond that, so it doesn't seem to be working quite well as of now. It's really a shame that we keep getting products that have so many glaring and simple issues that could be avoided by a more competent dev, the decision to hire these guys was just a bad decision. I truly hope this is the last nail that drives publishers away from outsourcing their product for a cheap conversion, there's just too much headache in the aftermath. I'm also sure that the money they did not want to spend initially, will have to be used to fix this port. For Heavens's sake use QLOC, Nixxes, Hexadrive or Bluepoint. Nobody elese is worth your time.For many conservative American politicians and members of the fundamentalist right wing, the idea that our nation is God’s “chosen land" is a frequently invoked trope. But a new book by Steven K. Green, Inventing a Christian America: The Myth of the Religious Founding, suggests this is a misreading of history. For many conservative American politicians and members of the fundamentalist right wing, the idea that our nation is God’s “chosen land" is a frequently invoked trope. But a new book by Steven K. Green, Inventing a Christian America: The Myth of the Religious Founding, suggests this is a misreading of history. Amazon.com For many conservative American politicians and members of the fundamentalist right wing, the idea that our nation is God’s “chosen land,” resting on a bed of Christian laurels, is a frequently invoked trope. Take David Lane, a self-described conservative political consultant with ties to Republican presidential hopefuls Mike Huckabee, Bobby Jindal, Rick Perry, and Ted Cruz. “If America is going to be saved it will be done by Christian men and women restoring a Judeo-Christian culture to the country,” he told the Washington Times in 2014, arguing that the United States was unassailably established, as the Times summarized it, as a “Judeo-Christian nation.” His friend, former Arkansas governor and Baptist preacher Mike Huckabee, takes this agenda one better. If elected, he promises to stop what he calls “the criminalization of Christianity” by liberal courts and legislatures and says that he intends to put God front-and-center through national repentance and public school prayer. “Our rights and freedoms come directly from God, not the government,” Huckabee tells viewers in a video called Learn Our History. What’s more, he fervently believes that “God’s special relationship with America makes us different from the rest of the world.” Similarly, Flip Benham, head of the virulently anti-abortion, anti-contraception, and anti-gay Operation Save America, is giddy at the thought of returning the United States to God and restoring the nation to its allegedly Christian foundation. His argument is based on the Mayflower Compact, a famous document penned by the Pilgrims as they sailed from the Old World to the New in 1620. In the World According to Flip, the Compact—and its emergence in the country’s governing documents—proves that the Europeans who settled America valued Christian piety and biblical values, and intended to create a hierarchical, God-fearing, society (regardless of the Native people already present). Get the facts, direct to your inbox. Subscribe to our daily or weekly digest. SUBSCRIBE The problem with this analysis, writes Willamette University professor Steven K. Green in Inventing a Christian America: The Myth of the Religious Founding, out this month from Oxford University Press, is that it is false, reflecting a serious misreading of U.S. history and a misunderstanding of the Compact’s intent and subsequent influence on documents such as the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. Green notes that the Compact’s frequent references to the Almighty bolster the idea—accepted as gospel by the right—that the cornerstone of U.S. government comes directly from heaven. In reality, however, heaven’s role was a bit more complicated, and the rationale for the Compact was a bit more opportunistic. “The Compact was largely a pragmatic device for diffusing dissention among the passengers of the Mayflower,” Green writes, “caused, in part, by the decision to settle in New England rather than in the Hudson River Valley, as was planned and authorized by their patent.” Green also points out that nearly half of the passengers on board were not what he calls “religiously regenerate … In order to secure their commitment to the enterprise, the Pilgrim leaders had the passengers ‘Covenant and Combine themselves together into a Civil Body Politic,’ … a body politic to which they ‘promise[d] all due submission and obedience.’” And herein lays the crux of the misinterpretation, Green writes, for the Pilgrims did believe that a rigid theocracy, led by a “spiritual aristocracy,” was the best system of governance. “Based on their biblically centered worldview,” Green explains, “Puritans argued that divine law … served as the basis and authority for all law, with applications extending to even mundane matters.” Some, like Plymouth Colony minister John Cotton, unsuccessfully lobbied for the death penalty to be imposed on anyone found guilty of idolatry, witchcraft, or Sabbath-breaking. This strict theology did not endure, Green notes: By the early 1700s, Massachusetts had effectively silenced advocates of such severe punishment. Instead, the new government imposed the same secular Common Law practices that were by then in place in Virginia and in settlements of “nonconforming” Quakers. “By the time of the American revolution,” Green adds, “the Puritan-inspired Biblically based legal system was a relic of the past. There is no evidence that politicians and jurists of the founding era considered the Puritan experiment when they developed their legal system.” Indeed, Green concludes that the flowery religious-sounding language of the Declaration of Independence, for example, may have been little more than kowtowing to the vernacular of the day. “Members of the founding generation lived in a social milieu in which religion played a prominent role, both privately and publicly,” he writes, “Religious terminology, metaphor, and allusion were a large part of popular discourse. Some of the more common religious language was ceremonial and customary (e.g., ‘in the year of our Lord’); other usages were habitual or were expected ingredients in exchanges between people.” Green believes this explains the religious references in the Declaration of Independence; still, he makes clear that by the time of the Constitutional Convention, the consensus was that government had no business interfering with people’s privately held ideas about God or faith, and hence had no business in the Constitution itself, except to state, once and for all, that the federal government could not impose any type of religious test on candidates for public office. Oops. I sure hope someone breaks the news to David Lane and company—and the sooner the better. But let’s get back to the real question: How did the myth of America’s Christian foundations develop and why it has been so hard to shake off? The answer, Green writes, rests with longstanding and near-constant religious declarations by politicians—whether in stump speeches or when campaigning for office—that “perpetuate the impression that America was specially ordained by God and that the nation’s governing documents and institutions reflect Christian values.” Numerous misconceptions bolster this faulty belief system: among them, that God wanted the nation’s so-called founders to create a New Israel; that every founder was a devout and pious churchgoer; and that the founders’ faith was so ingrained that it infused everything they said and did. But this wasn’t just the work of today’s 21st-century right-wingers, or even their fathers or grandfathers. Green argues convincingly—albeit in academically stilted and often repetitious language—that “the idea of America’s religiously inspired founding was a consciously created myth created by a second generation of Americans in their quest to forge a national identity, one that would reinforce their ideals and aspirations for the new nation.” That’s right: According to Green, putting forward the idea of the United States’ Christian roots was basically a public relations stunt to fuel national cohesion and unite disparate groups of people. Indeed, clergy members and politicians spewed these messages so frequently—and the media repeated them with such vigor—that rank-and-file Americans simply began to believe that they were true. In fact, in Green’s account, the initial impulse to conjure a mythical Christian history came in the immediate aftermath of George Washington’s death in 1799. “Politicians,” he writes, “praised his military exploits and political leadership, comparing him to Caesar and Cincinnatus, while clergy highlighted Washington’s moral virtues and religious piety.” In more than 550 separate eulogies, he was equated with Moses, Joshua, King David, and Jesus; some went so far as to claim that he had been selected by God to lead the nation into war and later, the presidency. A spate of hagiographic books celebrated his life and described him as a Scriptural literalist, a man whose every action was divinely inspired. Conveniently absent, Green quips, were references to the actual Washington whose beliefs were more in tune with “rational theism”—a philosophy steeped in the idea that “knowledge and goodness could be achieved through reason rather than through revelation and redemption.” Nonetheless, the first president’s sanctification became the stuff of legend. In addition, endless repetition of stories glorifying him led many people to conclude, Green writes, “that God’s providential anointment of Washington as an agent of change meant that God had also been instrumental in the creation of America.” This interpretation has rarely waned. For hundreds of years the idea that God is an indispensable partner in government—and that civil law is inadequate to counteract depravity and sin—has been repeatedly articulated by politicians, political aspirants, and Christian social-issue activists. These arguments have also been boosted in popular culture, such as by the influential writer and evangelical minister Tim LaHaye, whose popular Left Behind books and movies—which are available in 33 languages and have sold more than 60 million copies—make it seem as if there is a “Christian consensus” on American history. In other words, they promote the meme that ours is a blessed land, one that will be favored by the Almighty if we live Godly, Jesus-centered lives. Which brings us back to today’s political terrain. For David Lane, Mike Huckabee, Flip Benham, and other conservative evangelicals, contemporary Christians are locked in a war against secularism. They see this as a high-stakes battle in which a “pagan” victory will damn America and render God, Christianity—and them—irrelevant. By using fear-based notions of damnation and wrath, they purport to know what God wants for the country and aim to reclaim the social restrictions that the Puritan supported. Steven Green does not weigh in on these matters. In fact, he barely mentions the ongoing culture wars, the evangelical right-wing, or the religiously-inspired schisms that exist in 21st-century U.S. politics. This is unfortunate, since the issues raised in Inventing a Christian America are timely and important: In fact, we hear them from modern political figures on a regular basis. By confining the text to historical interpretation, Green missed an opportunity to link past and present. Then again, if Shakespeare was right, and the past really is prologue, there will be much to gain from looking back and grappling with the founders’ real desires and aspirations.Canadians earned more in 2015 than they did in the previous 10 years, and fewer young children were living in low-income households, according to 2016 census data released by Statistics Canada on Wednesday. The numbers also indicate most Canadian households are saving for their retirement, more couples are contributing equally to their earnings, and the rate of inequality has been largely flat over the last decade. The median household income in Canada rose 10.8 per cent between 2005 and 2015, to $70,336 from $63,457, measured in 2015 dollars — representing a slightly higher rate of increase than between 1995 and 2005, when median incomes were up 9.2 per cent. Nunavut and Saskatchewan experienced the fastest rates of growth,36.7 and 36.5 per cent, respectively. Median income was the highest in the Northwest Territories, at $117,688, while Alberta had the highest median household income at $93,835. Income grew most slowly in Quebec and Ontario, at 8.9 and 3.8 per cent, respectively, while New Brunswick had the lowest median household income at $59,347. But the 2015 figures — which matched census responses with tax filings with the Canada Revenue Agency for the first time — reveal the financial situation of Canadians before the steep drop in oil prices took its toll on the economy. Accordingly, the Prairies, and Newfoundland and Labrador experienced the greatest rate of income growth in the country in 2015. But the recent downturn, while having a "moderating influence on growth, should not reverse the long-term trends that have been recorded over the last 10 years," says Brian Murphy, special adviser in the income statistics division at Statistics Canada. The growth in the Prairies as well as Newfoundland and Labrador was spurred by the resource sector, as well as related growth in the construction industry. That contrasted with the hollowing out of manufacturing in Ontario and Quebec, which was behind the lower income growth levels in those two provinces. In Ontario, Windsor, for instance, suffered a 6.4 per cent decline in household incomes, while Oshawa, home to the province's auto industry, saw incomes grow by just 0.1 per cent. Percentage of low-income households steady The share of Canadians living in low-income households — defined as a household taking in less than half of the after-tax median income — increased slightly, to 14.2 per cent from 14 per cent in 2005. But there was a decline in the number of young children (under six years old) living in these situations, dropping to 17.8 from 18.8 per cent. Instead, seniors were behind the growth in the share of Canadians living in low income households, largely due to the aging population, increasing to 14.5 per cent from 12 per cent. Still, children were more likely to be living in a low-income household than adults, at 17 per cent to 13.4 per cent. The only province where that was not the case was Quebec, attributed to the greater benefits available to families in that province. In all, some 1.2 million children are living in low-income households in Canada — and that is more likely to be the case in single-parent households. Just under two-fifths of single-parent households are low income, compared to 11.2 per cent of households with two parents. The figures also pre-date the introduction of the Liberal government's enhanced monthly Canada Child Benefit, aimed at reducing the number of children living in low-income households. Inequality flat, but 1% holding gains According to Statistics Canada, individuals earning over $234,130 annually make up the country's one per cent. Their income has grown significantly over the years. In 1985, they earned $158,148 in 2015 constant dollars. That has grown by about 48 per cent since then. By comparison, the incomes of Canadians in the 70th to 80th percentile, earning about $53,000 to $68,000, have grown by about 17 per cent over that time. But the one per cent's growth has moderated over the last 10 years. Between 1995 and 2005, the income of the one per cent grew four times faster than that of the 70th to 80th percentile. Since 2005, however, the one per cent's income has grown by 14 per cent, just three points more quickly than the 70th to 80th percentile. "The 1990s were behind the shift in inequality," says Murphy. "It hasn't really been growing since then and has been flat since 2008-09." Statistics Canada will have a more detailed release on the wealthiest Canadians in the fall. More couples earning equal amounts But while inequality might be flat among Canadians as a whole, it is declining among couples. Virtually all couples report income from both individuals, at about 96 per cent. That's up from roughly two-thirds in the 1970s. Wednesday's release from the 2016 census revealed trends in Canadians' earnings. (Shutterstock) More are also dividing those earnings more equally. In 32 per cent of couples, each member earned between 40 and 60 per cent of the total income. That was just 20.6 per cent in 1985. The increase can be attributed to a number of factors, including a narrowing gender wage gap, more participation in the workforce by women and increased government transfers. Nevertheless, 50.7 per cent of men in a couple were the main breadwinners. Women were the primary income earners in only 17.3 per cent of couples. That disparity has become smaller, however. The number of couples involving a woman earning much more than a man has more than doubled since 1985. The census figures also show that same-sex couples earned more than opposite-sex couples. Male same-sex couples earned $100,707 combined, compared to $92,857 in female same-sex couples, and $87,688 in opposite-sex couples. Most households investing in retirement Just under two-thirds of households have contributed to either a Registered Pension Plan, a Registered Retirement Savings Plan (RRSP) or a Tax-Free Savings Account (TFSA). Over a third have contributed to more than one of these. "The decision to make investments in your retirement are made in the household context," says Murphy. "We know that less than half of individuals contribute, but it is interesting to see how that breaks down when we look at how households are planning for their retirement." Statistics Canada has been releasing results from the 2016 census throughout the year. The next set of data, on immigration, ethnocultural diversity, housing and Indigenous peoples, is set for release in October.Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption President Obama arrives on Capitol Hill for strategy meetings President Barack Obama has urged fellow Democrats to fight for his healthcare bill, as the incoming Trump team vowed to make a repeal of the law a priority. In a two-hour private meeting Mr Obama sought to rally members of his party, as Republicans took their first steps to dismantle his signature bill. Vice President-elect Mike Pence was also at Congress, where he told his party they would replace Obamacare. The law has extended health coverage to an estimated 20 million Americans. But the 2010 Affordable Care Act law has been hit by soaring premium costs and major insurers withdrawing from the scheme, leaving Americans with fewer choices for coverage. Image copyright EPA Image caption Democrats mocked Mr Trump's campaign slogan to "Make America Great Again" After the outgoing president's rare visit to Capitol Hill on Wednesday, Democratic Representative Elijah Cummings told reporters Mr Obama had "encouraged us to fight" to protect his flagship domestic policy accomplishment. Some of those present told US media the president had also urged them to "stay strong" as Republicans prepare to take control of the White House and both chambers of Congress for the first time in a decade. He spoke as Republicans in the Senate took the first step to begin demolishing Obamacare. They voted by 51 to 48 to debate a budget resolution designed to starve the programme of funding. The view from Congress - Laura Bicker, BBC News President Obama is not prepared to give up on his healthcare reforms without a fight. His final visit to Congress is a reminder that in just 16 days' time, his fellow Democrats will hold very little political sway in this battle. But publicly they've decided to talk tough. Congressman Gregory Meeks told me he knows Obamacare has its faults but it brings healthcare to millions who wouldn't otherwise have it. That's a key message Democrats are trying to publicise, but it is one they perhaps didn't make clearly enough during the election campaign. They also know Republicans have a weak spot. Repealing Obamacare will be the easy part - they have the votes they need and the backing of a president-elect who made it a key campaign pledge. However, so far no Republican has come forward with a clear replacement plan. Congressman Bruce Westerman told me they don't want to rip up and get rid of all of the reforms. Democrats hope they can at least exploit this to delay any dismantling of the Affordable Care Act and in doing so preserve President Obama's key legislative achievement. Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer warned that scrapping the law would throw the insurance marketplace into turmoil and - in a play on Mr Trump's campaign slogan - "Make America Sick Again". But Vice-President-elect Mike Pence, after meeting fellow Republicans on Capitol Hill, said they would bring about a "smooth transition to a market-based healthcare reform system". He said repealing and replacing Obamacare was "first order of business" for President-elect Donald Trump and Congress. House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan said Republicans - who have voted more than 50 times to try to repeal all or part of Obamacare - "have a plan" and "plenty of ideas." But during two news conferences, Mr Ryan, Mr Pence and Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell offered few details on their proposed replacement. What is 'Obamacare'? Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Residents of Kentucky, one of the unhealthiest states in America, talk to the BBC about their hopes and concerns about Obamacare The Affordable Care Act has extended healthcare coverage to about 20 million It requires all Americans to have health insurance Insurance can be purchased through state-run "marketplaces" Businesses with at least 50 workers must provide insurance Pre-existing illnesses are now covered Under-26s can be covered on parents' policies Read more White House spokesman Josh Earnest said: "One of the most articulate Republicans on Capitol Hill is the speaker of the House. "And he did a news conference today where he was unable to explain why Republicans have not put forward their replacement plan." Mr Trump - who will be sworn in as president on 20 January - wrote earlier on Twitter that Republicans "must be careful in that the Dems own the failed ObamaCare disaster". He predicted it would "fall of its own weight - be careful!" The Obama administration said on Wednesday that 8.8 million Americans had enrolled in Obamacare for 2017, about 200,000 more than at the same time a year ago. Mr Trump criticised the Affordable Care Act during his campaign, promising it would be replaced by something "much better and much less expensive". But after meeting President Obama in the days following his November victory, he vowed to keep some popular elements of the law in place. Mr Trump said he liked the rule barring insurance companies from denying coverage to people with pre-existing medical conditions.A SATELLITE map has unearthed the charred remains of entire communities as terrified residents claim they are the targets of a new-world genocide. “Some people were beheaded, and many were cut. We were in the house hiding when [armed residents from a neighbouring village] were beheading people. When we saw that, we just ran out the back of the house,” said Sultan Ahmed, a 27-year-old man from the former Chut Pyin village in Myanmar. Sultan is among a group of 1.1 million Rohingya Muslims that are often described as “the world’s most persecuted minority”. Rohingya people have lived for centuries in the western state of Rakhine, in Myanmar, but for decades have been persecuted by the Myanmar government. They are not considered among the country’s 135 official ethnic groups. The country has even denied them citizenship since 1982 and the state is one of the poorest in the country. On August 27, it is alleged Myanmar state security forces and local armed-residents committed mass killings of Rohingya Muslim men, women and children. The military unleashed what it called “clearance operations”. Myanmar’s army chief justified the slaughter as “unfinished business". “The killing spree lasted for approximately five hours — from 2pm to 7pm” reported Fortify Rights. More than 2600 villages were burned down throughout the state. It is becoming one of the “deadliest bouts of violence involving the Muslim minority in decades”, according to Reuters. "We haven't eaten in 4 days," says Rohingya Muslim woman refugee. pic.twitter.com/fclKaBoCEM — CJ Werleman (@cjwerleman) September 3, 2017 The violence — and ensuing exodus — saw survivors bringing with them harrowing tales of rape and murder at the hands of the military and Buddhist mobs. “Some are gaunt and spent, already starving and carrying listless and dehydrated babies, with many miles to go,” read the New York Times on the new crisis facing the modern world. It’s a result not helped by the silence of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, accused by Western critics of failing to support the Muslim minority that has long complained of persecution. “The military came with 200 people to the village and started fires... All the houses in my village are already destroyed. If we go back there and the army sees us, they will shoot,” Jalal Ahmed, 60, who arrived in Bangladesh last week with a group of about 3,000 after walking for almost a week, told Reuters. Aung San Suu Kyi's proving no Mandela. We were right to demand her release and now to condemn her over the slaughter of Rohingya Muslims — Kevin Maguire (@Kevin_Maguire) September 3, 2017 60,000 #Rohingya Muslims have fled Burma this week alone, after children were beheaded, burned alive, and systematically executed. pic.twitter.com/C5saDgHZhn — Khaled Beydoun (@KhaledBeydoun) September 3, 2017 “My brother was killed — [Myanmar Army soldiers] burned him with the group. We found (my other family members) in the fields,” Abdul Rahman, a 41-year-old survivor of the attacks on Chut Pyin village, told Fortify Rights. In the Chut Pyin village, where some of the worst violence is believed to have occurred, Abdul said his brother was among a group of Rohingya men marched into a house by soldiers who then set it alight, burning to death all inside. “They had marks on their bodies from bullets and some had cuts. “My two nephews, their heads were off. “One was six years old and the other was nine years old. “My sister-in-law was shot with a gun.” This was until recently a Rohingya Muslim village. Now it's just charred destruction. 700 buildings burned. Myanmar. https://t.co/v8nc9yGTAS pic.twitter.com/rt4GsVVXvq — Kenneth Roth (@KenRoth) September 3, 2017 All believers in human rts have been waiting a long time for Aung San Suu Kyi to stand up for the Rohingya. Attacks increase;silence deafens https://t.co/LdXyIpWnGX — Samantha Power (@SamanthaJPower) September 3, 2017 Reuters could not independently verify these accounts as access for independent journalists to northern Rakhine has been restricted since security forces locked down the area in October. As the violence rages, images posted on social media are providing a devastating snapshot. One photograph claiming to have been taken in a Rohingya village shows a number of children lying dead in the mud. Another shows a woman cradling the headless body of her young daughter. Another shows a man holding the little girl’s head in his arm. “There are no more villages left, none at all,” Rashed Ahmed, a 46-year-old farmer from the Maungdaw Township in Myanmar, told the New York Times. He had already been walking for four days. “There are no more people left, either,” he said.
Since the election, the stock market (based on the Dow Jones Industrial Average as of December 6) has risen more than 5 percent. Stock prices are a reflection of beliefs regarding a firm's future performance, but they are also driven by predictions. The election of Trump brings with it the potential for lower corporate taxes and less regulation -- both of which make stocks more attractive. In addition, the election of a businessman (who made his money in real estate rather than industry) brings with it the potential, once again, to encourage and promote those individuals who create companies, jobs and business. This shift toward individuals differs markedly from Obama's focus on the importance of collective, government action. As a reminder, Obama gave a speech on July 13, 2012, in Roanoke, Virginia, where he said, "If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen." While Obama was referring to roads and bridges, which are funded by government, his overall message was that businesspeople don't build the economy, the government does. This week, in contrast to Obama's 2009 apology tour to the Middle East, (which included Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Iraq, while skipping Israel, our strongest ally in the region), Trump and his vice-president elect, Mike Pence, are in the middle of a thank you tour in the United States; visiting Ohio, North Carolina, Iowa and Michigan. Internationally, there are signs of rapid change. Germany, which has recently had a rather open-door policy toward migration of people from the war-torn Middle East, is beginning to tighten its rules and change its language. This week, the Washington Post ran an article, "Angela Merkel calls for widespread ban on 'full veil' Islamic coverings," by Anthony Paiola. "German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who last year opened the door to nearly 1 million mostly Muslim migrants, staked out a tough new stance on conservative Islam on Tuesday by making her first direct call for a widespread ban on 'full veil' religious coverings," Paiola wrote. "Her comments also came as German social media buzzed following the arrests of two asylum seekers in five days in connection with three sexual assaults, including the brutal rape and murder of a 19-year-old medical student in the picturesque southern city of Freiburg. Right-wing politicians are openly blaming Merkel's policy for what they decry as a migrant-fueled crime wave." Merkel took a clear and tough stance regarding the veils, "We don't want any parallel societies...our law takes precedence before tribal rules, codes of honor and sharia." As I wrote last week, there was a stark contrast in how Trump and Obama responded to the death of Fidel Castro. President Obama's statement was without emotion, worded not to offend anyone, (except those who had endured hours under Castro), and did not acknowledge the horrors that Fidel Castro and his brother Raul inflicted on the Cuban people. Trump's words provided a more direct, emotional statement on the death of Fidel Castro. "Today, the world marks the passing of a brutal dictator who oppressed his own people for nearly six decades," he said. The small business people whom I have talked to since the election are thrilled at the prospect of less business regulation and changes to health care policies. Small business has been in decline for decades and needs reviving. According to the Commerce Department, 16 percent of private U.S. firms were less than a year old in 1977. By 2014, that figure had been cut in half. During that same time frame, the percentage of U.S. workers who work at new firms fell from almost 6 percent in 1977 to 2.1 percent in 2014. It will be interesting to see if enthusiasm from the election translates into more overall activity, more small businesses, more hiring and more productivity in the economy. It's only been a month since he won the election, and he has not yet taken office, but President-elect Donald Trump has already made himself a force, politically, socially and financially."Hopefully this has a privacy policy," says Rocky Slavin, a Phd student at UTSA. He and a team of professors are working to create tools to ensure apps on your phone aren't collecting more data than they said they would. He's walking me through their web form at Polidroid.org which should tell me if a dog whistle app i downloaded a few weeks back is taking more than it should. "Oh this doesn't have a privacy policy...that hopefully means they don't collect anything." But that probably isn't the case. In fact, after creating this tool, called the PVdetector, the team led by Dr Jianwei Niu, found that more than 400 of the 500 free apps they analyzed were potentially violating their privacy policies. Niu says one of the common potential violations was the collection of location. "We collect the information about which city you are in for instance, and actually what they collect is your real time GPS collection, they know you are in this building on the UTSA Campus." The tool is one of several the team has developed not to shame app developers, whose names they haven't disclosed, but to ensure the developers have the tools to know when their apps aren't complying with their privacy statements...because often the code writers aren't the privacy statement writers. The next step for the team is increasing the things the tools monitor for and building their own app that could do all of this for you on your phone. You don't have to be a power user to use the web form on their site, but if you aren't it will require you use their step-by-step tutorial. They say Polidroid should email you the results of your analysis within 24 hours based on the complexity of the app and the traffic the site is experiencing.Today’s nail experiment surprises me with its elegance. It took me forever to figure out what to do this week. I had two randomly chosen polishes; one is a very powerful, commanding purple with a blue flash, and the other is a dainty glitter topper with a slight blue tint. In tests, I couldn’t get them to work together. Putting the glitter on top of the purple always cancelled out the shifting colors, and my nails are so short that making thick necktie stripes would not have worked. I was totally out of ideas, and it didn’t occur to me until just before I started that I should use the glitter as the undies for a half moon mani. Best idea ever. To me, this is like the nail equivalent of an evening gown. The purple conjures images of both royalty and jewels. The glitter is the sexy underwear beneath. It lays a foundation that is inconspicuous, but adds a nice touch of sparkle that supports the purple without overpowering it. I’m really surprised I could get such an elegant mani that’s also so simple and quick to do. It was rainy when I took the first couple of photos, and as soon as I sat down to write, the sun came out, so I took a one more.HOOVER, Alabama - Hoover Mayor Gary Ivey and the Hoover City Council on Monday night honored two teenage boys who tried to save the life of a 68-year-old woman whose car plunged into Star Lake in May. Tristan Jernigan, a 16-year-old boy from Fultondale, and Tyler Harris, a 17-year-old boy from Helena, were on their way to pick up friends in Hoover to go to the movies on May 17 when Jernigan saw what appeared to be lights from a car submerged in Star Lake. Harris said he slammed on the brakes and put his vehicle in park, and the two boys jumped out and dove in the water. "We couldn't see anything. We couldn't break the glass, so we had to come back up," Harris said. The boys stayed there until police arrived and pointed out where the vehicle was. By that time, the lights on the car had gone off, Harris said. "They would have never been able to tell where the car was if we hadn't been there," he said. A dive team was on the way to the scene, but Hoover firefighters were able to attach a winch to the car and drag it out of the water. Police Chief Nick Derzis said firefighters then broke a car window and pulled a woman out. The woman was 68-year-old Deannna Shumate, a Conway, Ark., woman who had just attended a 50-year Ensley High School reunion at the Hoover Country Club. She apparently lost control of her vehicle and drove into the lake, Derzis said. Shumate was unconscious when firefighters got her out of her vehicle and took her to UAB Hospital, Derzis said. She apparently had been underwater for a long time, he said. Shumate did not survive, but two of her cousins came to the Hoover City Council meeting Monday night to show their appreciation to Jernigan and Harris for their heroic efforts. "We're very indebted to these two young men," Nancy Ridley said. The boys showed a lot of bravery, Donna Wills said. "They risked their own lives to try to help her. A lot of youth nowadays would have ignored it and walked on," Wills said. "They had some very good training from their parents to think of others." Jernigan said he wishes he and Harris could have done something different and been able to break the glass on the car to get Shumate out, but they did all they could. When asked what prompted them to take action, Harris said they didn't really think about it at the time. "You see a car in a lake. The instant reaction is, 'How can I help?" Harris said. They don't really feel like they deserve any special praise, "but I'm happy that people know we tried to do a good thing and are proud of us for it," Harris said. See more news from Hoover at www.al.com/hooverVideo (05:02) : Police and protesters were in a long standoff after a march shut down I-94 for several hours Saturday night and into Sunday morning. Marchers protesting the Wednesday night shooting death of Philando Castile by police caused an hourslong shutdown of part of Interstate 94 west of downtown St. Paul, starting just before nightfall Saturday and ending after 1 a.m. Sunday, when the freeway reopened to traffic.Dozens of people were arrested. Dozens of police officers decked out in riot gear used smoke bombs, and eventually tear gas and pepper spray, to disperse the crowd that gathered mostly at the Lexington Avenue exits and spread eastward to Dale Street. Around 11:15 p.m., police began arresting people one by one, escorting them to a law enforcement bus, but scores of protesters stayed at the scene. As police advanced, marchers retreated up the adjacent hill and left the freeway. A long line of officers stood in a blockade to keep protesters off the roadway. “Make some noise, loud enough for the people on the paddy wagon to hear us,” demonstrators yelled from the hillside. As the protest began to disperse shortly after midnight Sunday, several hundred people began to march “in triumph” back to the governor’s residence, where demonstrators have kept a constant presence since shortly after Castile’s death. At least five officers were injured after being hit by rocks, glass bottles or fireworks thrown by protesters, St. Paul police reported, and demonstrators on a pedestrian overpass threw objects including bricks and rebar at officers and dumped liquid on them. Police ordered people off the overpass and warned that they risked arrest. Gallery: Shootings spark day of protests across Twin Cities Gallery: Shootings spark day of protests across Twin Cities About 1 a.m, police said plows were cleaning debris from the interstate as first steps to reopening it to freeway traffic. I-94 had remained closed from Hwy. 280 to the downtown St. Paul exits for more than five hours after the disruption began. As early as 7:30 p.m., officers had started diverting traffic off I-94 at Lexington Avenue; as all cars were forced to file off the freeway, logjams began to form and police closed the highway in both directions. In the heat of the protest, as many as 300 people were spread across both the eastbound and westbound lanes of the major traffic artery connecting Minneapolis and St. Paul. Many sat down on the asphalt roadway while others stood, the air filled with yelling and chanting. Around 10:45 p.m., the crowd broke out in a chorus of Prince’s “Purple Rain,” a familiar Twin Cities anthem. Protesters had moved a small pickup onto the highway and were broadcasting with sound equipment. Some onlookers climbed over the freeway fence to join the blockade, with the crowd swelling as people blocked the freeway lanes in both directions. Around 10 p.m., officers had issued the 16th order to vacate the interstate, and protesters were not budging. Officers set off smoke bombs to disperse the protesters. About 100 feet away from the crowd, police cars with lights flashing were lined up in force, with officers addressing the marchers over loudspeakers and ordering them to “leave now” or face arrests. At one point, two dozen officers in riot gear pressed on the crowd, a paddy wagon following behind. No arrests were reported by about 10 p.m., said St. Paul police spokesman Steve Linders, but by 11:45 police were taking people into custody. Marchers, some of whom had earlier demonstrated at the governor’s residence on Summit Avenue in St. Paul, were beating drums and chanting slogans, including “Black lives matter.” One protester’s sign read: “We are not target practice.” Another said “Love, peace and change.” About 9 p.m. on Twitter, Black Lives Matter Minneapolis posted: “We shut down 94 for Philando. We are gonna need bail money. Please make a gift now.” The protest quickly grew into the day’s biggest and most disruptive demonstration in the Twin Cities, following a peaceful daylong gathering at the governor’s residence and a separate rally at Loring Park that spilled into the streets of downtown Minneapolis, where protesters briefly stopped traffic at 9th and Hennepin, blocked an entrance at the Basilica Block Party and marched past Target Center. Castile, a 32-year-old school cafeteria worker from St. Paul, was fatally shot by a police officer Wednesday night during a traffic stop in Falcon Heights. The aftermath, as he lay dying in the driver’s seat, was live-streamed on Facebook by his girlfriend sitting alongside him while her 4-year-old sat in the back seat. Castile’s death, coming one day after the fatal shooting of another black man, Alton Sterling, in Louisiana and one day before a sniper killed five police officers in Dallas, has put Minnesota in the center of national anguish over race and law enforcement. Staff writers Kim Palmer and Jennifer Brooks contributed to this report. Twitter: @randyfurstHaving a sweaty summer? It could be the corn. Climatologists are building evidence that crops, particularly corn, are driving up dew points as they put water into the atmosphere through evaporation. They also may make corn-growing areas cooler and alter rain patterns. Some say the extra moisture could even add energy to thunderstorms, with one study arguing that a 2001 tornado in Benson got a power boost from corn evaporation. "I think there's a new realization that there is a two-way interaction between weather and agriculture," said Richard Raddatz, a climatologist at the University of Winnipeg, who has studied the transformation of the Canadian prairies from grassland to cropland. In some ways, researchers are taking a second look at a 19th century adage - "rain follows the plow." Popularized by Charles Dana Wilber in an 1881 book touting the agricultural promise of Nebraska, the phrase supported a grand notion that the western Great Plains, which in the early 19th century had been labeled the "Great American Desert," could be transformed into a garden if people would expose its moist soil to the atmosphere. Rainy years added credibility to the idea, but it was discredited as pseudo-science after homesteaders who flooded the plains were trapped by drought and bankruptcy. Raddatz, however, said there is a growing body of research indicating that contemporary crops do indeed change the way water, heat and energy interact with the atmosphere. By "transpiring" more heavily than the prairie grasses that preceded them, and in relatively short periods, crops can generate air movements that can lead to storms, and intensify the season during which water is cycled through the atmosphere. Raddatz published a summary of studies of cropping and weather in February in the journal Agricultural and Forest Meteorology. They add some oomph to a 2002 study of dew points by Northern Illinois University climatologist David Changnon, which pinned a 40-year trend toward higher dew points in the Midwest, and record-high dew points during recent heat waves, on changes in farming. Other experts are skeptical. Assistant Minnesota state climatologist Pete Boulay points out that in the Twin Cities, average dew points - a measure of water saturation in the air - during three of the past four summers have been below average. And much of the corn-rowed state is now in its second consecutive season of very dry conditions. But Boulay does believe that a broadly irrigated landscape on the University of Minnesota St. Paul campus has contributed to dew points there that are higher than those at broadly paved Minneapolis St. Paul International Airport. Peter Robinson, director of the Southeast Regional Climate Center in North Carolina, has studied dew-point trends nationally and found mixed results, including an upward nudge in corn-growing areas. But he said he is only "suspicious the two are related." University of Oklahoma climatologist Jeff Basara, who has spent most of his summers in Minnesota, traces a link between corn evaporation and an F2 tornado that injured seven people in Benson on June 11, 2001. "There was going to be severe weather that day. But evaporation added enough moisture to the atmosphere and turned it from a day of localized severe weather reports to a day that really was a headline-maker," said Basara, who published his research in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society in 2005. Changnon, the Illinois researcher, found that since 1950, crops had replaced thousands of square miles of pastureland during the era of rising dew points. More significant, he said, was the shift in corn-planting from 40-inch rows to 30-inch rows. "We're just pouring more water into the air," Changnon said. Changnon said the results of his study shouldn't demonize agriculture but should prompt urban areas to be alert to the public health threat dew points in the 70s or higher can bring.Wow. That's all I can say. When I received the unassuming envelope in the mail, only briefly glancing at the return address, I had no idea what to expect. My extremely generous Santa gifted me a tandem skydive--something I've always wanted to do but never really sought out. I honestly can't believe it (somebody pinch me!). My desire to skydive was a footnote in my likes/dislikes page, a single line under the bucket list question. I totally didn't expect anything to come of it, but I can't wait to put this voucher to good use! Now I'll get to check skydiving off my bucket list! Thank you, thank you, thank you, a million thank yous! I wish I could give my Santa a real hug, but just know that I'm sending you the biggest internet hug that I can!President Obama’s campaign has transformed itself into a tax-exempt organization aimed at supporting his second-term agenda and countering a similar group that top Republican strategist Karl Rove has run during the last two election cycles. Mr. Obama’s campaign manager, Jim Messina, has turned the Obama for America campaign operation into a 501(c)4 nonprofit organization, an Obama campaign operative confirmed. The new organization, dubbed Organizing for Action, a play on the initials of the Obama for America campaign, is similar to Crossroads GPS, a spin-off of the super PAC fundraising machine Mr. Rove, President George W. Bush’s top political adviser, created three years ago. In launching the new group, Mr. Obama sent an email to supporters announcing announcing it with the subject line: “Say you’re in.” “Following the footsteps of the campaign you built, Organizing for Action will be an unparallelled force in American politics,” he wrote. “It will work to turn our shared values into legislative action — and it’ll empower the next generation of leaders in our movement.” The email linked to a video of first lady Michelle Obama thanking supporters for the work to get Mr. Obama elected and asking them to get involved in the next phase of the “our movement for change.” It did not include a request for a donation, only a button to click to provide a name, email and zip code. The mission of the new group, she said, will be to “build on the work we’ve already done by training and empowering the next generation of leaders and supporting the grassroots organizing you want to do on the issues that matter most to your community and to our country.” In a different fundraising pitch last week, Mr. Messina seemed to indicate that the group would be much more of a top-down organization designed to help pass Mr. Obama’s agenda and secure his legacy than helping communities across the country organize around local issues. He told supporters he would discuss how the use of millions of dollars in leftover campaign cash at an “Obama Legacy Conference” this weekend during inauguration events. There are restrictions on the inauguration committee using money raised during the campaign. Mr. Obama is the first president in history to continue fundraising for his campaign after the election was over — at least since the late 1970s when the newly established Federal Election Commission started keeping records of such things. Since Election Day, Obama for America has produced at least two web videos showcasing the president’s record and including “donate” buttons users can click. Although most of the staffers have gone on to other jobs, the campaign still holds onto one of its most valuable asset — lists of millions of emails of supporters and volunteers, which the new organization can use to help mobilize grassroots support for the president’s agenda. Vice President Joe Biden earlier this week hinted at the creation of the new organization by saying he and the president could rely on campaign resources to help generate public support for the administration’s new package of gun control proposals. As a 501(c)4 organization, the transformed Obama campaign will operate independently of Priorities USA, the pro-Obama super PAC that tried to compete with Republican-aligned groups that collected millions of dollars in unlimited contributions to support Republican nominee Mitt Romney’s campaign for president. Even though it was run by former Obama aides and had the backing of former President Bill Clinton, Priorities USA struggled to attract multimillion dollar donations. Bill Burton, one of two co-founders, just joined the Democratic-leaning public affairs firm Global Strategy Group. All told, Priorities USA spent at least $66 million on attack ads, much of it paid for by a small group of investors, trial lawyers and labor unions. But the super PAC supporting Mitt Romney, Restore Our Future, spent $143 million with American Crossroads, which supported Mr. Romney and Republican candidates generally, spending another $176 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Government watchdogs groups were already lamenting the president’s decision to accept unlimited corporate donations to fund his inauguration celebration. The creation of Mr. Messina’s new tax-exempt group, combined with what critics call Mr. Obama’s previous flip-flops on limiting special interest influence in Washington, has left many watchdogs wary. “The creation of a nonprofit group with close ties to the president after he has made a pitch to corporations for funds could raise some eyebrows on how donations from corporations might influence federal policy,” said Public Citizen’s Lisa Gilbert. “It’s a red flag when it comes to influence.” Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.Firebrand conservative commentator Ann Coulter defended a recent controversial tweet in a heated exchange with Yahoo News Chief Investigative Correspondent Michael Isikoff on Tuesday night. Coulter roused support as well as plenty of outrage on Twitter Monday night when she posited, “If only people with at least 4 grandparents born in America were voting, Trump would win in a 50-state landslide.” {snip} If only people with at least 4 grandparents born in America were voting, Trump would win in a 50-state landslide. — Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) November 8, 2016 When asked by Isikoff during Yahoo’s election-night coverage to explain the meaning of her tweet, Coulter bemoaned the backlash as “the most amazing display of political correctness.” “MSNBC and CNN talk about how the Hispanic vote is going, how the black vote is going, how the Muslim vote is going, how the women’s vote is going,” said Coulter. “I comment on a demographic that is so hated that merely stating something, I am called every name in the book. That’s one demographic you can’t even state something about.” {snip} Watch the full interview below: Original Article Share ThisIf you grew up on Tobacco Road, or had any affinity to Duke or UNC, or even just watched this particular college basketball game, you remember it–the night Duke’s Justise Winslow kicked a guy right in the dick on national television. * March 7, 2015. Third-ranked Duke was riding a ten-game winning streak into Chapel Hill, where they’d face a feisty and talented UNC squad. With the Blue Devils having narrowly edged out a victory over their rivals just a few weeks prior, and major ACC Championship and NCAA tournament implications hanging in the balance, the Saturday night showdown was already cooking at a fever pitch. Editor’s Note: All quotes are—to the best of our knowledge—fake. The Prelude One of the keys to Duke’s late-season run was its small lineup, which featured the 6’8” Winslow at power forward. The lineup’s improved spacing gave Winslow more freedom, but as a result, the team was–rather forebodingly–more dependent on Winslow’s aggressiveness. JUSTISE WINSLOW, Duke forward: I’d been playing well in the weeks leading up to the UNC game, playing with confidence. I felt damn near unstoppable. I was playing with insatiable rage and wanton disregard for safety, but I was 18, so it made sense to me. Damn right, I just used “wanton” in a sentence. They don’t call us “student-athletes” for nothing. MIKE KRZYZEWSKI, Duke head coach: I absolutely do not agree to participate in an interview. Please leave my office. JEFF CAPEL, Duke assistant coach: That game. Man. That was the kind of game that changes a man, you know? In these rivalry games, there’ll always be one or two plays that just defy explanation. You just hope they work in your favor, and that your guys don’t get hurt. Especially not their dicks. QUINN COOK, Duke guard: As the senior captain, I was responsible for preparing my teammates, getting them in the right mental state. Especially the young guns–you never know how they’ll react going into Chapel Hill. Some dudes are cool; some are amped. Crazy stuff can happen there. We knew Justise was a loose cannon, though. If something was going down, he was gonna be our guy. BRICE JOHNSON, UNC forward: Honestly, I thought it was just gonna be another game. A rivalry game, sure, but nothing out of the ordinary. No one wakes up in the morning assuming they’re gonna get kicked in the dick. That’s no way to go through life. CHUCK KLOSTERMAN, person who inexplicably appears in things like this: Most people who play basketball think that the sport is about putting a ball in a hoop. But to view the game through such a reductive lens is not only insufficient–it’s completely antithetical to James Naismith’s vision. The game of basketball isn’t about one specific designated outcome, but rather a complex web of potentialities, each stemming from the choices that the individual players make. And, for a while, we knew what these choices were: pass, shoot, dribble, foul. To kick a guy in the dick, though? That was new. That was exciting. In some ways, Winslow became the Jimi Hendrix of basketball that night. WINSLOW: Going into the game I had no idea what would transpire. That play, it wasn’t something we practiced. Hell, I never even played soccer growing up. You know those knee hammers that doctors use? Well, Marshall Plumlee had snuck one of those onto the bench for the game, and he kept hitting himself in the knees to stay occupied. Pretty inexcusable, yeah, but he’s like a Boo Radley kind of guy. No one really bothers to question him. MARSHALL PLUMLEE, Duke center [laughing pretty stupidly]: Yeah, I like those hammer things. Ha ha. WINSLOW: We were in a TV timeout right beforehand, and Marshall was sitting there, just hitting me in the knees for 60 seconds straight. When I ran back out on the court, my legs felt super springy, and I, well, I guess I just needed to stretch them out. The Kick With Duke trailing 33-29 late in the first half, Winslow drives to the bucket past UNC’s Justin Jackson. Brice Johnson, helping off of Duke’s Amile Jefferson, slides into the frame. JUSTIN JACKSON, UNC forward: Winslow drove by me, but I knew that we had plenty of rim protection, so I wasn’t too concerned. Does that make sense? It made sense at the time, I swear. Of course I think about that sequence now. I mean, if you could go back in time and prevent Hitler from kicking a guy in the dick, you would, right? AMILE JEFFERSON, Duke forward: I was wide open, and I’d been practicing that baseline jumper all year. So at first, yeah, I was pissed that he didn’t pass me the ball. But once I saw that gleam in Justise’s eye, I understood. A chance like that [to kick a guy square in the dick] only comes along once in a lifetime. As Winslow takes off for the bucket, he extends his left leg, making what appears to be contact on Johnson’s genitals. He’s whistled for an offensive foul, nothing more. WINSLOW [laughing]: Are we on the record or off it? But to answer your question: yeah, I kicked him in the dick. JOHNSON: Yeah, it hurt. Of course it f—— hurt. BRIAN KERSEY, head official: I was stationed on the baseline, so I got shielded on the play, and I could only call it as a traditional offensive foul. The officials got together and discussed it. We were pretty sure that Winslow had kicked Johnson in the dick, but we couldn’t think of the correct hand signal to convey this to the crowd. The charge and block signs are so elegant, you know? How do you maintain that elegance when dealing with something as brutal as a dick kick? ROY WILLIAMS, UNC head coach: You could hear the crunch of Johnson’s dick from the sidelines. KLOSTERMAN: As soon as Winslow kicked Johnson, the question had shifted from “Why did he do that?” to “Why hasn’t everyone else been doing that?” It was a whole new way of seeing the interplay between one man’s shoe and another man’s dick. It’s not a stretch to see Winslow’s kick as the lashing out of an entire generation, one beaten down by the Taylor Swiftian monoculture. It was a kick to, both literally and effectually, create some space. ESPN twice shows the replay of Winslow uncorking a solid blow on Johnson’s, well, johnson. CAPEL: We didn’t initially have a good view on the bench, but the replay? It was just savage. JAY BILAS, ESPN color commentator: Watching the play in real time, I actually threw up in my mouth a bit. When I watched the slow-motion replays–I mean, forget it. I vomited all over press row. CHRISTIAN LAETTNER, heralded investor: Should’ve been a no-call. JOHN BRENKUS, Host, “ESPN Sport Science”: When I saw that kick, I winced THREE SEPARATE TIMES, which is TWO MORE WINCES than when I see an AVERAGE PLAY. I called my editor and, AFTER SEVEN RINGS, he picked up. I told him that I wanted to run a segment on the kinetic force of Winslow’s foot on the guy’s dick, and my editor said “no” in 0.3 SECONDS–ABOUT AS FAST AS THE RELEASE on a STEPH CURRY JUMPER. WILLIAMS: People asked me why Johnson stayed in the game, like they don’t know why. I mean, do they really think our training staff has a dick specialist? It was incredible, though. Johnson staying in there was like Kirk Gibson in the World Series, except, he didn’t have a bruised knee or whatever. He had a bruised dick. JOHNSON: I’m not going to say exactly what I did at halftime. That’d be too graphic. He eats healthier now, but let’s just say it’s a good thing that Kennedy Meeks’ locker was stuffed with pints of ice cream last year. You figure it out. KENNEDY MEEKS, UNC center: Wait, he did what? The Aftermath After the kick, an emboldened Winslow scored nine of Duke’s next 11 points, keeping his team in the game before the Blue Devils pulled away late. Duke would only lose once more that season, going on a run that culminating in the team’s fifth National Championship in April. JEFFERSON: We honestly had no idea that the kick would be such a huge sensation. COOK: We’d get tweets and Facebook messages from all over, these inspired elementary- and middle-school players winding up and kicking their opponents in the dick. The hashtag #KITD started all because of Justise. JEFFERSON: For a while, the most popular Make-A-Wish for kids at the Duke University Hospital was to kick Brice Johnson–in the dick, that is. After a while, the hospital staff had to find out-of-work mall Santas to fill in for Brice. WINSLOW: It doesn’t make me feel good, but Coach would always talk about having that spark. Sometimes it’s slapping the floor on defense. Sometimes it’s a dunk. That night, it was kicking a guy in the dick. COOK: For me, there’s no question: if Justise doesn’t kick that guy in the dick, we’re not putting up another banner in Cameron Indoor Stadium at the end of the year. KRZYZEWSKI: I’m calling the police if you don’t leave my office. KLOSTERMAN: Today, the question shouldn’t be whether it was a great dick kick, which it–in both the absolute and relative senses of the word “great”–was. The question is whether in our temporal rush to anoint this kick as one of the best ever, we are actually doing it a disservice by disregarding the underratedness of its place in the pantheon alongside other Mt. Rushmore dick kicks, a dismissal that, in our pursuit of the defining post-Shavlik Randolph cultural zeitgeist, devolves our relationship with the dick kick into one which […] Ed. note: At this point we were forced to sedate Mr. Klosterman, and his commentary soon became unintelligible. KERSEY: We actually came up with a symbol for a “dick kick” foul in the offseason. It’s pretty explicit. Sure, people rag on Pitino for being a pervert, but he’s got one hell of a creative mind. JOHNSON: It was tough, trying to recover from that play. It basically became my identity. We used to go hang out at the mall, at the local Foot Locker during the summer. I couldn’t go in there until September–seeing all of those sneakers was too traumatic. WINSLOW: I really hope the best for Brice. We text pretty often now. JOHNSON: Every week he sends me two emojis: a foot and a cucumber. It’s like, c’mon man! PLUMLEE: Ha ha ha. That is funny. JOHNSON: I was hurting, emotionally and obviously physically, as a result of getting kicked in the dick. Unless you’re some kind of sadist, there’s no training for that kind of pain. Fortunately, some of Chris Paul’s opponents have reached out to me, and we can understand and support one another. WINSLOW: It’s crazy, thinking back like this. It’s really been almost a year since that play. Everyone today comes up to me and asks the same question: Would I do it again? I’m a different person now. A better person, I hope. Winslow then reaches into his bag and pulls out a steel-toed Air Jordan. He grins. Then again, if you aren’t kicking a dick or two, you aren’t trying. * Duke and UNC play tonight at 9 PM, in the first game between the two teams since the Winslow-Johnson encounter. Winslow now plays for the Miami Heat, while Johnson is in his senior year for the Tar Heels. Our thoughts are with Chuck Klosterman, as he gets the help he so desperately needs. Share this: TweetAmnesty International said a Guantanamo detainee accused of taking part in the 9/11 terror attacks may have been sodomized while in CIA custody and called on US authorities to provide medical care. In a letter made public on Wednesday, Amnesty International said Mustafa al-Hawsawi is suffering "painful and humiliating" rectal problems, which "may well be the result of torture by US government personnel: namely sodomy with a foreign object while in CIA custody." © AP Photo / Pentagon Publishes 200 Bush-Era Torture Pictures After ACLU Lawsuit The rights group called on the Pentagon health affairs chief to provide better care for the Saudi national, who is one of the "9/11 Five" accused of plotting attacks that killed thousands of people on September 11, 2001. The letter, which became public one week after it was written, added that Hawsawi's lawyers determined he had "received only minimal symptomatic treatment, such as over-the-counter pain medicine, for many of his conditions." Pentagon spokesman Gary Ross declined to comment on the specifics of Hawsawi's case, but said that "all detainees are provided medical and
temperature at which you experienced life as a fetus. A forthcoming study in Social Science and Medicine shows that people who were in utero during the warmer months were more likely to die from this type of wintertime heart disease during cold periods. For the study, researchers from University of California at Irvine, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Mannheim, Germany examined 13,500 Swedes born in Uppsala, a town just north of Stockholm, between 1915 and 2002. They then matched up their birthdays with the outside temperatures during the times they were gestating.The early 21st-century has seen a remarkable intensification in feline ownership. These animals are no longer casual bystanders in our eco-systems. They have passed that tipping point to become a global environmental phenomenon. Crossing boundaries of class, race and geography, it could be said that the cat population now has the entire planet under its ever-watchful gaze. This surge has a peculiar overlap with the introduction of Chemtrails in our skies, which has also occurred in the last 16 to 20 years. While there is much debate about the intention of Chemtrails — with hypotheses ranging from aerial defense and depopulation to a broad plot to cripple Christianity — it’s clear that these dangerous pollutants are causing countless health problems for everyday people. In turn, these biological problems (including fatigue, asthma, skin rashes, hemorrhagic fever and immune system failure) have been witnessed in various animal populations, including domesticated dogs. Cats, curiously enough, appear to be completely immune to this urgent medical crisis. In fact, studies show that today’s cats are healthier now than ever. This is a perplexing proposition, particularly when you consider that cats occupy the same spaces as human beings and that many are indoor and outdoor animals. Their exposure to Chemtrail-laced air is certainly equivalent to that of people. Further complicating the issue, cats seem uniquely attuned to Chemtrail clouds and take a surreal interest in following the planes pass through the skies. Many pet owners have chanced upon their felines studying these ferocious feats of geoengineering with a countenance that some would venture to describe as bemused or delighted. So why might the cat population be immune? 1. Thick fur, padded feet and a skin rich in glycoproteins and saliva provide protection The dense coats of fur that provide cats sleeping comfort and warmth during the cold might naturally play a role in their Chemtrails impregnability. The animals are also well-known for thorough grooming rituals, which include covering their entire bodies with a saliva rich in unique proteins that have been formed through posttranslational modification. Posttranslational modification has been noted by scientists as a calculated defense against infections caused by foreign substances, such as barium, sulfur, aluminum, cadmium. These four elements also happen to be the most commonly suspected components of Chemtrails. 2. Consumption of Chemtrails-poisoned birds has helped them develop immunity Of all the creatures in the animal kingdom, avian species have the most immediate contact with Chemtrail sprays. Numerous reports have noted that certain species are dying off in a Silent Spring-type of scenario. As felines consume a great deal of birds, it would only stand to reason that they would be exposed to the post-digestive acids of these pollutants. As such, there is a great possibility that eating so many colonic acids would help their own immune systems adapt to the poisons. This is not the case for humans, however, as most of the chicken and duck that we eat is from the farm and not exposed to higher altitude air. 3. Their purpose may be to depopulate the skies so that pigeons can reign Recently, I wrote about a curious phenomenon. Observers the world over have been asking, “Where have all the baby pigeons gone?” The answer may be a wide-scale CIA/NSA scheme to monitor us in an inconspicuous way. It involves equipping this one species of bird with RFID chips. Cats themselves don’t feed on pigeons. They prefer smaller animals, such as finches and swallows, and by hunting these particular types, felines are helping make room for pigeons to expand and take over our cities. This would be a natural counterpart to Chemtrails propagation and it would stand to reason that felines may have been bred or inoculated with some biological defense mechanism to Chemtrials. 4. Cats may be part of the conspiracy, as sentinels here to record Chemtrail efficacy One theory that has been circulating the internet lately is that cats are alien to this planet. This is supported by many ancient inconsistencies, such as the fact that felines did not exist in recorded history before the Egyptians and that the Egyptians described them as a “gift from the heavens.” It has been suggested that cats are actually alien sentinels sent here to record human activity. Additionally, animal behaviorists and sound engineers have yet to quantify the base tonality of a cat purr. Some scientists believe that these emissions of noise might be a way for these creatures to transmit information from their locales to a higher power/alternate dimension/Illuminati command system. While this idea may sound far-fetched, it does explain cats’ wistful attitude towards Chemtrail planes. 5. Cat dander and cat meat may actually be the key ingredient of Chemtrails The grand debate over what, precisely, Chemtrails are composed of may never be solved. For many people, however, there is a strange overlap between the symptoms of Chemtrails exposure and how their bodies react to cat allergens. Skin rashes, shortness of breath and brain fog are common complaints. In fact, feline dander (or meat) would be a readily accessible fuel source for such a scheme as cats are now everywhere on our planet and their appearances/disappearances are not conspicuous. (Some have even noted that cat meat is so widely available today, it could even solve our international hunger problem.) An implausible secret symbol also appears to attest to this theory. One of the first and most successful of the internet “memes” is an image called, “Nyan Cat.” This figure appears to represent a cat spraying the skies with a rainbow of Chemtrails. Richard Dawkins, a noted militant atheist and member of the Illuminati elite, was the man who actually conceived of the idea of a “meme,” coining the word way back in 1976. Was this Chemtrail cat meme meant as a message from Illuminati leadership to the other powers that control this planet? Has the dissemination of Nyan Cat as a popular facet of the contemporary internet weakened our own psychological defenses against the truth of this conspiracy with sarcasm and doubt? Whatever the ultimate goal, our awareness is the one thing they fear most.RIO DE JANEIRO — Manuel Neuer is the latest in a line of German goalkeepers regarded by many as the best in the world. German soccer fans often reminisce about the greatness of Sepp Maier and Harald Schumacher and Oliver Kahn, and if Neuer helps Germany win the World Cup final on Sunday, his place in history — even in the middle of his career — will be secure. Yet there is also a darker side to the lineage of German goalkeepers, an incident that lingers over German fans and also started Neuer along his current path. It happened in 2009. Neuer was playing for the German under-21 national team, not even on the radar of Germany Coach Joachim Löw. Löw’s preferred starting goalkeeper as the team headed toward the 2010 World Cup was Robert Enke, a tall, rangy player who spent time with top clubs like Barcelona, Benfica and Fenerbahce before becoming a mainstay at the German club Hannover 96. On Nov. 10, a Tuesday, Ronald Reng, one of Enke’s close friends and a writer who had been working with Enke on a book, called Enke on his cellphone. Enke was normally friendly and warm, but on this day, Reng recalled in an interview, Enke was brusque and curt. His voice sounded strained.This release is available in French. A research team led by Dr. Robert Hess from McGill University and the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (RI-MUHC) has used the popular puzzle video game Tetris in an innovative approach to treat adult amblyopia, commonly known as "lazy eye". By distributing information between the two eyes in a complementary fashion, the video game trains both eyes to work together, which is counter to previous treatments for the disorder (e.g. patching). This medical breakthrough provides direct evidence that alleviating suppression of the weaker eye, by forcing both eyes to cooperate, increases the level of plasticity in the brain and allows the amblyopic brain to relearn. The research is published in the prestigious journal Current Biology. Amblyopia is the most common cause of visual impairment in childhood, affecting up to 3 per cent of the population. It is caused by poor processing in the brain, which results in suppression of the weaker eye by the stronger eye. Previous treatments for the disorder, which have focused largely on covering the stronger eye in order to force the weaker eye to work, have proven only partially successful in children and have been ineffective in adults. "The key to improving vision for adults, who currently have no other treatment options, was to set up conditions that would enable the two eyes to cooperate for the first time in a given task," says Dr. Robert Hess, senior author of the paper and Director of Research Department of Ophthalmology at the RI-MUHC and at McGill University. According to Dr. Hess and his colleagues, the adult human brain has a significant degree of plasticity and this provides the basis for treating a range of conditions where vision has been lost as a result of a disrupted period of early visual development in childhood. The researchers examined the potential of treating amblyopic adults using the video game Tetris, which involves connecting different shaped blocks as they fall to the ground. "Using head-mounted video goggles we were able to display the game dichoptically, where one eye was allowed to see only the falling objects, and the other eye was allowed to see only the ground plane objects," explains Dr. Hess, who also serves as director of McGill Vision Research. "Forcing the eyes to work together, we believed, would improve vision in the lazy eye." The researchers tested a sample of 18 adults with amblyopia. Nine participants played the game monocularly with the weaker eye, while the stronger eye was patched; the other nine played the same game dichoptically, where each eye was allowed to view a separate part of the game. After two weeks, the group playing the dichoptic game showed a dramatic improvement in the vision of the weaker eye as well as in 3-D depth perception. When the monocular patching group, who had showed only a moderate improvement, was switched to the new dichoptic training, the vision of this group also improved dramatically. The suitability of this treatment in children will be assessed later this year in a clinical trial across North America. ### About this study: This work was supported by a grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). This Correspondence was co-authored by Jinrong Li, Daming Deng and Minbin Yu (State Key Laboratory of Ophthalmology, Zhongshan Ophthalmic Centre, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China); Benjamin Thompson (Department of Optometry and Vision Science, University of Auckland, New Zealand); Lily Y.L. Chan (School of Optometry, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China); and Robert F. Hess (Department of Ophthalmology, McGill University and RI-MUHC, Montreal, Canada). Contacts: Julie Robert Public Affairs and Strategic Planning McGill University Health Centre 514 934 1934 ext. 71381 julie.robert@muhc.mcgill.ca muhc.ca \| facebook.com/cusm.muhcAlabama has landed its third commitment of the week in 2017 three-star center Galin Smith of Clinton (Miss.). The Tide staff was looking for size, and got it in the 6-foot-10, 220-pounder, as he chose Bama over LSU, UAB, SMU and Tulane, among others. "Just how well I can see myself fitting into Coach Avery's (Johnson) system," Smith told BamaOnLine of why he committed. "As well as the academic support and family atmosphere that is present." Smith officially visited Tuscaloosa in September for the Kent State game. "It was definitely on my visit when I knew," he said of when he decided on Alabama. Be sure to enjoy VIP access to BamaOnLine with our Buy 1 Month, Get 2 Months FREE promotional offer. Johnson likes what Smith brings to the table “He loves my motor and the qualities that a lot of players don't have,” Smith said. When Smith told the staff he wanted to commit before his announcement on Friday, the Bama head coach couldn't contain his excitement. "Coach Avery and his wife were on FaceTime dancing and yelling Roll Tide," Smith said. Earlier in September, the Tide sent Johnson and assistants Antoine Pettway and John Pelphrey to see the Magnolia State product, clearly prioritizing the big man. Smith is rated the No. 23 center and the No. 192 overall player in the country, per the industry-generated 247Sports Composite. He was trending to Alabama at 100 percent on the 247Sports Crystal Ball. The commitment gives Alabama the No. 22 class in the nation, per the 247Sports Team Rankings. Smith plans to sign in November. For more news on Alabama sports and recruiting, follow BamaOnLine on Twitter. What's next for the Tide? Make sure you're in the loop by signing up for our FREE BamaOnLine Newsletter.Drunk and asleep men are rarely, if ever, beautiful and sexually appealing, but this is not the case with this sexy animal from ancient Greece. This monumental statue is not only intriguing for its aesthetics, but also for its obscure origins, stormy history and baffling iconography. At the first glance, the sculpture presents a muscular man, sleeping on a rock in a very provocative position. He is in his prime, with a beautiful body, captivating face and irresistible sexuality. After a closer look, we can identify figure as Faun or Satyr by a discreet tail on the left side of his body, and ivy and grapes entangled in his wavy hair. Also, a flashy pose with exposed genitals in which the Barberini Faun was depicted, is often attributed to fauns and their animal nature, as creatures free from human social conventions and restrictions. Fauns and satyrs were mythical creatures, half human half beast, the best known as companions of Greek god of wine – Dionysus, and participants in his parties. Very often they were shown as comical characters with distinct animal features such as tails, pointy ears or sometimes horse legs. They often struck acrobatic poses or were found chasing terrified females in pursuit of sexual attention. It was not common to present fauns as a solitary and fully asleep figures. Barberini Faun is sometimes named Drunken Satyr, highlighting the feature that was often associated with this character. The right hand bent over the head has been associated in the iconography of ancient art as a gesture of being asleep after exhausted activities like fights, exercises or heavy drinking. This passive role was quite unique for fauns, as usually they were depicted as dynamic creatures, and even when drunk they remained active. A frequent sexual aggressor was shown here in a vulnerable and passive situation. What also singles out Barberini Faun from other ancient presentations of his character is his monumental size, almost human physiognomy, heroic body and a unique scene presenting solitary Faun, who drunken fell asleep on the rock. The posture itself also combines contrasting qualities, relaxation and tension. Even asleep the body shows edginess, restlessness – parted lips, tense face muscles, slight angle between legs and torso, and a distinctive curve in the upper body. All these unique features may indicate this statue was dedicated not to an ordinary faun, but to a mythical character. One of the theories points to a faun (satyr), who was traitorously intoxicated and captured by King Mydas in one of the ancient myths. The exceptional features of this sculpture deviate from the iconography of the classical period and indicate the Hellenistic period as the time of its origin. It hasn’t been established if Barberini Faun is an original Greek sculpture or Roman copy. The statue was found without legs and left arm in the moat of the Castel Sant’ Angelo (formerly Mausoleum of the Emperor Hadrian) in Rome during its renovation in 1620. In 1628, it was added to the collection of the Barberini family, who owned it with a few gaps until 1814, when the statue was sold to Prince Ludwig of Bavaria. After many difficulties caused by Italian officials who tried to block the statue from leaving Italy, in 1820 the Faun was moved to Germany and installed in the Glyptothek in Munich. Where it remains to this day. Please note: To avoid writing a whole monography, the essay is very simplified. Some matters like differences between fauns and satyrs, or the identity of creature captured by King Midas were not explored deeper on purpose, but for all those who are more interested in the topic I recommend the following article. Jean Sorabella 2007: A Satyr for Midas: The Barberini Faun and Hellenistic Royal Patronage. Classical Antiquity, Vol. 26, No. 2 (October), pp. 219-248. Find out more:When the North American Free Trade Agreement took effect in the mid-1990s, enabling goods to flow across Canada, Mexico and the United States with minimal impediments, factory workers in American industrial communities became vulnerable to job losses as production flowed south. When China entered the World Trade Organization in 2001, gaining the right to export its wares around the globe, factory workers in every industrial nation were rendered vulnerable. Trade economists will say with justification that the inclusion of China and Mexico in the global trading system promoted economic growth, increased consumer choice, lowered prices on a variety of goods and allowed companies in wealthy countries to export more of their own wares. Yet if the gains of trade were broad, the pain befalling communities directly in the path of China’s export juggernaut proved intense and poorly cushioned by government policies. A voluminous body of economic literature has in recent years brought home just how intense and damaging the China shock has been in the United States alone. The distrust left after that shock, and anger over the broader workings of trade, have transformed politics in many major economies. Rage over factory closures in the American heartland propelled the rise of Donald J. Trump. Such sentiments fueled Britain’s vote to leave the European Union. Here is part of the explanation for the growth of right-wing populist parties in France, Germany, Hungary and elsewhere. Now, even a deal between Europe and Canada looks unachievable. Trade theory teaches that exchange across borders is ultimately beneficial to both countries. Some groups will win and some will lose, but society as a whole benefits, provided the terms of trade are fair and regulated by legitimate governments operating transparently. Here is what is most extraordinary about the demise of the Canada-Europe pact: It did not involve wealthy countries and poor countries with different labor and environmental standards. It spanned two of the most affluent, democratic and regulated societies on earth. If the people in these two regions cannot trust one another to deliver policies that will make the unimpeded exchange of goods and services a desirable deal for both, then the merits of trade are effectively defunct in the political realm.This article is part of the Opinion Today newsletter. You can sign up here to receive more briefings and a guide to the section daily in your inbox. Democrats just can’t seem to win an election in the Trump era. With last night’s losses in Georgia and South Carolina, Democratic House candidates are zero-for-four in special elections against Republicans this year. It’s easy to look at this pattern and think that Democrats are doing something fundamentally wrong — that they can’t close the deal with voters and are destined to keep coming up short in next year’s midterms. But if that’s the easy conclusion, it’s also the wrong one. Politically, Democrats are doing fine for a party out of power. It obviously would have been better to have won one of last night’s races, especially given the hopes in Georgia. But the party still has a real chance to retake the House next year. A disappointing loss doesn’t change that fact.Image courtesy of Heather Neal I have an overweight toddler. Not something I thought I’d ever be saying when I was pregnant with my first child. I didn’t think I would need to be worried about such a thing, as I made sure everything I put in my body as I grew that little babe was as healthy as possible. I made sure to stay within the recommended weight gain guidelines for pregnancy, as I knew my being overweight could lead to the same in my son. I never thought I’d have to worry about my young child’s weight because my husband and I are both at a healthy weight ourselves. I never thought I’d have to worry about it because we worked so hard to teach my son good, healthy habits. We fed him veggies as his first foods, we don’t regularly eat sweets or junk, and we encourage active, physical play every single day. But here we are, almost three years later, with a child officially categorized as “obese.” As a dietitian, it hurts because I know the potential risks and struggles this could lead to later in his life, both physically and emotionally. But as a parent, it’s a different experience. Here’s what I’ve learned from having an overweight toddler. 1. Everyone judges It doesn’t matter so much which way they judge, but everyone has an opinion. From telling us not to worry, “It’s just baby fat,” to telling us we better hurry up and put him on a diet, we get an earful on a regular basis. To this day I still don’t understand why it’s anybody’s business or why people think it’s OK to share their unsolicited thoughts on the matter. I get judged if I don’t let him eat cupcakes; I get judged if I give him an extra snack. In the eyes of others, you can never win. Related: How I talked to my kid about his weight without body-shaming him 2. Sometimes doing things “right” isn’t enough This morning my son told me his favorite food is oatmeal. The other day it was red peppers. The kid chows down on hummus and grapes. (Not together. OK, sometimes together.) He eats healthier than 90% of adults I know. He never, ever stops moving. He would run and ride his bike all day if he could. So he eats well and he’s active; he’s still overweight. Sometimes it’s just not as easy as that. 3. Meal patterns matter more than amounts We’ve tried numerous approaches to eating habits and behaviors over the past few years, and we’ve learned in practice what I’ve always known in theory as a dietitian – patterns matter more than specifics. Establishing loose guidelines for how often we eat (and keeping those consistent) has brought about better results than controlling how much food he can have. If it’s “lunchtime,” let’s say, and he’s still hungry after finishing what’s on his plate, he gets more. If he’s just randomly asking for a snack “just because,” he waits until it’s really time to eat again. It helps establish routine and parameters without overruling the signals his body is sending. It can be hard to teach healthy habits without unintentionally teaching that some foods are “bad.” Creating a rhythm lets him understand this better. 4. It gets hard to judge what’s normal My son wasn’t always overweight. In fact, he was just the opposite. Diagnosed with failure to thrive as an infant, he was so tiny for so long. And then things flip-flopped and he starting growing and growing and growing. It was obvious how big he was, but it was refreshing because we could finally feel convinced he was well-nourished and not starving all the time. As his growth slowed, we were optimistic because he was finally “growing into” his weight. Then we were caught off guard at a doctor’s appointment when he’d actually gone up in weight on the growth chart, thus getting the obese rating. When you see opposite extremes, it gets hard to distinguish what’s normal and just different. Related: Is this the solution to childhood obesity? 5. You’re always worried it’s something else Like I said, he eats healthy and gets plenty of physical activity, yet he’s still overweight. That, in addition to previous health problems he had as an infant, gives us constant nagging in the very back of our minds that something else could be going on. When you couple that with the above (being unable to determine “normal”), it gets pretty hard not to worry all the time.SuperTux SuperTux is a 2D platformer game, inspired by Super Mario. Here, the main character is Tux, Linux’s pet, instead of Mario. You have to move (arrow keys), jump (space bar) and fire (CTRL key) in order to get to end of the map. The gameplay is very simular to Nintendo’s Super Mario. There are “Question boxes” with coins and special items, like a snowball (to grow), keys or a flower, which enables you to fire using CTRL. There are different types of enemies. All enemies can be destroyed if you jump on them, but some of them are tricky. Mr. Ice Block, for example, will only be disabled and if you touch him, it will slide. The games has a lot of maps. But if you think you’ll be bored after you have passed all the maps, then you’re wrong. SuperTux comes with a Level Editor. You can design your own maps using blocks and enemies from the game. Then you can play and share your maps. Install SuperTux on Haiku SuperTux is under the GNU GPLv2 license. It runs on Haiku thanks to the SDL libraries. It’s available on HaikuPorts official repo, but no binary packages are available yet. haikuporter --get-dependencies --no-dependencies supertuxGlobal Warming Scientist To Be Cross-examined Under Oath [2nd Amendment Texan] In the off chance you morons dont regularly stalk the Superior Court of the District of Columbia in search of noteworthy cases, Professor Michael Mann of Penn State filed suit in 2012 against, among others, National Review and Mark Steyn for something Mark wrote and NR published on its website (full disclosure I am an occasional contributor to several publications, including NROs Bench Memos). As NRs capable lawyers have confirmed, there seems to be no case here. But even if there was a case, who in their right mind would want Mark Steyn as a defendant? He beat the rap when hauled up in front of the Canadian Thought Police Human Rights Commission and thats the guy they pick to bully into silence? It brings to mind the thousands of air traffic controllers who were fired for walking off the job in the middle of a labor dispute with President Reagan: Even though we have no legal case, lets try to intimidate the only president who has served as head of a labor union. He wont know how to negotiate with a union and will buckle under the pressure! We cant lose! This suit has echoes of a similar controversy in Australia. Four scientists who had not been persuaded by Mr. Manns hockey stick asserted thus: The scientific community is now so polarised on the controversial issue of dangerous global warming that proper due diligence on the matter can only be achieved where competent scientific witnesses are cross-examined under oath and under the strictest rules of evidence. I never dreamed we would be able to get Mr. Mann to actually take the stand. NRs Rich Lowry nicely summarized this line of thinking: Usually, you dont welcome a nuisance lawsuit, because its a nuisance. It consumes time. It costs money. But this is a different matter in light of one word: discovery. If Mann sues us, the materials we will need to mount a full defense will be extremely wide-ranging. So if he files a complaint, we will be doing more than fighting a nuisance lawsuit; we will be embarking on a journalistic project of great interest to us and our readers. It appears from the complaint that Mr. Mann is demanding a jury trial. He might get it yet after 18 months of procedural absurdity the judge refused to dismiss the case. For 1st Amendment legal observers, this is the cue to get the popcorn because there is a smack down coming. In fact, charging people to have their photo taken outside the courthouse with Mr. Steyn could be part his fundraising to cover the crushing legal costs of defending the 1st Amendment (Mr. Steyn is being represented by different counsel than the other parties involved). I dont know if the DC Superior Court allows cameras, but I for one would pay to watch Mr. Mann being cross examined about global cooling or global warming or climate change or climate collapse or whatever it is being called this week. If science has proven that global warming is real, that its mans fault, and that man can fix it, why keep the proof a secret? In 2004, a scientist trying to recreate the data behind this hockey stick and other global warming claims met a brick wall by the keeper of the data. Climatic Research Units Phil Jones famously responded to the request by asking Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it? So it seems that the exercise of independently verifying a scientific discovery has turned into just taking the scientists word for it. Because Science. And also, Shut up. Let the discovery begin. The 2nd Amendment Texan writes and speaks about energy security, among other things, and has experience in both the traditional and renewable energy fields. You can follow him on Twitter: @MichaelJames357 Posted from draft by AndyImage: Jeff Kubina/Flickr. ING Bank's main data center in Bucharest, Romania, was severely damaged over the weekend during a fire extinguishing test. In what is a very rare but known phenomenon, it was the loud sound of inert gas being released that destroyed dozens of hard drives. The site is currently offline and the bank relies solely on its backup data center, located within a couple of miles' proximity. "The drill went as designed, but we had collateral damage", ING's spokeswoman in Romania told me, confirming the inert gas issue. Local clients were unable to use debit cards and to perform online banking operations on Saturday between 1PM and 11PM because of the test. "Our team is investigating the incident," she said. The purpose of the drill was to see how the data center's fire suppression system worked. Data centers typically rely on inert gas to protect the equipment in the event of a fire, as the substance does not chemically damage electronics, and the gas only slightly decreases the temperature within the data center. The gas is stored in cylinders, and is released at high velocity out of nozzles uniformly spread across the data center. According to people familiar with the system, the pressure at ING Bank's data center was higher than expected, and produced a loud sound when rapidly expelled through tiny holes (think about the noise a steam engine releases). The bank monitored the sound and it was very loud, a source familiar with the system told us. "It was as high as their equipment could monitor, over 130dB". Sound means vibration, and this is what damaged the hard drives. The HDD cases started to vibrate, and the vibration was transmitted to the read/write heads, causing them to go off the data tracks. "The inert gas deployment procedure has severely and surprisingly affected several servers and our storage equipment," ING said in a press release. There is still very little known about how sound can cause hard drive failure. One of the first such experiments was made by engineer Brendan Gregg, in 2008, while he was working for Sun's Fishworks team. He recorded a video in which he explains how shouting in a data center can result in hard drives malfunction. In ING Bank's case, it was "like putting a storage system next to a [running] jet engine," a source told me. Researchers at IBM are also investigating data center sound-related inert gas issues. "[T]he HDD can tolerate less than 1/1,000,000 of an inch offset from the center of the data track—any more than that will halt reads and writes", experts Brian P. Rawson and Kent C. Green wrote in a paper. "Early disk storage had much greater spacing between data tracks because they held less data, which is a likely reason why this issue was not apparent until recently." Siemens also published a white paper a year ago saying that its tests show that "excessive noise can have a negative impact on HDD performance". Researchers said this negative impact may even begin at levels below 110dB. "It can now be established with a high degree of certainty that the faults in storage systems as a result of an inert gas extinguishing systems discharge were caused by the impact of high noise levels on the hard disk drives," according to Siemens. The Bank said it required 10 hours to restart its operation due to the magnitude and the complexity of the damage. A cold start of the systems in the disaster recovery site was needed. "Moreover, to ensure full integrity of the data, we've made an additional copy of our database before restoring the system," ING's press release reads. Over the next few weeks, every single piece of equipment will need to be assessed. ING Bank's main data center is compromised "for the most part", a source told us.Two judges said assaults on jurors and courthouse employees, combined with conditions, including the stench of excrement and urine, are creating a frightening atmosphere around the courthouse at Third and James in Seattle. Two King County Superior Court judges are asking for help cleaning up the courthouse at Third Avenue and James Street after they say two jurors and half a dozen employees have been assaulted. The judges, Laura Inveen and Jim Rogers, acknowledged Tuesday that there are difficult underlying circumstances contributing to the unsanitary and potentially frightening atmosphere around the courthouse. They — along with King County Sheriff John Urquhart — also recognized that there are two elements at play: crime and the fear of crime, with the latter being just as likely to keep people away as the former. The nearby blocks host most of the city’s homeless-shelter beds and many of its social-service outlets, which draw those who need help and the people who prey on them. That’s nothing new, Rogers said. But, for whatever reasons, things have gotten worse over the past few years and jurors and potential jurors report being afraid to go to the courthouse, the judges said. The judges said they have started hearing from jurors who want to do their civic jury duty at the county’s superior courthouse in Kent because they don’t want to come to the downtown courthouse. “I’ve never seen it this bad,” Rogers said in a Tuesday morning presentation to the Metropolitan King County Council’s committee on government accountability and oversight. Inveen told the committee about two incidents, one in late May and one in June, in which jurors were attacked in separate incidents outside the courthouse’s Third Avenue entrance. On other occasions, Inveen said, employees have been spat upon, slammed against a wall or punched. Although cleaning and patrolling the area immediately surrounding the courthouse would not address some of the deep-seated issues faced by denizens of the space, it would send a signal that somebody was paying attention, she said. She and Rogers asked the county to take immediate steps to clean up the courthouse with a daily power-wash of the surrounding sidewalks, which reek of urine and excrement. They also asked that the county empty trash cans more frequently, remove bus-stop benches, remove tents from the adjoining park and increase the presence of law enforcement — not just to arrest people but to deter crime. Another suggestion was closing the Third Avenue entrance and reopening the one on Fourth. Seattle Police Capt. Mike Teeter, commander of the West Precinct, said that police patrol the area heavily and that while there are certainly people in crisis, or need, who behave in ways that may make others “uncomfortable,” there is often no criminal activity involved. Statistically, Teeter said, a person is actually slightly less likely to be assaulted near the courthouse than in some other areas of the city. He also said that police are not able to address some of the things that may be intimidating to occasional visitors, such as seeing someone standing on the street corner and yelling. Though it makes people “uncomfortable,” he said, it’s not a crime. Brian Wetzel, a Port Orchard resident who was passing through the neighborhood on his way to the airport, understood the concerns. He said the area seemed “kind of seedy.” But Renee Winget, a “permanent resident” of the park, scoffed later Tuesday at the idea that the patch of land near the courthouse was any worse than anywhere else. The area may look a little rough at the edges, she said, “but there’s nothing to be afraid of out here. The people who are afraid probably just haven’t experienced homelessness, but experience is a great teacher.” Seattle resident Mary Hendrickson said she’d been homeless for a time and had no fear of the people who hang out near the courthouse. Compared to other gatherings, the folks at Muscatel Meadows — as the park is sometimes called — are actually a “pretty docile group,” Hendrickson said. “Sometimes there will be yelling and drinking,” she said, “but they’re not intimidating to me.” Some committee members expressed concern about addressing the symptoms of the area’s problems without getting to the cause. Councilmember Larry Gossett said he didn’t like the idea of power-washing the sidewalks because it brought back images of the use of hoses against civil-rights activists. Another council member, Claudia Balducci, suggested that the county consider using social-service employees in partnership with police. Urquhart said he has a front-row seat to the activities on Third from his office. And he agreed with the judges that it’s gotten worse in recent years. He told the committee he could put two deputies outside the courthouse for four to five hours several days a week for about $8,000 a month and he cited an old saying. “When you’re up to your keister in alligators, it’s not the time to drain the swamp,” he said, urging the committee to respond immediately. While no official action was taken, the county’s administrative officer, Caroline Whalen, and the facilities manager assured committee members that a stepped-up schedule of power washing and garbage cleanup would begin immediately. Though Inveen said she was not confident
airport was still open, however. The St. George airport handles seven flights a day. Both Cornejo and Hedglin were with the Colorado Army National Guard. Hedglin has been part time with the Guard since 2008, said Colorado National Guard spokesman Capt. Darin Overstreet. He was a "food service specialist," or a cook, he said. Hedglin participated in traditional National Guard drills, but was never deployed, Overstreet said. Cornejo was a full-time National Guard member, joining in 2006 and becoming an officer in 2011. She was part of the 100 Missile Defense Brigade, Overstreet said. As to why Hedglin fled from Colorado Springs to St. George, some officials close to the case have speculated he was likely familiar with the airport and had flown in and out of St. George while working for SkyWest. The airline's headquarters are in St. George. However, there was no official explanation Tuesday why Hedglin had fled to St. George or what he planned to do with the plane once he took off. Hedglin reportedly also has relatives who live in southern Utah. Contributing: Alex Cabrero, Andrew Wittenberg, Jed Boal × Photos Related StoriesA satellite view of Antarctica from an undated NASA handout obtained by Reuters Feb. 6, 2012. (NASA via Reuters) In two new studies, scientists say that the vast ice continent of Antarctica seems to have given up tremendous volumes of ice — even sprouting considerable plant life — during an era over 10 million years ago when concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide don’t seem to have been all that much higher than they are now. That period was known as the Miocene. And during its early and middle phases, between 23 and 14 million years ago, carbon dioxide concentrations are believed to have sometimes reached around 500 parts per million or somewhat higher — not so very far from the 400 parts per million (and rising) where we stand today. During this same era, finds the research, the continent is believed to have lost volumes of ice equivalent to tens of meters of sea level rise around the globe. Overall, Antarctica currently contains enough ice to raise seas by some 60 meters, or 200 feet, were it to melt entirely. [Seas are now rising faster than they have in 2,800 years, scientists say] “It’s doing it during this time interval when CO2 levels are not all that high,” says David Harwood, one of the study’s authors and a geologist at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. “It’s showing that dynamic behavior of advance and retreat under pretty modest CO2 concentrations.” The paper therefore infers that there the ice sheet may be quite sensitive to atmospheric carbon dioxide at levels not far from where we are now. Or as the scientists put it in their final sentence: “Given current atmospheric Co2 levels have risen above 400 ppm and are projected to go higher, paleoclimate reconstructions such as this one for the early to mid-Miocene imply an element of inevitability to future polar warming, Antarctic ice sheet retreat, and sea level rise.” The totality of the work was published in two separate papers Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In one of them, Richard Levy of New Zealand’s GNS Science, Harwood, and a large team of international colleagues presented their results from analysis of the ANDRILL-2A drill core, a more than half mile long core of ocean mud and sediment extracted near the U.S. Antarctic base McMurdo Station, as part of a multinational scientific collaboration to learn more about Antarctica’s deep past. Meanwhile, Edward Gasson of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and four colleagues simultaneously published the results of a sophisticated new computer simulation of Antarctica that, they said, could reproduce the ice behavior implied by the massive core. “Finally, our understanding of physical processes and our knowledge of the shape of the Antarctic continent beneath the ice — determined through decades of data collection — reproduce conditions that match important records like ANDRILL,” said Jamin Greenbaum, an Antarctic researcher and research associate at the University of Texas at Austin who led research last year finding a key vulnerability in the gigantic Totten glacier of East Antarctica, but was not involved in the current study. “Results like these will give us added confidence in predictive models meant to forecast future sea level rise.” The ANDRILL-2A drill core itself can only be called a treasure trove of information about Antarctica’s deep past. It was extracted from a floating ice platform over the ocean about 20 miles offshore, not far from the TransAntarctic Mountains, a vast range dividing East and West Antarctica. Scientists can gather large volumes of information about past seas and climates from such an object, by studying the layers of sediment that settled over eons. These contain not only records of past animal and plant life — ranging from the shells of tiny organisms to residues of pollen and spores — but also isotopes of the element oxygen, which have long known to provide a telling record of the state of the planet’s oceans and ice sheets. “When the ice sheets grow, they grow with a greater amount of Oxygen 16 in them, it’s the more volatile, reactive one,” says Harwood. “So when you store ice on land, the oceans get enriched in Oxygen 18.” The reason is that Oxygen 16 is lighter and evaporates more easily from the ocean. Ice sheets are fed, over long time periods, by the falling of snow on top of them – snow that originates as evaporation off the seas and falls as precipitation. The more that happens, the more Oxygen 16 is stored in ice sheets, and the more Oxygen 18 is remaining in the ocean. When it comes to learning what Antarctica — the planet’s not-quite-sleeping ice giant — is capable of, of particular interest to scientists is a period called the Mid-Miocene climatic optimum, some 14 to 15 million years ago. Targeting this period as well as millions of years before it in the drill core, the researchers observed evidence suggesting that Antarctica’s ice both advanced much farther out into the sea than where it now rests during cool phases, but also retreated much farther inland than we see at present. And seas fell, or rose, accordingly. A handout photograph provided by NASA shows glaciers and mountains in the evening sun during an Operation IceBridge research flight, returning from West Antarctica, on Oct. 2014. (Michael Studinger/EPA) As it changed, the ice sheet left currently ice-crushed coastlines exposed, providing a much more hospitable environment for life plant and animal life — and this seems to have occurred repeatedly during times when carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere were at their highest. (Carbon dioxide and temperature changes at that time were not caused by humans, of course — rather, they resulted from more slow-moving changes in the orbit of the Earth.) “The fact that we’re at 400 already, and preindustrial we were at 280, we’ve already gone 120,” says Harwood, referring to parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. “So we only need to go that far again until we reach this potential for the variability that we’re seeing in the Miocene, in terms of the way the ice sheet can respond.” The drill core, he said, suggests not only that Antarctica probably gave up the ice contained in West Antarctica during those periods (capable of raising present day seas by about 10 feet), but also much ice from the larger East Antarctica. Granted, there’s still considerable uncertainty about just how much carbon was in the air at that time. And at least one Antarctic scientist expressed skepticism about the kinds of inferences that can be made about our planetary future from a study like this. “I think the further back you go, the larger the envelope of uncertainty in terms of extrapolating forward,” said Jonathan Bamber, an Antarctic researcher based at the University of Bristol in the UK who reviewed the paper for the Post. Bamber didn’t challenge the results itself, but merely suggested that the planet was so different 15 million years ago that other factors than carbon dioxide concentrations could have played a major role in what happened to Antarctica. For instance, Bamber noted, the Isthmus of Panama, connecting North and South America, didn’t exist then (though some recent research potentially suggests otherwise). That’s a factor that Bamber called “quite important, because it allowed heat transport between the Pacific and Atlantic,” which in turn could have changed key features of the workings of the Earth’s climate. One thing that remains very unclear from the study is how fast Antarctica can change. The time scales involved in the new research are simply too large to allow for reducing the current findings down to human terms. “One of the things they can’t really resolve particularly well is these changes, how rapid they are, if it’s tens of thousands of years, or hundreds of thousands of years,” said Bamber. Still, the climate modeling study that was published at the same time as the study of the deep ocean drill core found that by adding several new processes and features to the simulation which speed up the rate of Antarctic ice collapse, it was possible to reproduce the presumed ice loss from Antarctica during the Miocene with only 500 parts per million or so of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Those factors include so-called “hydrofracture” — in which Antarctic ice shelves, which stabilize inland ice, shatter and fall apart as water pools on their surfaces, much as happened in recent memory with the Larsen A and Larsen B ice shelves — and “cliff collapse,” in which the sheer walls of ice that linger behind after hydrofracturing also crumble, due to the relative weakness of ice as a material. Researchers like the University of Massachusetts, Amherst’s Edward Gasson and Rob DeConto have been exploring including these processes in their modeling of how the ice sheets work in order to better understand their apparent changes in past eras, including several other prior warm periods besides the Miocene. “We’re adding and including new physical processes in these models, and the result of that is we’ve begun to be able to simulate with these models the kinds of changes in the ice sheets that the geologists see,” says DeConto. He continued: “We were able to generate sea level going up and down again, on the order of tens of meters, like 30 meters, without having to go to extremely high levels of CO2.” DeConto also cautioned that the Miocene is not a perfect analogue for our planet’s future – the key role of changes in the Earth’s orbit during this era pretty much ensures that. After all, it’s now us, not these orbital cycles, that are in the driver’s seat. Nonetheless, DeConto underscored that the new research does highlight, above all, that the Antarctic ice sheet can really respond significantly to changes in the composition of the atmosphere. “This isn’t a direct analogy for the future, but it’s just one more piece of evidence,” he said. More at Energy & Environment: The solution to climate change that has nothing to do with cars or coal We may have just seen a truly ominous new weather record It’s not just Flint: Poor communities across the U.S. live with ‘extreme’ polluters For more, you can sign up for our weekly newsletter here, and follow us on Twitter here.exhaustive is a library that guarantees that when building a parser, or some other computation that produces data, all possible constructors in a data type are considered. You can think of this library as providing a symmetry to GHC's built in -fwarn-incomplete-patterns compile time warning, although this library is stricter in that it produces compile time errors if a constructor is omitted. Usage of this library is intended to be straightforward, though admittedly the types might have you think the opposite! To understand this library, an example may be helpful. To begin with, consider a simple data type for a "boolean expressions" language: import qualified GHC.Generics as GHC data Expr = ETrue \| EFalse \| EIf Expr Expr Expr deriving ( Eq, GHC. Generic ) instance Generic Expr Note that we have to make our data type an instance of both GHC.Generics. Generic and Generics.SOP. Generic, though this only requires boiler-plate code. Next, we would like to build a parser for this language. Let's assume that we have access to a parsec -like library, where we have one basic combinator: symbol :: String -> Parser String Ordinarily, we would write our parser as parseExpr :: Parser Expr parseExpr = msum [ETrue <$ symbol "True",EFalse <$ symbol "False",EIf <$> symbol "if" > parseExpr <> symbol "then" > parseExpr <> symbol "else" > parseExpr ] However, nothing is making sure that we actually considered all constructors in Expr. We could just as well write parseExpr :: Parser Expr parseExpr = msum [ETrue <$ symbol "True",EFalse <$ symbol "False"] Although this is significantly less useful! Using exhaustive, we can get exhaustivity checks that we are at least considering all constructors: parseExpr :: Parser Expr parseExpr = produceFirst $ construct (\f -> f <$ symbol "True") : construct (\f -> f <$ symbol "False") :* construct (\f -> f <$ > symbol "if" > parseExpr <> symbol "then" > parseExpr <> symbol "else" > parseExpr) : Nil As you can hopefully see, exhaustive requires only minimal changes to an existing parser. Specifically, we need to:In April, GOP state chair Pat Brady came out in favor of marriage equality. Brady is one of the growing number of Republican realizing that while the gay marriage issue secured power for them less than a decade ago, their opposition to it has now created a hurdle over which they may not be able to leap. When Brady changed his stance, he said of the Republican party: “I think there are people in the party who don’t necessarily agree with me, but the point is …. we’re a party that welcomes all ideas,” Brady said in April. “You don’t have to be exactly a platform Republican to be welcome in the party, and that’s the direction we’re taking the party.” That was in April. It’s now May. How’s that working out for Pat? When you sold the GOP to the fundamentalists and the god botherers for their votes, you signed on to become the party of ideological purity. The present GOP and the majority of their voting base wouldn’t know pragmatism if it was crawling up their ass. And changing your mind, to them, is not the hallmark of personal integrity and self-improvement – it is a signal of defeat and weakness. Pat Brady did the right thing when he admitted he was wrong about gay marriage. I’d love to see him make the same admission about his assessment of the Republican party.S.F. woman accused of bilking would-be tenants S.F. CRIME Rachael Marie Smith of San Francisco, accused of cheating would-be tenants out of thousands of dollars in deposits. Ran on: 07-30-2010 Rachael Marie Smith found renters through Craigslist. Ran on: 07-12-2011 Rachael Marie Smith allegedly collected several deposits. Ran on: 08-30-2011 Rachael Smith less Rachael Marie Smith of San Francisco, accused of cheating would-be tenants out of thousands of dollars in deposits. Ran on: 07-30-2010 Rachael Marie Smith found renters through Craigslist. Ran on:... more Photo: San Francisco Police Department Photo: San Francisco Police Department Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close S.F. woman accused of bilking would-be tenants 1 / 1 Back to Gallery A San Francisco woman has been arrested and charged with bilking would-be apartment renters of thousands of dollars apiece by accepting their deposits and then spinning a tale that they couldn't move in for a while because her mother had cancer, police said Thursday. Rachael Marie Smith, 29, recruited victims by posting ads on Craigslist, offering to rent her apartment on the 5600 block of California Street near 18th Avenue in the Inner Richmond District, said police Sgt. Troy Dangerfield. Several victims separately signed leases with Smith, and each gave her a $5,600 check for the deposit, police said. Then, Smith allegedly told them they wouldn't be able to move in on their scheduled dates because her mother was sick and needed care, police said. "They were told that they had to wait a little bit longer because her mother had cancer," Dangerfield said. One woman signed her lease July 16, then said she couldn't get ahold of Smith. When she complained about the situation at work, a colleague told her Smith had taken her deposit on the same apartment and had given her the same story, police said. The two contacted an attorney, who told them he was already handling cases from clients complaining about Smith, Dangerfield said. The lawyer then called police. Smith was arrested July 22. San Francisco prosecutors charged her with numerous counts of grand theft and obtaining money under false pretenses, authorities said. She is accused of stealing a total of $20,000 from at least four victims. Efforts to reach Smith on Thursday were unsuccessful. Police are trying to determine if other people were defrauded. Anyone who believes he or she may be a victim is asked to call Inspector John Monroe at (415) 553-1936.“90210” alum Jessica Stroup has been cast in “Marvel’s Iron Fist” on Netflix, Variety has learned exclusively. Tom Pelphrey (“Banshee,” “Guiding Light”) has also been cast in the upcoming superhero series. Stroup will play the series regular role of Joy Meachum. Pelphrey will play her on-screen brother, Ward Meachum. The duo joins the title star Finn Jones (“Game of Thrones”), who will play Danny Rand/Iron Fist; Jessica Henwick, who will co-star as Colleen Wing; and David Wenham, who will play Harold Meachum, the father to Joy (Stroup) and Ward (Pelphrey). The children of Harold Meachum (Wenham), Joy and Ward have spent their lives building Rand Enterprises to its current standing in the world, only to have all their work put in jeopardy when Danny returns to claim his birthright. They are childhood acquaintances of Danny Rand’s who now play an important role in Rand Enterprises. “Marvel’s Iron Fist” follows Jones’ Danny Rand as he returns to New York City after being missing for years. He fights against the criminal element corrupting New York City with his incredible kung-fu mastery and ability to summon the awesome power of the fiery Iron Fist. “Dexter” alum Scott Buck will serve as showrunner. Stroup and Pelphrey are the final two series regulars to be cast in “Marvel’s Iron Fist.” Stroup starred on the CW’s “90210” reboot, plus Fox’s Kevin Bacon vehicle “The Following.” She is repped by ICM. Pelphrey is repped by the Gersh Agency and Red Letter Entertainment.Geoff Copson / Australian National Parks and Wildlife Service After a cat loses its last aesthetic and behavioral traits characteristic of a kitten, it also loses much of its appeal as a companion to some people. At the same time, this cat may begin going into heat, agitating itself in a way that is both embarrassing and unsettling. With the human’s affection wearing thin, the cat might gaze longingly out the window. Sensing an opportunity for everyone to get what he or she desires, this frustrated pet owner might then crack the window open. If the cat is not spayed or neutered it will be tempted to jump out the window in search of reproductive opportunities. It happens more than you might think. The neighborhoods surrounding college campuses, for example, are notorious for the explosion in the population of one- year-old, unfixed cats that start to scavenge from Dumpsters just after the last exams in the spring. As the warmer months tend to be the most prolific for mating, this population quickly skyrockets. While these cats suffer, they also successfully hunt a huge number of other creatures. As a result, these events precipitate an attending debate over the role of feral cats within the natural and cultural landscape. This debate takes place between those who are concerned with the welfare of individual animals and those who prioritize the protection of biological diversity. Each group agrees that the natural world is out of alignment, and that this disharmony is eroding the richness of the natural world. The debate over what should be done pivots around different views regarding which lives are important (and, conversely, which deaths tragic), where humans’ obligations lay, and what sort of future is desirable. For some, feral cats are a result of human neglect, deserving of specific rights. In this estimation, the cats’ potential to live satisfying lives has been wasted by humans. In order to ameliorate this wrong, thoughtful action must be taken. In the United States, those sympathetic to the welfare of feral cats support a program that aims to humanely trap them, surgically sterilize them, and return them to the place they originally inhabited. Those who support this program believe that populations will slowly but steadily decline due to these limits on the reproductive capacities of feral cats. These animals live sorrowful lives, often starved and sick, they say, and it will be ethically productive for their population to be reduced, if done humanely. To others, feral cats are unnatural predators that upend local ecologies. As an introduced species in North America, they have an unfair advantage over their prey. Indeed, a recent study suggests that in the United States, outdoor cats kill as many as 3.7 billion other creatures annually. Many of these prey animals are not eaten by their killers—they’re wasted, left to rot on lawns, streets, and doormats. The fact that many cats’ diets are subsidized by people only further tips the scales in their favor, disrupting the balance established by the glacial force of evolutionary history. With few natural predators, say cat critics, it is up to humans to limit the population of feral cats by any means necessary, including widespread euthanization. Future actions must counter past wrongs, and that means negating the impacts of feral cats on the local ecosystem—a problem we caused in the first place. Despite the passion on both sides of this debate, the issue is most likely intractable. There are as many as 50 million feral cats spread across the United States. Because their geographic range is so vast, it would be nearly impossible for all of them to be sterilized or euthanized. The more realistic governments and conservation biologists addressing the threat posed by feral cats choose to concentrate their efforts on critical and isolated sites. On Macquarie Island, a UNESCO Ecological World Heritage site and a vital habitat for avian migrations in the Southern Hemisphere, the Australian government sought to eradicate the feral cats that were imperiling the seasonal bird population. Because it was a small island, this was an achievable goal, accomplished with targeted poisons, traps, and dog-led hunts in the last years of the 20th century. After that, however, rabbit populations ballooned, leading to unintended consequences. The growing rabbit population devastated local vegetation, increasing erosion, causing problems for the penguins that roost there. A second eradication, this time aimed at rabbits, has been thus far successful, thanks again to a significant government investment and the confined nature of the problem. Nature has many stories, and these are only a few. Still, the challenging lesson to take from these events is that the living world is devilishly complicated, and very difficult to predict or control. We look out at the world and have high hopes for preserving what we think has value, but it is hubris to expect we will usually be successful. Charlie Nichols studied studio arts before turning his attention to cultural anthropology. As a graduate student, he studies the politics of wildlife management and the social impacts of extinction.Way back in early July, we made note of a little video aggregation engine called ScrapeUp, an offshoot of VideoSift. It turns out both are still alive and kicking. The news today is that the folks who brought you those services are out with another public beta. It’s name is Dwigger. And while it doesn’t quite roll of the tongue, it is for sure an interesting bit of kit. Twitter feeds plus threaded replies plus voting. It’s Twitter, Diggnified. Moving quickly past the terrible Diggnified coinage that is mine and mine alone, Dwigger is, in short, both a useful and playful application. How it operates: You can paste a pre-published Twitter message URL and submit it to Dwigger, to be voted and commented on. You can also write a fresh post directly within Dwigger, 140 characters long. And if you want to write items exclusive to Dwigger, you may add info as needed. Just keep in mind the character limit, which carries across the various post options. Also, if you happen to be in the city of Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York or London, you can designate your message like so. If only just for kicks. It’s important to note that both original posts and replies are shown through Dwigger. This is done in order to streamline the communications process. You won’t have to convince your dozens, hundreds, or thousands of followers to log in to Dwigger to see what you’re saying. Everything is simple, everything is smooth. Still, what’s especially pleasing about Dwigger’s presentation is that replies to you are channeled into a thread, a la Pownce. If you want to easily make sense of your Twitter inbox insofar as a particular post you made, Dwigger works like a charm. Add voting to the mix, and you’ve got yourself a recipe for fun. Indeed, the ability to vote on material is enjoyable, but it certainly needs much more time to become popular and a solid part of the feature set. Dwigger is in its first day as a public item, so give it time, I say. Just keep in mind that the voting component is Dwigger’s own, so votes don’t carry over to other Twitter services as updates or anything of the sort. But that is just as well. Better to keep that part of your Dwigger life separate from your Twitter life. In addition to the core features, Dwigger has dressed its front page with top weekly posts, popular people, a “Zeit Cloud,” a subscription to the feed, and more. There also is a timeline for a strict clockwork view of activity, in case you don’t want to pull from the RSS flow.Cincinnati Reds' pitcher Aroldis Chapman takes a photo of himself during picture day. (Photo: Gary Landers / Cincinnati Enquirer) GOODYEAR, Ariz. -- Aroldis Chapman wore a black hat with a golden emblem of two hands together in prayer, but the fact that he was released from the hospital on Saturday and in the Reds clubhouse on Sunday was already an answer to many prayers. Just four days after being hit in the face by a line drive off the bat of Salvador Perez and three days from having a titanium plate placed in his head, Chapman visited teammates at the Reds' spring training complex. He had some swelling around the bridge of his nose, a couple of marks on his face and two black eyes -- but for anyone who saw Chapman's injury, he looked remarkably good. And count Chapman among those who have seen the video. "After I watched the video -- and I have been watching the video, repeating it many, many, many times and every time that I see it I feel really happy because this could be something worse," Chapman said through interpreter Tomas Vera. "The way how I am right now, the way how I feel I'm in no pain. I have no pain at all. How I've been progressing with has been great for me." CLOSE Via Reds trainer Tomas Vera, Aroldis Chapman speaks about his injury, revealing that he feels a lot better than he thought he would feel and why he posted photos of his injury to Instagram. In addition to the black hat and t-shirt with metallic sleeves, Chapman wore another accessory -- a huge smile. "I feel proud, I feel really happy to know there are this many people who came to see -- a lot of players, all my teammates, all the Cuban players in the area came to see me," Chapman said. "Not only have the physical visits, but also through social media, the number of people who have prayed for me and all the good wishes that people had for me makes me proud and happy for the many, many people who contacted me." It was in that spirit, Chapman said, he posted a picture of the staples in his head, along with a picture of him smiling in his hospital bed, on his Instagram and Facebook pages on Friday. Photo: Chapman's Instagram post after surgery "When you've got so many, many people trying to contact you and wishing you doing well, people asking how things going, you don't have time to reply to everybody," Chapman said through Vera. "So I decided to show them how I am and how I feel so I decided to put the picture on Facebook and Instagram just to tell them I'm doing OK." Chapman got to see several of his teammates before they played against the Brewers Sunday at Goodyear Ballpark. Those players, like Sam LeCure and Brandon Phillips, took to Twitter to express their excitement over seeing their teammate in familiar surroundings. While his father was already in Arizona -- and joined him on the field Wednesday after the incident -- the rest of his family will join him in Cincinnati this week. NEWSLETTERS Get the Bengals Beat newsletter delivered to your inbox We're sorry, but something went wrong Please try again soon, or contact Customer Service at 1-800-876-4500. Delivery: Invalid email address Thank you! You're almost signed up for Bengals Beat Keep an eye out for an email to confirm your newsletter registration. More newsletters "I'm so happy and glad that he was there with me when this happened," Chapman said of his father. "The rest of the family they all wanted to come over but it was my decision not to have the other part of my family here with me because I believe it would be too much impact for them. It would be too much stress for them. It would cause me to feel in a different way to my recovery." CLOSE Bryan Price talks about Aroldis Chapman's visit with the team Sunday. That recovery will start soon, as he is expected to start cardiovascular training soon, followed by throwing. The latest prognosis has him being able to return to playing baseball in four-to-six weeks. He will start the season on the 15-day disabled list, but the team is so confident in his ability to return, that he will not be placed on the 60-day disabled list. "Whatever they allow me to do, I'll do," Chapman noted. As far as the mental side of returning to the mound, Chapman said he doesn't expect to feel any trepidation about returning. "I haven't thought about what's going to happen with this. This could happen to anybody else," Chapman said. "This is just something that happened in my job, I got hit. I know this is something that can happen. I've got to get over it. Personally, what I'm thinking right now is that I'm going to have to throw more balls in now, I'm going to have to throwing inside more."Petrol prices were last night hiked by Rs 2.58 a litre and diesel by Rs 2.26 per litre Highlights Petrol price has been hiked by Rs 2.58 a litre and diesel by Rs 2.26 Jet fuel becomes costlier by over 9% Non-subsidised LPG cylinder will cost Rs 21 more Hours after petrol and diesel prices were raised last night, the prices of non-subsidized LPG cylinders and aviation fuel were today hiked sharply following an increase in global oil rates.Petrol prices were last night hiked by Rs 2.58 a litre and diesel by Rs 2.26 per litre. After the price revision, petrol will cost Rs 65.60 per litre in Delhi and diesel Rs 53.93/litre.The price of aviation turbine fuel will go up by a sharp 9.2 per cent and will cost Rs 46,729 per kilolitre in New Delhi.The price of non-subsidised 14.2 kg LPG cylinder has been raised by Rs 21 and will now cost Rs 548.50 in New Delhi.The price hike in aviation fuel and non-subsidised LPG comes into effect from today. "The current level of international product prices of petrol & diesel and rupee-dollar exchange rate warrant increase in price of petrol and diesel, the impact of which is being passed on to the consumers with this price revision," Indian Oil said in a statement last night.Americans and concerned observers worldwide watched Haiti tremble after a magnitude 7.0 earthquake Tuesday evening, and many immediately asked: How can I help? Relief organizations largely say that right now, money donations are needed more than additional aid volunteers. “It’s a bit of a tough one for impromptu volunteers to enter into the fold,” says Richard Muffley, spokesman for the Center for International Disaster Information (CIDI) in Washington. Unsolicited volunteers may not have the needed training from aid organizations and will still need to be fed and housed once in a disaster zone, he says. “Cash is truly the most economical and efficient way of making a contribution.” But Mr. Muffley and other aid organizations also say there are still opportunities to be hands-on with Haiti earthquake relief – which, they note, will continue long after the shock the quake triggered this week. How you can volunteer now For medical workers, the International Medical Corps is still open. “We are taking applications for volunteer doctors and nurses, but we have a particular need for nurses,” says Crystal Wells, the group’s communications officer in Chicago. Applicants can fill out their information on the "Work with Us" tab of their website. Both medical and non-medical workers can register their offer of services with the CIDI on their website: http://www.cidi.org/default.htm. Aid agencies browse the listings and call on those whose services match their needs. Muffley adds that hands-on events outside of Haiti, like baked goods and yard sales, can generate much-needed donations. The Red Cross is not accepting volunteers to travel to Haiti now, but both they and the International Medical Corps say that later, they may need volunteer health-care personnel. “Down the road, [Haiti will need] more medical people, translators, things like that,” says Nadia Pontif of the American Red Cross. She encourages interested volunteers to contact their local Red Cross chapter to get the appropriate disaster training now. Social-media volunteering Aid staffers emphasized the role that social media are playing in Haiti relief, to solicit donations, help Haitian families get information about their relatives, and follow the island’s news. The Red Cross has set up a Family Links database here for relatives to find their Haitian family after the quake. Since yesterday, 14,000 people have registered on the site and more than 1,000 people in Haiti have written to the Red Cross to say that they are alive, says Anna Nelson, a spokeswoman in Geneva. “Even if [someone who wants to help] doesn’t know any Haitians, they can put this on their Facebook” and let friends know to pass along the database, Ms. Nelson adds. Ms. Wells of the International Medical Corps says they’re looking for social-media volunteers to monitor their website, which they continuously update to show which donations they need at a given time and who is needed on the ground. “That’s kind of a different way to volunteer that does make a big impact,” Wells adds.In the wake of the horrific massacres in Paris and Beirut, hopefully we can all agree that wanting to resist ISIS should not be criminalised. Sadly, the Crown Prosecution Service doesn’t seem to see it that way, and so, as people across the world continue to mourn the attacks, Shilan Ozcelik is due in court on Tuesday morning to face charges that she allegedly tried to join the Kurdish resistance fighting against ISIS. If you can make it down to the Old Bailey to support her, or if you know anyone who might be able to, please pass the information on. If you don’t, you can still support her by sending a message via her solicitors at: Av. Ali Has, Morgan Has Solicitors Bank Chambers, 1st & 2nd Floor, 133 Stoke Newington High Street, Stoke Newington London N16 0PH Bear in mind that support for the PKK is considered criminal, so please don’t say anything that could get you or her into more trouble. Fuck ISIS. Fuck the jailers who’ve kept Shilan kept locked up for months awaiting trial, and the judges who denied her request for bail, all because she was alleged to have tried to join the fight against ISIS. AdvertisementsThis article is from the archive of our partner. If you are the sort of person who is deeply worried about the shifting racial demographics of the United States (i.e., a racist), a bit of a reality check: It is partly your fault. Last year, for apparently the first time, more non-Hispanic white people died than were born. Other trends confirmed by the Census compilation of population estimates for the year 2012 were expected: the U.S. population is shifting to the Southwest, getting older, with more people moving to cities. But the point about white population decline was probably the most surprising. The Washington Post reports on what that shift looks like. Population estimates for 2012 released Thursday show what’s known as a natural decrease — a straightforward calculation of births minus deaths — of about 12,400 people among the nation’s 198 million non-Hispanic whites. Although the percentage is small, several demographers said they are not aware of another time in U.S. history — not even during the Depression or wars — when there was such shrinkage among the dominant racial group. No other group showed a similar falloff. Here's how it goes by racial group:Pippin Barr’s water collection, v r 3, is so lovely [official site]! You can download it for free and just wander round examining different people’s approaches to designing and programming water effects in a museum-style setting. It’s so pleasing as a snapshot of different game aesthetics as well as different people’s ideas and work and style!I made a video of my visit – it’s a bit jerky as I found the walking speed to be slightly too fast for the space so kept overshooting the exhibits: v r 3 is so called because it ended up being a continuation of sorts of the dev’s previous gallery/Unity work in v r 2 (which you can see here) and re-uses some assets. It sounds like the idea is to revisit the space and the assets to curate different shows: “The first exhibition (the one in v r 3 specifically) is going to be of water. I’ve been really interested in
years ago thanks to a group of nomadic herders hailing from Russia’s Great Steppes. "Everyone assumed it came to Europe with the first farmers, but you actually had a 4,500-year period when European farmers could not actually drink milk." University of Adelaide researcher and study co-author Bastien Llamas tells Anna Salleh for ABC News Australia. Most mammals lose the ability to digest milk after their infancy, and for millennia Europeans were the same way. For a long time researchers believed that the genetic mutation that allows adult humans to process milk was introduced to Europeans by Anatolian farmers from modern-day Turkey, who started raising cattle around 6,500 B.C., Wyatt Marshall reports for Munchies. But according to Llamas, they should be thanking Russian herders instead. The study examined DNA from the remains of 230 Eurasians who lived between 6,500 and 300 B.C. Llamas and his colleagues discovered that the mutation that lets Europeans keep producing an enzyme called lactase throughout their adult lives was introduced right at the time that the Russian herders arrived in Europe, Salleh reports. “Suddenly 4,000 years ago, there’s a revolution when the Steppe herders brought the enzymes they needed,” Llamas tells Salleh. While the nomadic origins of European cheese lovers was a surprise, the study didn’t stop there. Llamas and his colleagues also discovered that the same herders are the reason why Northern Europeans tend to be so tall, while the Anatolian farmers were responsible for the shorter stature of many Mediterraneans. The Anatolians also introduced the genes for light skin color into the modern European gene pool, Salleh reports. "All of those 230 individuals were screened across their genomes for more than a million variable sites. That means we have a very accurate picture of what's going on in their genomes,” Llamas tells Salleh. "For once we can have the same power for genomic analysis in ancient populations as we have in modern populations." The study also found evidence that linked resistance to diseases like tuberculosis and leprosy to the rise of agriculture. While early humans lived a solitary, hunter-gatherer life, the steady source of food from farming led to larger, more densely-populated villages that aided the spread of disease. As a result, people had to evolve ways to fight off these diseases, Marshall reports. "Whether you like it or not, generation after generation, this constant pressure on the environment will shape humans genetically," Llamas tells Salleh.From left to right: Raymond Tallis and Roger Scruton Daniel Johnson: Let me start a bit of disagreement. I came across a passage in one of your books, Ray, Enemies of Hope (Palgrave Macmillan, 1997), that is a critique of contemporary pessimism, both of the Left and of the Right. You say that those who deny progress will allow more hungry children to die in the dust while the prophets of doom continue to enjoy life in the library and the seminar room. Would it be fair to suggest that you think pessimism is an inhumane and possibly selfish denial of the purpose of humanity and, above all, progress? Raymond Tallis: It may be. Just as Roger [Scruton] talks about unscrupulous optimists, there are unscrupulous pessimists. But I'm thinking about extremists, such as John Gray, who argues that any attempt to improve things will always make things worse. He bases this on the claim that we are animals who don't know ourselves and so are acting in darkness in the grip of impulses that we haven't fully understood. So Enemies of Hope is an attack on unscrupulous pessimists, those who say there is nothing to be done about the woes of the world and that passivity is the only way to avoid making things worse. In my book, I focus on two strands of pessimist thought: the tendency to marginalise consciousness, and to question conscious human agency as the chief motor of change; and the tendency to regard humans as animals and civilisation as an aberration. Roger Scruton: The Dawkins types. RT: Although curiously Dawkins himself isn't a pessimist. RS: He makes me a pessimist. DJ: Roger, do you want to talk about unscrupulous optimists? RS: The title of my new book is The Uses of Pessimism (Atlantic), not Pessimism — I don't justify pessimism. But a sprinkling of salutary gloom is necessary if we are to accept humanity as it is. This means accepting it in its civilised condition — the condition in which we are — where we not only create new problems for ourselves but also create the ways of solving them. The theme of my book is that there is a constant tendency in civilised people to lapse into a pre-civilised condition. Then, their minds are invaded by an unscrupulous optimism, which commits them to certain fallacies that I diagnose. The purpose of those fallacies is to maintain hope in the face of the evidence. RT: I agree with Roger that one has to moderate one's aspirations and ambitions. But towards the end of your book, Roger, you offer a diagnosis as to why people are and do become unscrupulous optimists. Unscrupulous optimism was an entirely appropriate attitude in the conditions that prevailed in the Pleistocene era. I was rather surprised because you, like me, have an allergy to biologism, or to the notion that we are hard-wired for this or that. RS: I thought at the time that maybe I'm betraying my own cause but then I thought no, that's not true. What I'm saying is that what we are is what we become through conflict and resolution, and through understanding our position as others in a world of others like ourselves. This process is what makes us into self-conscious, truth-seeking creatures; our Pleistocene "adaptations" do not get us anywhere near so far. But we do have a tendency to lapse into those old and comforting adaptations. You cannot deny that we have evolved from something that was not what we are now. But what we are now is not animals but persons. Persons are things that exist in another way, have different conditions of identity, different aspirations, different ways of resolving disputes. They live under a rule of law and a rule of accountability, all the things that I think you, Ray, would agree with. As you say in your book, persons do things like point. I think it's important to note that animals don't do this — not even the dogs that we call pointers — because pointing is a highly sophisticated semantic notion which itself is the gift of life in community. It's not something you can achieve without the community of self-conscious beings who account to one another for what they are. RT: But this belief in a tendency to regress to an earlier state lies at the heart of your pessimism, is why I want to worry at its foundations: the idea that we have ascended from our Pleistocene state almost against our natural primordial condition. I wonder why I don't quite buy that. Is it because I think we have moved so far that there is a different kind of dynamic going on when we do relapse into savagery? If you think of comparatively recent examples of barbarism, they are not usually mass uncontrolled outbreaks of primordial passions. The First World War or Auschwitz required an incredible amount of cold and careful bureaucratic calculation. So our regression to barbarism was mediated through the kinds of people we've become, rather than the kinds of people we once were and you fear we might relapse to. No one in the Pleistocene era could ever be as barbaric to organise the First World War or to dream up Auschwitz. RS: That is true. Auschwitz and the gulag required an awful lot of planning but I do identify the planning fallacy as one of the principal fallacies that guided and misguided the 20th century. I want to trace it to an attitude that would have been useful, or adaptive, in Pleistocene conditions, which is the attitude of facing a collective emergency. It simplifies things, even when living in a large society, if you can represent your problems as an emergency. In an emergency, we all gather behind the leader who presents us with a plan. Then, we become intoxicated with the whole idea of planning, so we believe that we can solve all the difficult things and difficult questions that arise through our life by a plan. Hence the slogan with which Auschwitz was presented to the people: "the final solution". RT: Whether or not one accepts the notion that this is rooted in the Pleistocene era it seems to me a compelling diagnosis. It reminds me of something that bothered me when I read your book: your treatment of the planning fallacy. I was deeply impressed by your treatment of all the seven fallacies you identify. But they made me think of The Uses of Pessimism as pre-political rather than political. It presents the frameworks through which you should start thinking politically. A key belief of yours is that planning should be modest — and in this you are in a noble line of thinkers that includes Friedrich Hayek, Karl Popper and so on. If, however, you move on from the pre-political framework to actual policies, it is not enough to invoke the Fatal Conceit. There is, after all, the opposite fallacy that we might call the Fatalistic Conceit. So how shall we find the right place between, on the one hand, the conceit of imagining that we can have a central regulated economy that is successful and, on the other, the opposite conceit that says: "Forget about piecemeal social engineering, as even the most modest plan that involves a large number of people is going to have unexpected consequences"? RS: It's a really good question. I would suggest that one look at examples of continuous institutions which arrive at solutions to social conflicts and difficulties, not by planning but by solving them case by case and building up an accumulation of accepted principles. I take common law as my favourite example — and Hayek is brilliant on common law, essentially reiterating William Blackstone's original defence. It is a system of law that arises through generalising from individual conflicts for which the solution has been found, and then extracting principles that can be tested in the next conflict. One of the tragedies of this country is that this wonderful system has been overlaid with a European law that derives legal answers from abstract premises accepted at the top, rather than building up solutions from the bottom. In other words, EU legislation to me is an instance of the planning fallacy. One can see its danger by considering what's happening with the euro. There's a perfect example of something that has been imposed by a plan, built into a system of law, but with no plan B should the thing go wrong. Suddenly, like the French revolution and the Russian revolution, the plan comes up against the truth — and the truth is people, who do not on the whole follow the plans that others make for them. RT: Your ten pages or so on the EU are devastating — they are brilliant. As a Europhile, it gave me a pause for thought. But if we could continue talking about the planning fallacy, I admit that I am sympathetic to the idea of the Invisible Hand, and the notion of social institutions being shaped from the bottom upwards, with correctives being applied top down where necessary. But if one took to the extreme what you were saying, we wouldn't have statutory law. At some point, it is necessary to move from common law to statute. One needn't go all the way to a Bill of Rights and the kind of thing that puts your hackles up, but I just wondered, where do you feel that the statutory law fits into your scheme of things? RS: Statutes are necessary because, as societies become increasingly complex, problems arise with which our ordinary day-to-day reasoning cannot deal. They need the advice of committees that try to see the long-range effect. Statutes in English systems of law are of two kinds: one is the result of those committees — that's the ideal statute — committees in the Commons and the Lords, the committees in the US Congress, which take a problem and solve it, taking into account as much information as possible. There is another kind of statute in English law that summarises the findings of the court, for instance the Occupiers' Liability Act. Occupiers' liability was discovered by judges in Australia when the railways started being built. Gradually, the judges built up a wonderful system of law about what your duties and rights are if you occupy land, even if you don't actually own it. Then, at a certain stage, parliament said: "Let's gather this all together and we'll have a single statute." But codification, as in the Roman law under Justinian, came after the event. That's perhaps an even better way of producing a statute than from committees. RT: Imagine we go back 200 years, to when Edmund Burke was alive. Much has happened since then to make the world a better and more just place for the average person. And a lot of it has been top-down — it's been driven by visionaries, leaders and a lot of it has been enshrined in statute. I'm thinking about the extension of the franchise, the Ten Hour Act and improvements in health and safety at work. Do you think those things would have risen up from the people without the interference of the kind of top-down meddlers, the people who cause you nightmares? RS: These are serious issues that one needs to discuss. One needs to look at where top-down approaches came up with a solution that is indeed to the benefit of all and where they did not. You're right that the extension of the franchise is one of these. I should say, though, that the franchise was extended partly as a result of conversations in the Reform Club, not only as a result of things in parliament. It came from people who felt that our country really needed to include more of the people in the franchise in order to cope with all the changes that were happening — migrations to the towns, changes in property and so on. The 1832 Reform Act wasn't a decision of a dictatorial kind — a lot of these things that the 19th century begs to be remembered by began as civil initiatives. The Factory Acts began because exploited children were suddenly apparent to well-off compassionate people. Before that, they'd been working just as hard in the fields but not observed by those who had the influence or the will to help them. As always in England, it wasn't very long from the first impulse of reform in the minds of ordinary citizens to the statute that conveyed what they wanted. RT: The Human Rights Act is clearly a supreme example of a top-down intervention to which you're allergic. But let us think of the origin of the kind of law we both approve of. One can imagine an emerging concern, about hungry children visible in the streets as they were not before. There are whispers in corridors of clubs and soon the corridors of power are echoing with concerns. But sooner or later, these concerns have to be translated into law. RS: Parliament was originally conceived in the Middle Ages as a court of law. The members passed judgment by statute, which was a recommendation to the king effectively to rectify an abuse. The resulting statute was then tested in the courts. Things were different then but until joining the EU, it was the case that any statute passed by parliament had to be tested against popular acceptance. People were entitled to vote at an election to get rid of the people who passed that statute and put another one in its place, or repeal it. We can still do this every now and then... RT: Even with the Human Rights Act, which is currently being reconsidered.... RS: Yes. But we can't do it with EU directives, which account for more than 50 per cent of the laws that are imposed upon us. RT: That is a bit of a dodgy figure because an awful lot of that 50 per cent consists of minor, rather than major, laws. RS: A law is major to anybody who's afflicted by it. DJ: I want to throw in the moral aspect because I'm still struck by the terms "scrupulous" and "unscrupulous" when talking about optimists and pessimists. Is there a place for either in your schemes of things? Optimists, if we take the extreme example of Dr Pangloss, tend effectively to deny evil, which plays no part in the more extreme examples of Enlightenment optimism. Evil is merely backwardness — people who haven't yet seen the light. On the other hand, in pessimistic schemes of thought, ideas like original sin, a deep sense of the world being a fallen place, play a very big part. RS: The idea of original sin captures something important — that our condition is one that is deeply flawed in ways that the moral sense tries to rectify. We are constantly trying to gratify our selfish wishes at the cost of other people. We are brought up to overcome this but we don't ever completely overcome it. It is true that evil is a reality in our experience but we go through long periods of denial about it because it is an uncomfortable thing to recognise. Therefore, there is a motive to describe evil in another way, as something that we've got over by being nice. This is the Matt Ridley view of the human condition — that we can settle everything by respecting each other and signing contracts. This is true up to a point but, as we know, the resulting condition is fragile. Without an awareness of this, we live in danger. RT: I share Roger's view of society as fragile. What an extraordinary achievement it is to be able to live with each other on so many levels, in so many ways, and in so many different groupings. I also think Roger's analysis of the Born Free fallacy is superb. I don't think we're born free or born good. I wonder, however, whether there his view of humanity is a little too essentialist for my taste. My own feeling is that the human species is infinitely malleable and may even become gradually better — though one cannot ignore the catastrophic relapses we witnessed in the 20th century. DJ: Not an unreasonable view — in many ways we have become better in the sense that we do demonstrate compassion, not just for our immediate family and friends but for people we don't even know. RT: The very fact that we have laws of war — OK, we flout them, but the fact that we are aware that we're flouting them and try to conceal the fact says something about our moral progress. Roger, is your philosophical conservatism anchored in your pessimistic view of our species-being? Do you think that there are permanent flaws in the human race? RS: I'm sure I'm open to correction in this respect but I see much of the progress that we have made as being the by-product of prosperity. We are not living in the state of need that tempts us to those evil acts that our ancestors were constantly tempted to: to steal, to murder, to become a highwayman, etc. Defoe, in Moll Flanders, wonderfully describes somebody in that condition of need who is clearly a warm and compassionate person but who has to incorporate into her world the morality of theft. This is her way of survival. But it is interesting that the first big age of technological and economic progress — the 20th century — was the age of the great exterminations too. So I hesitate to go along with the idea of moral progress entirely and I also think the rule of niceness has a downside in human relations: the loss of loyalties. You see it in the collapse of marriage, the betrayal of children, the escaping from any long-term commitments. Nice people do it but this might mean that the nice are the enemy of the good. RT: I agree that the instinct of niceness may mean that one avoids the moral challenges that justify some conflicts. And I agree with you that often we are able to behave better than our predecessors because it costs us less than it might have cost them. To behave well in the Pleistocene era you had to be a saint and you probably wouldn't survive. But is denying moral progress true to history? Often, new moral sensibilities have emerged, such as those that prompted the abolition of slavery. Slavery had to be seen as wrong first. RS: Implementation is one thing but acknowledgment of the truth is another. Slavery is not acknowledged in the Roman natural law and Isidore of Seville made it clear that under Christian jurisdiction there could not be ownership of another person. English common law abolished it before parliament set about imposing abolition upon those barbarians across the Channel. Again, prosperity made it possible to implement the abolition of slavery. It could be that people have always known it to be wrong, but found no easy way to bring it to an end. Aristotle had to lean over backwards to justify it. RT: What you're saying is that if Aristotle had had a washing machine then he wouldn't have defended domestic slavery? RS: It's quite possible that he wouldn't. RT: You have a profound, and often all too justified, suspicion of human beings and you believe that the claims that we are "born free" and "born good" are nonsense. The record of the 20th century, when proportionally humans killed more people relative to the overall population than at any other time in history (Niall Ferguson did the sums), speaks for itself. So what looks like moral progress may just be down to the fact that the cost of being a nice person now is cheaper than it was when we didn't have science-based technologies to make life easier. In view of that, however, what makes you confident that progress will actually rise up from the masses? And why do you put your faith in the masses rather than those who show an explicit lead, saying (for example): "This is wrong"? I find myself thinking about Edmund Burke on representation and delegation... RS: His speech to the electors of Bristol. RT: Yes. He was famously at odds with his constituents on many issues. And he tells them — though he didn't put it quite like this — "I'm here to be better than your best selves, not simply bound by mandates issued by your average selves." Does this assertion of moral leadership make you uneasy? RS: You're right: we depend upon moral leadership and we were given it 2,000 years ago. And we're all downstream from that. The emancipation of slaves was one of the first effects of the Christian revolution. And yes, there are these great leaders who completely change the way people look at things. Not always for the better, though. But this means that leadership isn't necessarily the bad thing that you might otherwise suppose I think it to be. But I would say, and this is something that is very much in keeping with your worldview, that most of us don't look for leadership. We look for examples. And we try to be friends with them. Our friends make a difference to our lives by setting an example. I met a colleague at a conference whose articles I'd read and disagreed with. And I thought: he's bound to be the normal, resentful academic who's going to hate the fact that I disagree with him. And instead there was this smiling person who welcomed me and gave me every possible encouragement. He attended this conference with his wife who'd had a stroke and is in a wheelchair, and he took her everywhere with him — across the Atlantic — and though she could no longer speak he was always soothing her with affectionate gestures. And I said to myself, there is an example. I couldn't do it, and yet he does it with a cheerful face. One of the problems we are living through is a decline in real friendship. Because of the ease of entertainment, people can retreat into their private study and look at the internet. And I know you agree with this, Raymond, that pornography is driving out sex — sex in the sense of a real erotic commitment to another person. RT: I would agree with all that, because it seems to me that we live in a state of e-ttenuation" in the sense that electronic media are breaking up our daily lives into small episodes. At any given moment, people are receiving dozens of texts, mobile phone calls, emails, and gazing at a flickering, cluttered screen, etc. In short we are distracted. Unfortunately, boredom has actually been pre-empted — and boredom can be very productive, very fertile. RS: I wouldn't call it boredom. I mean in the sense of ennui, which only appeared in the 19th century. RT: They had acedia in medieval times. RS: Yes, but that wasn't regarded as a creative thing. Rather it was an invitation to resist it, to achieve self-containment, like a monk in his cell: somebody self-sufficient and able to fill his life with meaning out of his posture of submission towards the divine will. DJ: Ray, can I just press you a little on this? You're something of an apostle of progress and that word "hope" came in at one point and I think we can all agree that hope is a good thing, whether or not optimism is a good thing. But in this brave new world, what will be the content of this transcendence that you talk about? In a rather poetic passage in your book, you speak of "the beyond beyond which there is no beyondering", but will there be any content in this? RT: There are two parts to your question. The first is about having a sense of direction and purpose in one's life. The feeling that you are going to make a difference, however arrogant, is a potent expression. Without that desire, life can seem meaningless. But there is a different kind of answer connected with finding something to fill the vacuum left by the departure of religion. Well, for me, it is an increasingly intense awareness of the complex miracle of our ordinary, everyday conscious life. The more you pick it apart, the more you unpack it, the more extraordinary it seems. It can awaken an utter gratitude for the fact that one is without that necessarily leading to one feeling grateful to any particular Being at all. RS: You're looking for an intransitive gratitude. RT: Absolutely, that's beautiful. This prompts me to refer to Roger's tragic pessimism, expressed in Death-Devoted Heart (OUP, 2004), his wonderful book on Wagner. DJ: I also was interested in something that you touched on briefly, the subject of sexuality and eroticism. Because that lies at the heart of a lot of pessimism, and when you look back Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Wagner, it all seems to do with sex. I wonder whether there is some connection there, and whether we can link up these disparate things? RT: There's a biographical link through sex between those awful characters. Nietzsche's relationships with women were catastrophic. The one true love of Wagner's life lay tantalisingly just beyond reach. Schopenhauer's relationships with women were sensual, but dispassionate and often cruel. So it's not hard to imagine that the profound sense that they had of the centrality of sexuality combined with their profound sexual disappointments would feed into pessimism. DJ: We have a culture now in which sex plays a central role, and yet it's strangely bloodless, isn't it? RT: I strongly share Roger's point of view over this. We live in a world in which pornography or at least sexual allusion is almost wall-to-wall. You can't open a copy of The Times without seeing a naked woman and that to me is the marker of where we are at. It's as if sex has become shallower and shallower as it has become spread more widely. Sex as a consumer item increasingly dominates over sex as an encounter with the utter mystery of another person, with a profound sense of love and compassion for them. These are marginalised by the ubiquitous culture of pornography. RS: I agree. One of the social functions of religion is that of withdrawing certain things from the market. We fence them round and say that here is a realm where things are not exchanged, bartered, paid for or taken, but it's still a realm where things can be given in a special way. That is the idea of a sacrament: certain ways in which human beings give to each other have a sort of blessing from another realm, and only then can they be fully themselves. It's not just sex that religion withdraws from the market — people too. At least in Christianity, people are not to be used and sold, they are to be understood as objects of intrinsic value. This intuition was rephrased by Kant in terms of his categorical imperative but it's there in Aquinas and all Christian thinking. It is there in the Old Testament too. But, interestingly, in our culture "we" — as in "they, out there, the proletariat" — still think that you can't buy and sell children. People get into a huge excitement about it. Using and abusing a child becomes the greatest of all sins. You see it in the present hoo-hah over paedophilia in the Catholic Church: it's not that this hasn't happened before, but rather that today paedophilia has been isolated as the one remaining sexual crime. So the whole burden of our guilt at having made each other into consumable objects is laid on those who abuse children. RT: It also illustrated the difference between ecclesiastical and secular law. There has been a sense for a long time within the Church that ecclesiastical law, and the wellbeing of the Church itself, is above secular law. That's what shocked all of us: the unscrupulous willingness within the Church to pervert the course of justice so that when priests in a situation of total inequality have abused young people, those young people themselves have been abused again by the system that wants to keep the abuse quiet. RS: And yet it's children who are the victims of the pornographic culture in which vast numbers of people are involved. Children are the ones who are going to be prematurely sexualised and deprived of the maturation that makes the erotic into a form of human relationship. In that sense, all pornography is child abuse. DJ: Ray, you spoke very eloquently about the quasi-religious significance of scientific understanding of the human condition. You clearly have a very exalted view of man, albeit not a religious one. Is there some sort of meeting point between the religious and the non-religious sensibilities? I think of the ancient world where Graeco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian thought coalesced into Western civilisation, and whether the conflict that is taking place now between the secular and the non-secular will reach some sort of compromise? RT: In the conflict between religion and the secular outlook, both parties have simplified the other's position. The wrong critique of religion is either a) that it lacks scientific evidence, or that it encroaches on the territory where science holds sway, or b) that it has produced net ills for the world. The latter is a very weak argument because you can't run the tape twice — run the history of the world with religion and then run it without religion — and see what would have been a better outcome. There are good arguments for indicating that religion at key moments in history has been both the sponsor of science and morality and something that undermines science and morality. The point of convergence, it seems to me, is both parties are aware of the irreducible mystery of what we are. A true humanist isn't somebody who naturalises humanity and argues that we can be explained entirely in biological terms. We are profoundly mysterious and we've hardly started thinking about ourselves in a post-religious way. As a humanist, I share something which is central to religion: a feeling for the sacredness and profound mystery of human life. DJ: It's very important that you use the term "sacredness of human life", because that's quite controversial. Quite a lot of people in your camp dispute that. RT: Well, the doctrine of the sanctity of life is a difficult one because I am in support of assisted dying, and one of the arguments put forward against it is that it undermines our respect for the sanctity of life. This is not true. I support assisted dying because I accept the valuation placed upon their own remaining days and weeks of life by someone who has a fatal disease and has unbearable and uncontrollable suffering. That is not the same as devaluing human life. And in this respect, I am less inconsistent than many who preach the sanctity of life and at the same time believe in wars. RS: I'm broadly sympathetic to this, and Daniel's right: introducing the concept of the sacred does transfigure one's sense of what the atheist position might be. This has happened in the realm of art and I argue that this is what Wagner was trying to do in his music dramas. He was trying to reconstruct the concept and the feeling for the sacred from purely humanistic premises, making man his own redeemer. But nearer to what you were saying is Rilke in the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus. Rilke presented human consciousness as containing within itself the mystery not only of my existence, but the mystery of existence as such. And for Rilke the earth, the realm of natural objects outside me, is begging to be admitted to my consciousness in order to be bathed by the sacred light within — the light of consciousness which is the sole redemption. And that's a wonderful idea. It's difficult to express outside poetry and music but it is something that, for Rilke at least, is essentially an atheistic thought. RT: As does someone you probably don't like very much: Heidegger. RS: No, no, he has this too. RT: It's as if we're "too late for the gods and too early for Being". [Your book] Death-Devoted Heart is a fantastic work on Tristan and Isolde, but it encompasses two things that may not quite fit together: one is your sense that Wagner is trying to reconstruct the sacred out of purely humanistic materials, and the other is the profoundly pessimistic thought that, in the end, the consummation of life is in death. That's where I find it difficult to follow you, because it's a difficult doctrine to make live in one's own life. RS: Yes, I don't go along with the Wagnerian mysticism about the erotic. But there is a truth in it, and what I want to say is that erotic love does first of all emphasise that this thing has within it a kind of redemptive force. It's a redemptive force that comes through our acknowledgement of our own nature as dying things. DJ: Roger, would you like to sum up what you think is the code by which you think a modern, educated, sensitive and humane person can hope to live? What is it that we believe? RS: Gosh. Well, I can say what I believe. One must be open to transcendence, open to the recognition first of all of the mystery of your being and the mystery of the being of others. That isn't unique to the Western tradition. Hinduism is a very good example of how this is done, especially by encouraging us to look for the transcendent in the everyday. However, and this is much more special to the Western tradition, one has to be able to learn to look on oneself as another. This idea of the "otherness" of oneself, which is summed up in the Ancient Greek concept of irony, is all-important, especially now that fundamental metaphysical doctrines are in doubt. Looking at oneself in that way, one can learn both to forgive oneself and others. This is the beginning of wisdom. But what one builds upon it depends on whether one's been lucky enough to find others with whom one can live at peace and in a condition of affection. DJ: That's a very impressive credo. Ray, what do you feel about this? Music in the highest sense is unique to the West. Is music important to you as a redemptive force? RT: It is an extraordinary force. I am very much with Roger on this profound significance of music. I don't compose as Roger does, I don't play any instrument and I don't have any ability in musicological analysis, but the point where we converge is the profound joy that music brings to both of us. One thing I find interesting about classical music — and again it was a point made in one of your books, Roger — is that in recent centuries we enjoy music in a rather unusual way. We sit still and sit silent. We attend concerts almost as worshippers and it was this, it seemed to me, that Wagner exploited in his elevated notion of the music-drama. One of the things that has particularly struck me about Roger's philosophy of music is his analysis of the way music holds together. And he talks about two things: "virtual causality" and "double intentionality". The way that a succession of elements of music hangs together — not in a cause and effect way, not in the way that the sounding of the violin produces the sound that people hear and respond to — is to me the perfect model of human action. It's closest, most obviously, to dancing. But to me it's the model of any kind of action. Double intentionality means that you perceive a piece of music, but you also perceive what's in the music. This again is a model of so many aspects of uniquely human consciousness. So music is important to me because in practice it overwhelms me, but also in theory because it does seem to be a beautiful paradigm of something very distinctive in human consciousness. And that's why, like the other arts, it's a model of our freedom. Because it is the most pure expression of how we act as relatively free agents in a causally closed world. RS: I would put things a little bit differently. I'm closer to Schopenhauer here — what we hear in music I wouldn't call the will, but it is as though we are, when engrossed in music, within another person's first-person point of view. We all see the world from the first-person point of view. There is a point on the edge of things where I am, from which I embark on free projects of my own. And the same is true of you. But we see other people in a different way, as things in the world. When we listen to music, what is going on we know is not going on in the world. When melody begins in music, nothing begins in the world of sound, which consists only of sequences. But when listening to music we hear things begin and strive and come to a conclusion. That's something like the way we experience our own life, and we know that this thing into which we have been invited by the music — this movement and tension and striving — is not really part of the material world.Are you preparing for an interview as a software engineer or similar role? Many tech companies ask questions about data structures and algorithms, Big O Analysis, and technical puzzlers. This is a club for like minded individuals to prepare for such interviews by practicing typical technical/coding questions with each other on whiteboards, and critiquing answers in a friendly and encouraging environment. The typical meeting format is as follows: We start with
in part, by shepherding and pastoral competency. A biblical desire for church-planting will include more than the desire to shepherd the flock of God, but it will include at least that. He should be excited about the pioneering aspect of it, such as starting new ways of outreach, training up leaders, and meeting new people in a new place. He’s prayed about it, searched his heart, and can say with integrity that God has given him this desire. 5. Others want to plant a church with him. If he has a family, they are on board, and especially his wife. His wife needs to like him, be shepherded by him, and enjoy the ministry. This, too, should be confirmed by leadership who know him and his wife well. His wife should have some competency in discipleship as well. She’ll be greatly needed in the church planting process. Also, a potential core team needs to like him and desire to plant with him. Unless he’s an Apostle, and he’s not, I would be slow to recommend that anyone plant a church alone, without an equipped, united core team. He’ll need a plurality of giftedness and skills. They will need to have air-tight unity, maintained and furthered, in part, by his shepherding giftedness. A case can be made that most church plants fail because of poor core team dynamics. So in discerning his call, it should be verified that he’s gifted and trained enough to keep the team together. In addition to this, as the man discerns his calling to plant, he ought to consider a few related points: 1. A desire for a specific location need not constitute the call. I omitted “Location” as a criterion because it’s not a must in discerning the church plant calling. It’s important, but places in need of solid churches are not hard to find on the planet. More important than place is the guy, just as a sought-after NFL draft pick can go to just about any team. Talent, not team, determines his capability. Similarly, the Apostle Paul was called by Christ and could go anywhere and be faithful. He just needed to pick a place and have the means to get there. Not everywhere worked out, but many did. Lack of fruit in Athens didn’t mean he wasn’t called. Once a guy meets the above criteria, he can easily pick a location with the help of leadership. 2. If the church plant fails, that does not necessarily invalidate his calling. The latest statistic I heard was that 80% of church plants never materialize into a church. He has to be prepared for this. If it happens, he should not automatically conclude that God did not call him and, with the help of church leadership, he should examine himself to see where he may have erred. But it is not necessarily a ministry failure. What constitutes failure is unfaithfulness to Scripture, for example, disqualification of elder criteria. Many ministries of godly men over the centuries who were called, like Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Jonathan Edwards, did not see numerical growth or receive positive response. Even so, God called them and they glorified him in their ministries. 3. Even if a guy seems to plant a booming church apart from discerning his call in a biblical way, that does not mean we should make the way he discerned his call our fixed principles. In church planting, we should be slow about asking, “Well, what did awesome-church-planter-guy do that worked?” then indiscriminately adopt his methods. Instead, we should ask, “What did he do that was biblically based, and how can I apply that in my situation while being faithful to Scripture?” The call to plant a church may not be as complicated as we think. But let’s do what it takes to respect the Lord’s care for the only institution he promised to build and bless as we discern the call to plant biblical churches and help others do the same.This article is over 4 years old Jakarta denies delay to Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran facing firing squad is due to diplomatic pressure, and says they will do so as soon as possible Indonesia says 'nothing whatsoever' will stop execution of two Australians Indonesia has reaffirmed its intention to execute two Australian drug smugglers, despite continuing high-level diplomatic efforts from Australia to prevent their deaths. Indonesia’s attorney general declared on Friday that “nothing whatsoever” could stop the execution of Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran from going ahead, promising they would face the firing squad as soon as possible. And the Indonesian president, Joko Widodo, seemed to echo that message, saying that a recent delay to the execution was down to technical issues rather than due to any pressure from Australia. Meanwhile, the Australian foreign minister, Julie Bishop, confirming she had contacted the Indonesian vice-president by telephone on Thursday. Indonesian authorities have said that Chan, 31, and Sukumaran, 33, ringleaders of the so-called Bali Nine heroin trafficking group, will be among the next group of prisoners on death row to be executed. But the pair were given a glimmer of hope this week when their scheduled transfer from Bali to the high-security prison where they are due to be shot was postponed. In her phone call to Jusuf Kalla, Bishop reportedly thanked the Jakarta government for delaying the men’s transfer to the execution site on Nusakambangan island. She told Fairfax Media she also appealed directly to Kalla for an indefinite stay of execution and emphasised Australia’s willingness to work with Indonesia to combat the drugs trade. “Both of our countries are victims of drug syndicates. We’ve proposed ways we can work together to save the lives of Indonesians from the drug problem and I reiterated that to Mr Kalla,” she told Fairfax. But, despite Bishop’s expression of gratitude, Widodo dismissed the suggestion the delay was due to Australian complaints. “No, there was none [complaints from Australia],” he said. “This is our area of sovereignty. It is only a technical problem, ask the attorney general.” The attorney general, Muhammad Prasetyo, said the executions would proceed “as soon as possible”. “There’s basically nothing whatsoever that will hamper the implementation of this decision,” he told reporters Friday. Prasetyo said logistical difficulties involving capacity at Nusa Kambangan – the notorious island prison where five inmates were executed last month – had prevented the two Australians being transferred this week as planned. Australia had also requested the men be granted more time with their families, he added. Indonesia executed six drug offenders in January, including five foreigners, prompting a furious Brazil and the Netherlands – whose citizens were among those put to death – to recall their ambassadors. Jakarta has remained tight-lipped about when the Australians’ executions will take place, and which other foreign inmates will join the two condemned. Prisoners from France, Brazil, Ghana and Nigeria have also lost their bids for presidential clemency – the final avenue of appeal for a death row convict. Tension has been building between Jakarta and Canberra over the fate of the two prisoners and on Friday the Australian prime minister, Tony Abbott, was again accused in Indonesia of making threats in his bid to save the pair. Abbott said this week that Indonesia should remember the significant financial aid Australia provided in the aftermath of the devastating 2004 tsunami that killed 170,000 Indonesians. According to Fairfax, Bishop assured Kalla that Abbott’s comments were meant only to emphasise the history of friendship between their two countries. Abbott himself had also denied the comment was threatening, but Indonesia’s foreign minister, Retno Marsudi, on Friday suggested Jakarta felt otherwise. “We will not respond to an emotional statement, which was a threat in nature,” she said, adding she did not think Indonesia owed Australia anything for their tsunami aid. Marsudi added that Indonesia had been helping Australia by stopping the Bali Nine from bringing drugs into the country. “So, the convicts persons would have bought the goods [drugs] into Australia. So actually in fact we saved those goods, stopped the goods so they were not carried out [of the country].” Widodo has vowed to refuse clemency to narcotics dealers while Indonesia is facing a “drug emergency”. Some analysts speculate he is taking a tough stance on the issue to appear decisive to his critics early in his presidency. Lawyers for Chan and Sukumaran have challenged Widodo’s decision to deny them clemency, and hope a hearing next Tuesday in Jakarta will result in their executions being postponed. Abbott continued to argue against the execution on Friday, saying Chan and Sukumaran’s rehabilitation had made them a “weapon against drugs”. “I absolutely know that their [Indonesia’s] drug problem is, if anything, worse than ours, and I can understand their desire to crack down in the toughest possible way on drug crime,” Abbott told reporters on Friday. “But these two Australians are now a weapon against drugs. That’s what they are. They are a weapon against drugs and why would you deny yourself access to that at a difficult time for your country.” Australia’s attorney general George Brandis reiterated that the country was doing all it could to stay the executions. “What we are all united in doing... government, opposition, indeed every voice in the parliament, is appealing to the Indonesian government, as the prime minister has done, as the foreign minister has done, as the parliament speaking collectively has done, as I have done with my opposite number in Indonesia, to ask for the lives of these two men to be spared.”Eric Fromm, the student body president at Northwest Christian University in Eugene, Ore., “came out” last week as an atheist. “I don’t have to hide anymore,” said Fromm. “I know that people accept me for who I am.” In an article in the university’s Beacon Bolt newspaper, 21-year-old Fromm said, “I couldn’t force myself to believe in God.” According to The Register-Guard, Fromm was baptized Lutheran and attended a Methodist church until the divorce of his parents when he was a teenager. He still questioned the way he was raised in the Christian church even before he stepped foot in NCU in 2010. A Canby High School graduate, Fromm chose to attend NCU not for its religious affiliations, but because it had a good communications program. ADVERTISEMENT Thanks for watching! Visit Website Michael Fuller, the university’s vice president for enrollment and student development, said he’s known about Fromm’s views for years and does not seem to have a problem with it. “He’s a man of very high character and respect,” Fuller said about Fromm. “He’s a great advocate for our student body, which is exactly what he’s supposed to be and do. “I want students like Eric here … students who are looking to explore their faith and willing to look hard and make their faith their own,” Fuller said. ADVERTISEMENT Thanks for watching! Visit Website ADVERTISEMENT Thanks for watching! Visit Website “If we all had our wishes, we wish Eric would be a strong Christian man,” Fuller added. But at the same time, he said, “We’re an open and welcome community, and we meet students exactly where they’re at.” However, not everyone in the university is happy. Writing in an email to The Register-Guard, the author noted that NCU’s student government’s purpose, according to the school’s website, is “to encourage students academically, spiritually and socially.” “With an atheist president, it doesn’t make sense how this mission can be carried out,” the email writer said. The Register-Guard reports that Fromm still respects his peers on the 600-student college campus. undefinedFor the first time since they were discovered 13 years ago, human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) have shown medical promise. Two people with eye degeneration both say their vision improved in the four months after they received implants of retinal pigment epithelial cells made from hESCs. The treatments were also safe, with no sign that the cells triggered aggressive tumours called teratomas, no sign of immune rejection of the cells, and no inflammation. Discovered in 1998, hESCs had previously failed to deliver on their medical promise. The new procedures, performed by Robert Lanza of Advanced Cell Technology of Marlborough, Massachusetts, and colleagues, could represent a turning point for hESC therapies. One of the women in the trial had Stargardt disease, an inherited form of eye degeneration in which the pigment cells wither and die. She had replacement cells made from hESCs injected into one of her eyes. Advertisement Before the treatment she could only make out hand movements, but afterwards her vision in the treated eye had improved enough to discern finger movements too. She could also read five letters on a standard visual acuity chart – beforehand she could not make out any letters. “That doesn’t really capture the difference it’s made in her life,” says Lanza. “She reports she can see more colour and has better contrast and dark adaptation out of the treated eye. She started using her computer and could even read her watch. Little things like that, which we all take for granted, can make a huge difference in the quality of people’s lives.” Stem cell boost The second woman in the trial, who has age-related macular degeneration, also reported improved vision. She expanded the number of letters she could read on a visual acuity chart from 21 to 28. Although modest, the vision improvements represent a huge boost for researchers developing treatments based on hESCs. From the outset, these studies have been opposed by anti-abortion groups on the grounds that the cells can be obtained only by destroying human embryos. Consequently, most progress so far with stem cells has been with adult stem cells extracted from tissue such as fat or skin. Former US president George W. Bush impeded progress in federally funded US labs by restricting researchers’ access to hESCs in 2001. The move was reversed by Barack Obama in 2009, paving the way for treatments to enter trials in 2010, including the eye trials that have now been completed. “The goal of this therapy is not to cure blindness, but to slow down or prevent its onset,” says Lanza. However, with evidence now that the stem cells are safe they could be used earlier in treatment, where they might have a greater impact. Other researchers welcomed the developments. “At last we’re seeing the fruits of hESC research entering clinical trials, and I am immensely happy this has happened in the eye,” says Pete Coffey of University College London, who is head of a team developing tiny patches of retinal pigment epithelial cells from embryonic stem cells to treat age-related macular degeneration. “Hopefully, we will be able to enter our own clinical trials using hESC therapy soon,” he says. The results “move us much closer to the future of regenerative medicine for vision disorders”, says Paul Sieving, director of the US National Eye Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. He adds that the institute is also working with hESCs to combat retinal diseases and cataracts. Journal reference: The Lancet, DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(12)60028-2Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich's murder continues to stir up public opinion in the US. Speaking to Sputnik, Wall Street analyst Charles Ortel assumed that Rich's death could have been part of a massive conspiracy aimed at appointing Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton as successor to Barack Obama. The unresolved murder of Democratic National Committee (DNC) staffer Seth Rich has again been brought into the spotlight. About a year ago Rich, who reportedly worked as the voter expansion data director at the DNC, was shot in the back in the Bloomingdale neighborhood of Washington D.C. The Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) surmises that the DNC staffer was a victim of a robbery. However, his wallet, credit cards and cellphone were found on his body, intact. To add to the controversy, the police have not been releasing new information on the case for months, prompting American political consultant Jack Burkman to file a suit against the MPD on Wednesday seeking to force them to release video footage of the murder. For his part, US conservative commentator Sean Hannity signaled Tuesday that he is "making progress" in investigating what was really behind Seth Rich's murder. Why does the former DNC staffer attract so much attention? The crux of the matter is that he is believed to be an alleged whistleblower who leaked nearly 20,000 DNC emails to WikiLeaks, exposing Hillary Clinton's conspiracy against her counterpart — former Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. Back in August 2016, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange dropped a hint that Rich could have been behind the leak. If that is true, the Democrats' narrative that Russia had "meddled" in the US 2016 presidential election will fall apart like a house of cards. We are in search of the identity of the DNC leaker (s), don't get distracted by the mainstream media fake news distributors. — Sean Hannity (@seanhannity) May 31, 2017 Meanwhile, American investigative journalist and author Jerome R. Corsi has published a series of articles, which "explores the evidence that Seth Rich… leaked to WikiLeaks thousands of John Podesta's emails." Sputnik asked Wall Street analyst and investigative journalist Charles Ortel to share his views on the issue. If it is proven that Rich was behind the DNC leak, will it deal a lethal blow to the "Russians did it" story? At the same time, will it help answer the question who could have been behind Rich's murder? "Jerry Corsi's excellent work deserves close attention as does the independent work of George Webb and others who are trying to discover why so many people close to the last election have died along the way," Ortel told Sputnik. Indeed, the death of attorney Shawn Lucas, who served the DNC with a lawsuit in early July 2016 accusing then-DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz of "rigging primaries" for Hillary Clinton, raised a lot of questions. Likewise, the passing of Joe Montano, who served as chairman of the Democratic National Committee before Debbie Wasserman Schultz, in July 2016, and the death of Victor Thorn, who authored four books on the Clintons, in August 2016, are still shrouded in mystery. The US alternative media are circulating the so-called "Clinton death list" claiming that it contains the names of people who died after crossing the Clintons' path. "Assuming the FBI was given the appropriate attitude and necessary resources, I imagine they would wish to investigate what seems to be a massive criminal conspiracy to appoint Hillary Clinton as successor to Barack Obama," Ortel noted. "Here, I would suggest going all the way back to the 2007 and 2008 election cycle to understand better exactly what accommodations may have been reached between the Obamas and the Clintons concerning the operation of the Clinton Foundation and its affiliates while Hillary Clinton served as US Secretary of State, forward to the present," the Wall Street analyst suggested. "What I see in the public record alone is a pattern where political donors and Clinton Foundation donors appear to have been richly rewarded numerous ways. In addition, particularly from 2009 forward the Clinton and Obama families, somehow, seem to have become much wealthier. Can publishing houses credibly defend the enormous advances given for various books? Can payments for'speeches' and for part-time positions be defended, when compared to incomes earned in the private sector for a full year of honest work?" Ortel asked. Meanwhile, there is yet another burning issue related to the DNC leak. The question is why the DNC still denies the FBI access to their hacked server. Or maybe it is the FBI that is insisting on not examining the server while relying on a private firm's findings on the alleged hack? Why did the @FBI not demand access to the @DNC servers? Why was a conflicted private company allowed to investigate? pic.twitter.com/YUMdKOS70w — Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) May 31, 2017 "If I were a Democrat, and if I were a Bernie Sanders supporter, I would be furious with the leadership of the Democratic Party — its behavior during 2016 strongly suggests to me that party officials have much to hide, a conclusion that is consistent with their apparent refusal to let the FBI do its work, rigorously," the Wall Street analyst emphasized. © AFP 2018 / Robyn BECK FBI Spying Machine: Who Allowed US 'Deep State' to Overstep Its Bounds "In solving mysteries, one of the oldest questions normally asked is 'who benefits'?" he highlighted. "I believe that the Clinton campaign acted as if their candidate had earned the absolute right not simply to win the presidency but to rule the American people with unchecked power. Having lost so badly in 2008, Hillary Clinton and her supporters were determined to win in 2016 at all costs. So, damaging information was suppressed, and the primaries seem to have been rigged from what we know, so far, in the public domain," Ortel elaborated, adding that "Americans deserve to know what really happened during election season." "Moreover, those who have been attacked, the Russian government for example, and others who have been charged in the media and even by politicians as having, potentially, meddled in the recent election cycle need either to be proven guilty or cleared," he added. The Wall Street analyst believes that "America needs to get its game back." "To do so, we need to root out the endemic corruption especially in Washington, D.C. among both political parties, drain the swamp and make examples of the swamp monsters who still believe, even now, that they are above the law," Ortel concluded. The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Sputnik. Never miss a story again — sign up to our Telegram channel and we'll keep you up to speed!White House adviser "has turned himself simultaneously into a Statue of Arrogance and a National Monument of Ignorance," organization says President Trump’s proposed revamp of legal immigration might already lessen the U.S. population by one, if the Anne Frank Center has its way. Reacting to White House adviser Miller’s fiery comments about the Statue of Liberty — and, in particular, the Emma Lazarus poem that accompanies the statue — during a press conference on Wednesday, Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect executive director Steven Goldstein suggested that Miller’s ignorance deems him ineligible for American citizenship and counseled him, “please leave.” “Stephen Miller has turned himself simultaneously into a Statue of Arrogance and a National Monument of Ignorance,” Goldstein said in a statement issue Wednesday. “His subpar knowledge of American history, as reflected in Emma Lazarus’ poem, means he couldn’t pass President Trump’s new immigration test. Therefore, Stephen, please leave.” Also Read: Trump Adviser Stephen Miller Slams CNN's Jim Acosta to His Face: 'Ignorant and Foolish' (Video) Here is our full statement on Stephen Miller’s grotesque statement calling Emma Lazarus poem’s on the Statue of Liberty “meaningless.” pic.twitter.com/5tAn92ecqk – Anne Frank Center (@AnneFrankCenter) August 2, 2017 Miller steered Wednesday’s press conference into trainwreck territory while engaging in a heated exchange with CNN’s Jim Acosta, who said that Trump’s plan “does not sound like it’s keeping with American tradition” on immigration before reading a passage from the Statue of Liberty poem, noting that it “doesn’t say anything about speaking English.” “Jim, I appreciate your speech so, let’s talk about this,” Miller said before mocking the CNN reporter with a series of sarcastic, rhetorical questions. Miller asked, “The notion that you actually think immigration isn’t a historic law … do you really, at CNN, not know the difference between Green Card policy and illegal immigration? You really don’t know that?” Also Read: White House Adviser Stephen Miller's Santa Monica High School Classmates Wonder 'WTF?' Acosta criticized the notion that immigrants need to learn English before coming to America, asking if only people from England and Australia will be allowed into the country. “I am shocked at your statement that you think that only people from Great Britain and Australia would know English,” Miller responded. “It reveals your cosmopolitan bias to a shocking degree… in your mind, this is an amazing moment. This is an amazing moment that you think only people from Great Britain or Australia would speak English is so insulting to millions of hard working immigrants that do speak English from all over the world.” During the exchange, Miller also contended that the Lazarus poem is “not actually part of the original Statue of Liberty.” Also Read: Joe Scarborough, Steve Bannon Trade Jabs Over Trump's Senior Policy Adviser “The Statue of Liberty is a symbol of liberty enlightening the world,” Miller said. “It’s a symbol of American liberty lighting the world. The poem that you’re referring to was added later. It’s not actually a part of the Statue of Liberty,” a claim that Acosta characterized as “national park revisionism.” In case you missed it, watch the exchange in the video below.Large crowds have gathered across Iran in a demonstration of loyalty to the government as opposition protests showed no signs of abating. Tehran meanwhile slammed Washington’s “interference” and “deceptive support” of the unrest. The ongoing protests in Iran started as a rally against soaring food prices and unemployment, snowballing into the biggest anti-government movement in eight years. On Saturday, according to videos posted on social media, the protesters, who appear to be predominantly young and male, were seen jostling with riot police, throwing stones, burning fires, and hauling down a billboard of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. In several clips, crowds are heard calling for the overthrow of the country’s supreme leader and also President Hassan Rouhani, as well as chanting “No to high prices!” Some Tweets and Facebook posts claimed that at least two demonstrators have been injured or shot dead by Revolutionary Guards in Daroud, a city in the central Lorestan province, but there has been no official confirmation by media or the authorities. The government said without prior permission, all such gatherings are “illegal,” and have stated it has been orchestrated by “anti-revolutionary forces” based abroad. "Police and security forces have tried to manage conditions. We have received reports of calls to gather, cyber and social media based, and such calls and any gatherings resulting therefor, are certainly illegal," Interior Minister Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli said in a statement Saturday afternoon. A final resolution at the rallies, cited by the Fars news agency, called for “unity and integration” and urged “vigilance” against provocateurs. Thousands of pro- and anti-government demonstrators have taken to the streets across Iran since Thursday. Anti-government protests were prompted mostly by discontent over economic hardship and alleged corruption. The crowds also aimed their anger at Khamenei. “People are protesting because [they] are under economic pressure and the government must be responsive in the face of rising inflation and these economic hardships,” Mostafa Kiaie, a demonstrator, said, as cited by AFP. Pro-government protests were held in around 1,200 cities and towns, local media reported. Mass pro-government protests took place in Tehran and Mashhad, Iran’s second most populous city. The demonstrations were the most serious since the unrest back in 2009 that followed the Iranian presidential election results. The protesters disputed the victory of then-Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Oppressive regimes cannot endure forever, and the day will come when the Iranian people will face a choice. The world is watching! pic.twitter.com/kvv1uAqcZ9 — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 30, 2017 President Donald Trump has weighed in on the discontent, tweeting, “the good people of Iran want change” and “oppressive regimes cannot endure forever,” - quoting from his speech on Iran to the United Nations in September. Trump has taken a much more hardline approach to Iran in contrast to his predecessor, branding the Islamic Republic a leading state sponsor of terrorism and decertifying the landmark nuclear agreement. Trump's administration has also repeatedly taken aim at Iran’s missile program – which Teheran claims is purely defensive – slapping it with a wave of new sanctions. With the discord escalating, Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif labelled Washington’ rhetoric and policies “extremely dangerous,” impulsive, and detached from reality. The Iranian foreign ministry immediatelly slammed Trump’s remarks as an “opportunist and hypocritical” attempt to meddle in Iran’s internal affairs, with ministry spokesman Bahram Qasemi calling the ongoing anti-government action “part of US' hypocritical ploy,” as cited by IRNA. Brushing off Trump’s accusations of an “oppressive regime,” Qasemi noted the huge turnout at the pro-government rallies, as well as the presidential election held this year, which proves that Iranians have strong faith in the country’s democratic institutions. Over 70 percent of Iranians took part in the May election which Rouhani Rouhani won by a landslide. “The noble Iranian nation never pays heed to the opportunist and hypocritical mottos chanted by the US officials and their interfering allegations on domestic developments in the Islamic Republic of Iran,” Qasemi said. “The vigilant attendance of people and their resistance against ill-wishers that US president Donald Trump stands on top will guarantee the country's development.” Seyed Mohammed Marandi, professor of politics at Tehran University, told RT that the West has seized on localized discontent to push for the collapse of the entire political system. “The counter protests were much larger, but these were not reflected in the Western media.”Image copyright PA Image caption St Helens CCG is proposing non-urgent referrals to hospital between October and January be stopped to "support the CCG's financial recovery" An NHS commissioning group has proposed a temporary ban on non-vital operations in a bid to tackle funding problems. St Helens Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) in Merseyside could suspend all non-essential hospital referrals for four months during the winter. The CCG's lay chair, Geoffrey Appleton, said the group recognises the move "won't be popular" but is facing a funding gap of £12.5m this year. The British Medical Association (BMA) called the move "unacceptable". The CCG, which was recently rated "inadequate" by NHS England, is also suggesting a two-year suspension of IVF services for people aged under 37 and stopping provision of gluten free foods and some over-the-counter medicines. 'Denied access' Image caption The CCG said it hopes to save at least £2.5m by pausing non-urgent referrals to hospital Mr Appleton said the plan would "support hospitals during the busy winter period" and allow them to concentrate on the sickest patients. Explaining the group's situation in its Financial Recovery Plan, he said: "Imagine our NHS budget is your household budget and every year the cost of living goes up but your salary doesn't increase; the result is money becomes tighter and tighter." "Now imagine another relative comes to live with you and because of their health needs are unable to work and cannot contribute financially. How would you manage?" Dr Richard Vautrey, deputy chair of the BMA's GP committee, said the move "highlights the incredible financial pressure facing general practice and its impact on patient care. "It cannot be right that the public will be effectively denied access to healthcare because the local CCG has run out of money," he said. He called on government ministers to "step up their commitment to resolving this crisis". "The cost to the health service of delaying referrals could ultimately be much greater in the long term as more complex and costly problems develop as a result". The CCG says it is "under-funded" compared with other areas in Cheshire and Merseyside. An NHS spokeswoman said deciding how to prioritise resources are "very difficult for commissioners" but CCGs must "plan and manage demand over winter". "St Helens CCG is actively engaging with its local population on the best way to ensure patients have their care prioritised over the busy months for the NHS", she said. Charity Coeliac UK criticised plans to cut gluten-free prescriptions, saying it "will leave vulnerable patients without support" and "could cost the NHS more in the long run". The NHS England regional office will review the proposals before a decision is made because of the CCG's inadequate rating. The proposals are under public consultation until 5 October.The Blockchain Lab at the UC Berkeley received the campus’s first ever donation in Bitcoin, worth more than $50,000. The donation, also the first for the Blockchain Lab, came from the EchoLink foundation. EchoLink is a project that is using blockchain, the technology that securely verifies Bitcoin transactions, to help employers verify education, skills and work experience for prospective employees. EchoLink was founded by Steve Chen, who is also serving as industry co-lead for the Blockchain Lab. The Bitcoin donation, a pilot project, has already been cashed into dollars for the lab to use. “Berkeley has always been a hub for innovative ideas and research, and the Blockchain Lab here provides a platform for researchers and students from different disciplines to work together to conduct leading-edge research and build really innovative blockchain-based projects,” Chen said. [Read more: With blockchain, Berkeley student group sets standard] Berkeley’s Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology launched the Blockchain Lab this fall to help entrepreneurs take advantage of a technology that many believe to be one of the most exciting recent developments in computer science. Bitcoin is just one example of a blockchain, or a distributed public ledger system, which allows users to make secure transactions in a very short amount of time. Blockchain has become a buzzword in the cybersecurity world and on the Berkeley campus, which is now a hub for blockchain research and education. A Berkeley Ph.D. student used blockchain data to hunt sex traffickers, and this spring, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business will offer a class to business, engineering and law students called “Blockchain and the Future of Technology, Business, and Law.” Recently, Chen held a two-day workshop for students to learn the fundamentals of blockchain development. At the event, Chen demystified the basics of blockchain and went into detail about how the system works. Students also learned how to develop their own applications on Ethereum, a popular blockchain-based platform used for creating smart contracts and token offerings. With blockchain, much of the attention so far has been on Bitcoin because the digital currency has been the spark that has ignited the blockchain revolution, but the potential for blockchain technology is much larger. Experts believe it may soon touch every industry and completely change how business is done. Reduced transaction costs and impenetrable security will enable all kinds of new business models and activities. For example, governments could use a blockchain to enable digital voting where individuals could vote online and verify that their votes were appropriately counted. Unlike current tries at online voting, a blockchain-based system would be nearly impossible to hack. A recent post on the Berkeley Blog talks about importance of blockchain technology in protecting personal data in the United Nation’s new digital identity system for refugees. “The more one thinks on the plausible applications for blockchain, the more one starts to see how this technology may in fact change the social, political and business landscape much like the internet did,” said Ikhlaq Sidhu, founding director and chief scientist at the Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology. “Thanks to the donation from EchoLink, students at Berkeley will have the chance to begin exploring.”Seattle Seahawks cornerback Jeremy Lane sits as the national anthem plays before a preseason NFL football game against the Oakland Raiders, Thursday, Sept. 1, 2016, in Oakland, Calif. (AP Photo/Tony Avelar) RENTON -- The Seattle Seahawks hope to make a statement in their season-opening matchup versus the Miami Dolphins on Sunday. But some of the players might make a statement before the game even starts. Following protests by San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick and Seattle cornerback Jeremy Lane, members of the Seahawks might join together to address the issues that motivated Kaepernick to first sit, then kneel during the playing of the national anthem. Linebacker Bobby Wagner said Wednesday that the team is considering a show of unity in order to promote justice and equality for all Americans, regardless of skin color. "Anything that we want to do, it's not going to be individual," Wagner said ahead of practice at the Virginia Mason Athletic Center. "It's going to be a team thing because that's what the world needs to see. The world needs to see people coming together versus being individuals." Kaepernick sat for the national anthem during the preseason as a way of protesting what he believed to be the unequal treatment of minorities in America -- specifically police brutality against African Americans -- telling NFL Network he refused to "stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppressed black people and people of color." Lane followed Kaepernick's lead ahead of Seattle's preseason finale versus the Oakland Raiders on Sept. 1, while Kaepernick and teammate Eric Reid amended their protests to kneeling during the national anthem as a sign of respect to the military ahead of the Niners' final preseason game. Seahawks head coach Pete Carroll told reporters he expected Lane to continue his protest on Sunday. "We've talked some about it," Carroll said. "He's pretty clear what he did and what he was trying to express. I think it's very simple, so we'll leave that up to him. But he's understanding the responsibility of it, I think, and shouldering it." Wide receiver Doug Baldwin, never shy about expressing his opinions, took to Facebook to discuss the issue on Sept. 4, using a parable to argue people were more concerned with Kaepernick's method of protest than the issues he raised. "I think that's what the issue is here," Baldwin said on Wednesday. "We're missing the message in terms of what we're talking about. It's not necessarily about the messenger or about the protest itself. It's about what we're pointing to." Baldwin and his teammates have discussed a larger protest, but the 27-year-old said he wanted to get "all of my ducks in a row" before he disclosed any plans. One complicating factor could be that Sunday's game falls on the 15th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, a fact that's not lost on Baldwin. "I think that anybody should be thinking about that," Baldwin said. "Even if it wasn't Sept. 11, the point of the protest is to get people to think. "I think it's very ironic that 15 years ago on Sept. 11 is one of the most devastating times in U.S. history, and after that day we were probably the most unified that we've ever been," he continued. "And today you struggle to see the unity." According to Baldwin and Wagner, both team leaders, the unity Carroll has helped create among a diverse group in the Seahawks locker room makes them uniquely prepared to take a stand. "It's different in our locker room," Baldwin said. "Whatever decisions you make, we understand that we're all human beings. So some of us might not agree, some of us will agree, but at the same time we give each other slack because we're all human beings." "I enjoy having conversations
Don't shoot." On Saturday, witnesses said Brown had raised his hands in the air before he was shot, but that was not confirmed by Belmar. Protesters called for 10,000 people to join them at 10 a.m. Monday at the Ferguson Police Department. The crowd marched through the streets Sunday morning and afternoon. The Rev. Al Sharpton says the shooting death of Brown is "very disturbing," and the civil-rights leader is planning a visit to Ferguson to make that known. Sharpton tells The Associated Press that he's spoken with a grandfather of Michael Brown and plans to meet with the family in person Monday night or Tuesday in Ferguson. Contributing: The Associated Press Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1omDzDCA Cuneiform clay tablet which for over 150 years defied attempts at interpretation has now been revealed to describe an asteroid impact which in 3123 BC hit Köfels, Austria, leaving in its wake a trail of destruction which may acccount for the biblical tale of Sodom and Gomorrah. The "Planisphere" tablet (see pic) - inscribed around 700 BC - was unearthed by Henry Layard in the remains of the library of the Assyrian royal palace at Nineveh, close to modern-day Mosul, Iraq. It's a copy of the night diary of a Sumerian astronomer containing drawings of constellations and "known constellation names", but it required modern computer tech to finally unravel its exact meaning. Alan Bond, Managing Director of Reaction Engines Ltd and Mark Hempsell, Senior Lecturer in Astronautics at Bristol University, subjected the Planisphere to a programme which "can simulate trajectories and reconstruct the night sky thousands of years ago". They discovered that it described "events in the sky before dawn on the 29 June 3123 BC", with half of it noting "planet positions and cloud cover, the same as any other night". The other half, however, records an object "large enough for its shape to be noted even though it is still in space" and tracks its trajectory relative to the stars, which "to an error better than one degree is consistent with an impact at Köfels". That a large body had impacted at Köfels had long been suspected, the evidence being a giant landslide 500m thick and five kilometres in diameter. The site had no impact crater to back the theory, but the researchers now believe they have a plausible explanation for that. The Bristol Uni press release explains: "The observation suggests the asteroid is over a kilometre in diameter and the original orbit about the Sun was an Aten type, a class of asteroid that orbit close to the earth, that is resonant with the Earth’s orbit. This trajectory explains why there is no crater at Köfels. "The in coming angle was very low (six degrees) and means the asteroid clipped a mountain called Gamskogel above the town of Längenfeld, 11 kilometres from Köfels, and this caused the asteroid to explode before it reached its final impact point. "As it travelled down the valley it became a fireball, around five kilometres in diameter (the size of the landslide). When it hit Köfels it created enormous pressures that pulverised the rock and caused the landslide but because it was no longer a solid object it did not create a classic impact crater." Mark Hempsell, hinting at the possible fate of Sodom and Gomorrah, adds: “Another conclusion can be made from the trajectory. The back plume from the explosion (the mushroom cloud) would be bent over the Mediterranean Sea re-entering the atmosphere over the Levant, Sinai, and Northern Egypt. “The ground heating though very short would be enough to ignite any flammable material - including human hair and clothes. It is probable more people died under the plume than in the Alps due to the impact blast.“ While the biblical fate of the legendary dens of vice (“Then the Lord rained down burning sulfur on Sodom and Gomorrah - from the Lord out of the heavens” - Genesis 19:24) sits nicely with the asteroid theory, it's never been categorically proven that they actually existed in their suspected location close to the Dead Sea. Tales of fiery destruction raining from the skies are not, though, restricted to the Bible. Hempsall told the Times that "at least 20 ancient myths record devastation of the type and on the scale of the asteroid’s impact" - including the Ancient Greek myth of how Phaeton, son of Helios, lost control of his dad's chariot and plunged into the River Eridanus. A translation of the Planisphere and the researchers' findings can be found in the book A Sumerian Observation of the Köfels' Impact Event. The tablet is object number K8538 in the British Museum collection. ®Email 12K Shares [NEW YORK, NY] Trial began in Manhattan Criminal Court Monday for Occupy Wall Street activist, Cecily McMillan, who faces 2nd degree assault charges stemming from a 2012 encounter with the NYPD that left her beaten and unconscious. Trial has been postponed until March 3rd due to the introduction of illuminating new evidence. McMillan was brutally arrested on the evening of March 17, 2012 at an event marking the 6-month anniversary of the group’s occupation of Zuccotti Park. The series of events leading up McMillan’s beating was documented extensively by the press, and began with a plainclothes male NYPD officer forcibly grabbing her right breast. McMillan was 23 years old at the time. McMillan, over the course of her arrest, sustained a violent beating resulting in bruised ribs, a seizure, and myriad cuts and bruises across her body. McMillan was hospitalized for these injuries. McMillan was later charged with felony assault of a police officer, Assault 2nd degree, a Class D felony in NY, which carries that sentence of up to 7 years in prison. Prosecutors, upon approaching trial, have indicated that they will ask the judge for a maximum sentence of 7 years. Many activists speculate that McMillan’s work as a political organizer has played a role in the prosecutor’s unwavering position. Others attribute the city’s stance to an unwillingness to admit guilt in the grotesque display of police misconduct on the night of McMillan’s arrest. Supporters of McMillian are calling on activists and friends to fill the courtroom to witness each day of the proceeding. * COURT SCHEDULE Room 1333, Part 31 @ 100 Centre St. (All Sessions from 9:30am-4:30pm) Trial resumes on MARCH 3, 2014 * You can stay up to date with Cecily’s support by texting “@CecilysTrial” to 23559, or by visiting http://Justice4Cecily.com, updates are also regularly posted via Facebook HERE. * Cecily McMillan had her first day in court on Monday, after nearly two years of delays. On March 17, 2012 Cecily was attacked from behind by a police officer, and brutally beaten by several officers on duty at Zuccotti Park. An out-of-uniform police officer grabbed her right breast from behind, and Cecily instinctually raised her arm, making contact with the officer. She was thrown to the ground by the officer and then suffered blows from several other police officers nearby; following the attack, Cecily went into a series of seizures. The District Attorney is looking to discredit Cecily’s account of the night through questioning the veracity of her medical conditions, in spite of video and eyewitness accounts supporting the seriousness of her injuries. The prosecution is also trying to depict this as an isolated event – not connected to mass-arrests and grotesque police brutality exhibited by the NYPD throughout the night. Per the testimony of the officer in charge of Cecily’s arrest, the police detail assigned to Zuccotti Park night were informed in advance that the end-goal was to “clear out the park.” Contrary to the prosecutor’s assertion that there was no context for Cecily’s arrest, there was a obvious goal of violent mass-arrests: 72 others were arrested that night and many more were man-handled by the NYPD. During a break between some of the pre-trial motions, McMillan’s lawyer Marty Stolar said, “I believe 100% that we will win, because absolutely no crime was committed.” Interview w/ Cecily McMillan’s attorney, Martin Stolar \| Courtesy of Jeffrey Durkin “The main issue here,” says Martin R. Stolar, McMillan’s attorney, “is the heavy-handed, over-policing by the NYPD during the Occupy Wall Street protests, which lead to crimes where none existed. It was a normal reaction for a woman to react, to be startled after having her right breast grabbed.” Rebecca Heinegg will be co-counsel with Stolar at trial. According to the National Lawyers Guild, McMillan’s case is one of the last court cases stemming from Occupy Wall Street remaining on the docket. It may also be one of the most consequential. More information on how to support Cecily McMillan can be found HERE. Journalists who would like to obtain comment from McMillian or her legal team can contact Stan Williams at 256-323-1109 or via email at t4swillia3@gmail.com as well as Lucy Parks at 540-810-5531 or via email at wegrewuptwofast@gmail.comSAN FRANCISCO, CA—After months of rumors and speculation, Apple took the wraps off of iOS 8 today at the opening keynote of its 2014 Worldwide Developers Conference. The latest version of Apple's iPhone and iPad operating system retains and refines the "flattened" user interface introduced in iOS 7 last year while introducing new features and APIs. Apple has revamped Notifications Center in iOS 8 so users can respond to messages without leaving the app they are in. The function will work for apps like Messages and Calendar, and items can also be answered from the lock screen. The keyboard gets an update with QuickType, a context-aware set of suggestions for words to include in messages. The suggestions are personalized and will differ from contact to contact, and Apple reassured users that the keystrokes and learning are all conducted in the device and do not need to be sent to Apple's servers for processing. The Continuity features in OS X will likewise be featured in iOS so users can throw calls, documents, and messages between their iOS and OS X devices. Group messages in iOS will now be organized as threads with titles where participants can be added or removed. Locations can be shared in iOS 8 message threads, and users can also record snippets of audio and swipe up from the recording field to send them. Apple is also adding the ability to mute individual conversations, and media in conversations is now curated together in a "details" pane. iCloud Drive will be integrated with iOS 8, allowing users to see files stored in iCloud from application in a single pane. Apple introduced a new API in iOS named Healthkit that can aggregate information about your weight, exercise levels, and medication schedules to help you manage all of it. Healthkit can collect data from external third-party apps from companies like Nike, and from fitness gadgets by extension. The door is obviously open for Apple to introduce its own health tracking gadget later on. Not only can Healthkit curate this information, it can pass it on with the user's permission. For instance, if the user takes a blood pressure reading that registers higher than normal, Healthkit can pass that information along to the user's doctor. Family sharing has received some updates in iOS 8. Calendars, photos, reminders, and photo streams can all be shared between family phones, as well as Find My Friends position, with permission. Up to six family members who share one credit card on their accounts can also mutually share purchased items like movies, apps, books, and music. Photos will now back up automatically to iCloud so that all photos are available on every device (however, Photo Stream has always had a 1,000 photo limit, so it's unclear whether the new iCloud integration will have to play along with that limit). Photos can also now be searched by location, date, and album, and the app will get new editing tools for lighting, color, auto-straightening, and cropping. Favoriting photos on one device will make them appear in a special "favorites" album on other devices. Along with photo sync, Apple is introducing new iCloud storage pricing. The 5GB tier will remain free, with 20GB costing $0.99/month and 200GB at $3.99 per month. Updates to Siri include Shazam song recognition and streaming voice recognition that will show what Siri is transcribing as the user talks, rather than compiling it in one fell swoop once they stop recording. Apple has also added to Siri 22 new dictation languages. Mail in iOS will receive some tweaks: messages can be marked as read with a single gesture, and the app will gain context-aware shortcuts, like adding events to a calendar. Users can also now move a draft message window aside to navigate the rest of the inbox, rather than having to save the draft and re-open it later. Mail will also have a feature called "VIP threads" that lets users get notifications on a per-thread basis. The new version of Spotlight in iOS will now include results for things that are not on the user's phone, including news or apps available in the App Store that have not yet been bought or downloaded. The iPad version of Safari will gain some previously iPhone-exclusive features like the bird's-eye tab view and Safari sidebar. To address Enterprise customers, Apple has set up a new system that installs a user profile on a device before it is sent to the customer so that IT will not have to deal with that extra step. Third-party enterprise document providers will also now integrate with iCloud, though Apple did not specify which apps or companies. As for the App Store, Apple plans to add an Explore tab to help users find new apps, as well as top trending searches and continuous scrolling in search. Users will soon be able to buy apps in bundles at discounted prices, and soon developers will be able to include videos in their app listings to demonstrate what their apps do. Devs will be able to invite users to beta-test apps for free using TestFlight. For Xcode, Apple has created a new programming language called Swift, which it calls "Objective-C without the baggage of C." Apple states that Swift is 3.9 times faster than Python at complex object sorting, and also fast with RC4 encryption. Apple states that Swift can sit next to C and Obj-C code in the same application, and Xcode will show live demos of what Swift code is doing as it's added in a separate pane. More significantly, Apple is loosening some of the restrictions on third-party applications to allow them to interact with each other more easily. In older versions of iOS, only third-party apps and services "blessed" by Apple (e.g. Twitter, Facebook) could easily upload and share pictures and other files from most apps via the Share menu. In iOS 8, people who want to post a picture directly from the camera roll to Google+ should be able to, as will anyone who wants to upload a Word document from Office Mobile to Dropbox. Apps will presumably need to be updated to support the new feature, but iOS developers are typically quick to jump on board when it comes to features like these. Developers will also get an API to add widgets to Notifications Center, system-wide third-party keyboards (hello, Swype), and an API for the TouchID sensor. Apps can use TouchID for logins and to organize user data, but developers will not get direct access to the fingerprint data itself. Apple revealed that it is developing a network protocol, HomeKit, to allow users to control things like garage doors and lights from their iOS devices. Apple revealed the new CloudKit with iOS 8, a "free with limits" programming model that lets developers access iCloud authentication, storage, and search with 1PB of assets and a 10TB database. Developers will also get access to Metal, a new 3D graphics API designed to work with the A7 processor that reduces the overhead typically seen from using OpenGL. Another tool, SceneKit, will allow users to render games with built-in physics and particle engines. The iOS 8 beta is available to WWDC developers starting today, with the official release coming in the fall. Apple's WWDC keynote is ongoing. We'll continue to update this post with more details as they're announced. For up-to-the-minute info, you can follow our liveblog.A few months ago a coworker held up the item pictured above and said, “This is called a cheeseborough.” I didn’t believe him, nor could I see any particular use for the tool. Later, I found out he wasn’t making up the term, and that all a cheeseborough does is clamp onto 1-1/4″ to 1-1/2″ pipe. And a few days ago I found out what makes this odd tool so cool. Last week some guys were prepping for an outdoor event, and I got to see ’em put up an aluminum truss structure, made of tubing around 1-1/4″ to 1-1/2″ in diameter. I found out that with a cheeseborough and some pipe, you can hold almost anything. I saw cheeseboroughs used to hold ceilings, large fabric headers, plasma screens, and just about anything else that could be clamped down with it. This week I did a little research. I haven’t found out why they’re called cheeseboroughs, but I did find out they’re also called less cool names, like pipe coupler or scaffold clamp. I found out they come in dozens of styles — some are rigid, some swivel, some can be bolted onto, some can have rope tied off. Just about any permutation seems to exist out there. I also learned they aren’t too cheap. If they weren’t so expensive, I’d be trying to come up with projects for ’em all the time. Scaffold Clamps [Rosco] Couplers [The Light Source] Street Pricing [Google Products]Appeals Court Temporarily Blocks Porter Testimony At Goodson Trial Update (3:07 p.m.): In a response filed by Attorney General Brian Frosh's office, the state claimed Porter did not exhaust potential remedies at the circuit court level before appealing to the Court of Special Appeals, a route taken only in extraordinary cases under state rules for court proceedings. Furthermore, the state claimed, Porter didn't meet the criteria for an injunction. "Porter does not even attempt to meet his burden for receiving an injunction," wrote attorneys. "In fact, Porter's motion before this Court is little more than a recitation of his motion to quash in the circuit court." Porter, they wrote, needed to prove he will suffer greater (and irreparable) injury if the injunction is not granted than prosecutors will suffer if it's granted and that it is in the interest of justice that the injunction be granted. Attorneys believe the limited immunity prosecutors can grant Porter's testimony is sufficient to protect it against use in even a federal prosecution. CLICK HERE to read the full response. -- The Court of Special Appeals on Friday issued a stay on Judge Barry Williams' order to have Officer William Porter testify in the trial of Officer Caesar Goodson. The two page stay was signed today by Peter Krasuer, Chief Judge for the Maryland Court of Special Appeals. CLICK HERE to read the stay. The officers are among six Baltimore police officers charged in the death of Freddie Gray. Williams, who is presiding over all six cases, ordered Porter this week to testify in Goodson's trial, which starts Monday, and that of Sgt. Alicia White. Goodson faces the most serious charges in Gray's death. The stay noted the state has not yet had a chance to respond to Porter attorney Gary Proctor's 38-page motion. It did not indicate when a ruling on the injunction would be issued. Porter's first trial last month ended in a hung jury, but prosecutors plan to retry him. If he does testify in the other trials, it would be under a form of limited immunity. Anything said from the stand could not be used against him in his own trial. Earlier today, new trial dates for White and Officer Garrett Miller were formally entered into the record. White's trial has been delayed two weeks and will start February 8. Miller's trial has been delayed a month and will start on March 7.President Obama is meeting with a group of law enforcement officials on Monday in the wake of last week’s deadly sniper attack on officers in Dallas. Obama dropped into a meeting previously organized by Vice President Biden in order to talk about “the challenging job that police officers across the country have,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters. ADVERTISEMENT “He’s quite interested in making sure that dialogue continues.” Obama has scrambled his schedule in response to the killing Thursday night of five officers in Dallas during a protest march against the fatal police shootings of black men in Louisiana and Minnesota last week. He returned from Europe one day early and will travel to Dallas on Tuesday to speak at a memorial service for the victims. The president also plans to organize a meeting Wednesday at the White House with law enforcement officials, activists, academics, civil rights leaders and local political leaders to discuss criminal justice reform. Obama will push them to find ways “to try and further the dialogue and to identify specific solutions to mend the bonds of trust that have frayed in so many communities” between residents and law enforcement, Earnest said. Jim Pasco, the executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police, is attending Monday's meeting and has urged Obama to make a “unifying speech that recognizes the grieving of all communities,” he told the Wall Street Journal. “Police officers are there to protect the sanctity of life, and that’s all lives.” He’s also planning to press for hate-crimes protections for law enforcement officers who are attacked.It looks like Fox News may be able to call off their search for Glenn Beck’s replacement. If drooling delirium and glassy-eyed insanity is the criteria, then Judge Andrew Napolitano has the role sewn up. Today he opened his program on Fox Business Network, Freedom Watch, saying… “Osama Bin Laden assassinated, killed on the illegal whim of the President.” That’s right. Osama Bin Laden, a brutal commander of terrorists responsible for thousands of deaths, is finally found and dispatched, and Napolitano says that President Obama is the criminal. The only thing Napolitano needs to seal the deal is a blackboard tying George Soros and Van Jones into the operation as well. Napolitano continued… “Tonight on the docket Osama Bin Laden is dead and the President thinks he has a right to kill whomever he wants so long as the person is a monster and the people support it. Of course the attacks on 9/11 were a horrific tragedy, but killing Osama Bin Laden is a symbol of all we’ve lost in this pointless war on terror and we can’t forget that.” Whomever he wants? Napolitano thinks that the President’s decision to target the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, who has been the subject of an international manhunt for ten years, is the same as a decision to kill anyone else with whom the President may have a beef. In Napolitano’s eyes there is nothing special about Bin Laden. Napolitano also believes that killing Bin Laden is “a symbol of all we’ve lost.” What would allowing Bin Laden to live and continue to murder innocent people be a symbol of, Judge? And why are you taking Bin Laden’s side in this against your President? During the program Napolitano correctly criticized the Patriot Act, but conflated that unfortunate infringement of civil liberties with the mission to capture or kill Bin Laden. Despite the fact that the Bush administration exploited 9/11 to pass the bill, it never had anything to do with protecting Americans from terrorism. It was a cynical power grab on the part of Bush and a majority Republican congress (although way too many Democrats voted for it as well). For Napolitano to bring it up in the debate over whether Bin Laden should have been killed makes about as much sense as Beck’s theory that Muslims and teachers unions are conspiring to bring Sharia law to Wisconsin. This must be Napolitano’s audition reel for Beck’s hour on Fox. And with delusional, fear-mongering material like this he could easily slip into the time slot without any of Beck’s addled fans noticing any difference.Opponents of Canada’s sweeping new anti-terror law are planning a major campaign to pressure the Liberal government to launch broad public consultations before overhauling the controversial legislation. Civil society groups, legal scholars and labour unions are calling on the government to hold a public debate on reforms for the legislation – known as C-51 – which they say are necessary to protect Canadian civil liberties, freedoms and personal privacy. “We know very little about the government’s plans for C-51, so our hope is they are going to listen to the huge number of Canadians who expressed deep, deep concerns about this bill when it was passed,” British Columbia Civil Liberties Association executive director Josh Paterson says. “They need to be very clear on what their intentions are before actually doing anything.” The government has given few details on its plans, though prime minister Justin Trudeau has reiterated his pledge to establish an all-party national security oversight committee. Legislation to form that statutory committee is expected within six months. Federal public safety minister Ralph Goodale is in London this week looking to the UK’s intelligence and security committee of Parliament – which examines the policy, administration and expenditure of that country’s intelligence agencies – as a possible model. The opposition Conservatives criticized Goodale on Tuesday for failing to include parliamentarians from other parties in these initial consultations. Bill C-51 provoked widespread outrage when it was passed by the Conservative government last June. Liberals took a beating in public opinion polls when they voted in support of the legislation, though they promised to repeal its “problematic elements” if they won the 19 October federal election. They did, and now the bill’s critics – who say it is too broad, lacks sufficient oversight for national security and law enforcement agencies, and includes a number violations of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, a rights bill embedded in Canada’s constitution – want to ensure those problems are dealt with in full public view. “Because it has been such a divisive political issue, I think there is a desire to move it out of the public sphere, especially because of the political damage the Liberal party took in supporting this legislation,” said Paul Finch, treasurer with the British Columbia Government and Service Employees’ Union. “We want to set the agenda before the (January) legislative session gets going.” While opponents say they are hopeful the government will follow through on its commitment to introduce new legislation, they are concerned that pledge has been moved to the political back burner. “It was a big issue that got a lot of attention before the election and since the election hasn’t seen much action from the government,” said Laura Tribe of Open Media. “Canadians are not going to let this one slide.” Critics are also concerned the federal government will focus on cosmetic reforms that fail to address the deeper problems they see in the legislation. “At this point there just needs to be some direction from the government about whether there is going to be a consultation and how deeply they are going to reach into bill C-51,” said Kent Roach, a University of Toronto law professor who has helped lead the attack on the legislation. Goodale’s spokesman, Scott Bardsley, said: “Work on our platform commitments on C-51 is ongoing. The full details will be unveiled in due course.” Those commitments include a guarantee all Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) warrants respect the charter and a statutory review of the full anti-terror act after three years. Bardsley also said the government was planning on holding “broad consultations” but said he could offer no further details for the moment. Last summer, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA) and Canadian Journalists for Free Expression filed a lawsuit arguing that the bill violates the Canada’s constitution. That lawsuit is pending and the CCLA has requested a meeting with the new government. Meanwhile, Tribe said time is of the essence when it comes to tackling the complex reforms. “The longer bad legislation sits on the books, the longer information is being collected. The longer people are potentially subject to surveillance,” she said. “It’s not enough to say, well, no harm has been done yet.”ISIS-K Leader Killed in Afghanistan U.S. forces killed Abu Sayed, the head of Islamic State of Iraq and Syria-Khorasan, in a strike on the group's headquarters in Kunar province, Afghanistan, July 11, Chief Pentagon Spokesperson Dana W. White said today in a statement. "The strike also killed other ISIS-K members and will significantly disrupt the terror group's plans to expand its presence in Afghanistan," she said. ISIS leaders chose Abu Sayed to lead the group, which is an affiliate of ISIS, after Afghan and U.S. forces killed the previous ISIS-K leaders - Hafiz Sayed Khan in late July 2016, and Abdul Hasib, in late April this year, White said. Afghan and U.S. forces launched a counter-ISIS-K offensive in early March to drive fighters from Nangarhar province, which borders Kunar to the south, and send a clear message to ISIS that there is no sanctuary for their fighters in Afghanistan, she said.Hours after the deadly bombing in Ankara, Turkey vowed to “exert more efforts” to punish the perpetrators, rushing to suspect the Kurds. However, experts suggest that accusing the PKK is a “politically convenient” move for Turkey to intensify its crackdown. A large explosion hit three military vehicles near parliament buildings in the Turkish capital, claiming the lives of at least 28 people and leaving 61 wounded. Speaking after the terrorist attack, President Tayyip Erdogan said his country is now more than ever determined to “defend itself.” “We will continue our struggle against these pawns, which carried out these attacks that had no moral or humane boundaries and the powers behind them every day in a more determined manner,” he said in an official statement, avoiding any direct accusations. Erdogan promised to retaliate “everywhere” possible to avenge the deaths of those killed on Wednesday and in previous attacks. READ MORE: At least 28 dead, 61 injured as blast hits military bus in Turkish capital Ankara “It must be known that Turkey will not hesitate to use its legitimate right to defend itself always, everywhere and under any circumstances,” he said. “The losses we suffered during the last attack and in previous attacks and clashes tear our hearts out, but also sharpen our resolution and impel us to exert more efforts.” Several hours after the bombing, no group has claimed responsibility, leaving the door open for speculations and accusations. An unnamed Turkish security official told Reuters that the bombing had the “initial signs” of a Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) attack. Other sources suggested that Islamic State militants (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) were to blame. “Let’s not forget that whenever something like that happens inside Turkey, the first place that they are going to point the finger is going to be the PKK,” Daniel Wagner, CEO of Country Risk Solutions told RT. He believes that Islamic State is “the likelier root of the cause.” “If you look at some of the previous attacks, how successful they’ve been, the number of casualties that they’ve had in the recent months, it certainly seems to have a hallmark of Islamic State,” Solutions said. Yet, he adds, the Turkish government is quick to point the finger at the PKK. “Of course, it is politically convenient for them to do that as they are waging an enhanced war against the PKK,” he said. Thus last year, roughly two weeks after a twin suicide attack, allegedly ordered by IS killed 102 people during a peaceful rally in Ankara on October 10, the Turkish military shelled Kurdish fighters in northern Syria. “Turkey has been waging an aggressive war against Kurdish civilians, not just Kurdish military personnel – they have been doing it for over 20 years, so there is a lot of long-standing bad blood between the Kurds and the Turks,” former CIA intelligence officer, Larry Johnson, told RT, stressing that the PKK’s involvement in Wednesday's attack, even if turns out to be true, would not be surprising. “In any event, Turkey is going to use this as a justification for more aggressive military action outside of Turkey,” Johnson thinks. The bombing on Wednesday in Ankara is the latest in a cycle of violence that has hit Turkey since July 7, 2015, when an IS attack killed 33 in the town of Suruc. The latest bombing came a little over a month since an attack in Istanbul, which killed 11 German tourists. According to the Anadolu agency, by last October, terror acts had claimed the lives of 145 Turkish security forces and 137 civilians in 98 days. “After the four bombings that happened and it was announced by ISIS that it was staged, the current government was again busy putting the blame on Kurds,” Firat Demir, an international political expert, told RT. Turkey has been facing harsh criticism over its ongoing shelling of Kurdish and Syrian government forces in the vicinity of Azaz. Ankara says it wants to create “a secure strip, including Azaz, 10km deep inside Syria and this zone should be free from clashes.” However, President Erdogan mentioned on Wednesday that Ankara does not intend to stop shelling Syrian Kurdish YPG militia. “They tell us to stop shelling” the Kurds in Syria, Erdogan said over a televised address. “Forgive me, but there is no question of us doing such a thing.” READ MORE: 'We have proof' Turkey backs ISIS & other terrorists – Kurdish commander “Today, the rules of engagement may only cover responding to armed attacks on our nation. But if needed, tomorrow the same rules can be expanded to include all sorts of threats to our country,” he said, warning “no one should doubt that.”DALLAS — Arizona expects to raise $300 million for its general fund today by mortgaging state office buildings, prisons, and other property in its second issue of certificates of participation this year. Senior manager Morgan Stanley will take retail orders first with co-managers Barclays Capital, Citi, Stone & Youngberg, and Wells Fargo Securities. RBC Capital Markets is the state’s financial adviser, Squire, Sanders & Dempsey is bond counsel, and Greenberg Traurig is underwriters’ counsel. The COPs are insured by Assured Guaranty, providing a AAA rating from Standard & Poor’s and Aa3 from Moody’s Investors Service. Both carry negative outlooks. The certificates carry underlying ratings of A-plus from Standard & Poor’s and Aa3 from Moody’s, also with negative outlooks. The 2010B issue is the second time this year Arizona has raised money to pay bills from the sale and leaseback of state buildings. In January, it sold $735 million of COPs at an average interest rate of 4.57% over 20 years. The deal drew more than $1 billion of orders. “For the state to be able to borrow $735.4 million over a 20-year period at an interest rate of 4.57% is very helpful in addressing the state’s fiscal challenges, and reflects well on investors’ view of the state and the governor’s efforts to address budgetary concerns going forward,” said David Raber, interim director of the Arizona Department of Administration. Despite the state’s weakened fiscal condition and need to address projected budgetary shortfalls in the current and future fiscal year, investor interest was high due to the dependence on the facilities used as collateral, Raber said. The facilities sold in January included the Executive Tower, legislative buildings, the Department of Public Safety headquarters, various state prison facilities, and other assets. Similar buildings are being sold this week, including the Arizona State Hospital, the Department of Public Safety building in Tucson, more state prisons, and state fairgrounds buildings. Some of the properties to be sold were covered by COPs that expire Sept. 1, provided the state makes its final lease payment of $25 million. The total value of the properties to be sold in the 2010A and B deals exceeds $1 billion, according to the Department of Administration, which oversees bond sales for the state. The Legislature authorized the sale and leaseback of the buildings as part of the budget solutions for fiscal year 2009-10, which ends June 30. The assets are nominally sold to a bank trustee and immediately leased back to the state for the 20-year term of the financing. Arizona retains control of the facilities and continues to operate them as it normally would, subject to making the annual lease payments. The bank trustee uses the proceeds of the certificates sold to investors to buy the facilities from the state. At the end of the financing term, when the certificates are repaid, the facilities are automatically released as collateral. The decision to sell the state buildings prompted criticism of the Republican Legislature and Gov. Jan Brewer, particularly from Treasurer Dean Martin, who is running against Brewer in the Republican primary for governor in August. “It was a mistake to sell the Arizona Lottery revenue and our state buildings because it continues to put our state’s credit rating at risk and looks foolish to the rest of the country,” Martin said. The lottery revenue was used to leverage a $450 million revenue bond issue last month. The proceeds of that issue were also used to pay state operating costs. For the 2010-11 fiscal year, which starts July 1, the state added one cent to the sales tax to raise $1 billion per year for three years. That increase was approved by voters last month to avoid deeper cuts in education and other services after years of reductions amid falling revenue. “The state will face ongoing cash-flow pressures until permanent state spending aligns with permanent revenues,” Martin said. “Ironically, passing a temporary tax increase makes IOUs more likely in the future.” Even with that additional sales tax revenue, Martin said, Arizona will have to issue more IOUs in the form of warrants if voters do not also approve fund sweeps from state agencies. In the November election, voters will be asked to adjust the First Things First program, which would move an estimated $325 million in tobacco tax revenue used for childhood services into the general fund. Another ballot measure would transfer $123 million from land conservation funds into the general fund. The budget also includes $60 million in relief from refinancing debt from the Arizona School Facilities Board. Through May 12, Arizona has issued $86.5 billion of treasurer warrant notes at a cost of $3.5 million and an average interest rate of 0.93%, according to Martin. With the two series of COPs, the state will make lease payments twice a year, peaking at $85.7 million in September 2029. For investors, the greatest risk is that the state will not appropriate lease payments in any given year. The COPs are allowed under Arizona’s constitution because, technically, they do not encumber future legislatures with debt payments along the lines of general obligation bonds. Under
he said, referencing a recent article from the fashion magazine in which Dunham showed off her pet. Vazquez claims he has "been in charge of the dogs" at BARC for more than a decade and that he was personally there the "four times Lena visited Lamby" prior to the dog's adoption. "If Lamby had a bad past or was abused, do you think BARC would have adopted him to Lena knowing she's a new star and put her — or the dog — in that situation? We would have told her if the dog had issues. We are a no-kill shelter. We don't lie about the dogs' histories because that gets them returned — and mentally it's not good for dogs," Vazquez said. Dunham responded to Vazquez's comments on Instagram: "It's come to my attention that the staff at the shelter where I adopted Lamby have a very different account of his early life and behavioral issues than I do. While I'm sorry to have disappointed them, I can't apologize," the actress wrote. "Lamby was and is one of the great loves of my life. When I met him I knew we'd have an amazing journey. But his aggression - which was unpredictable- and his particular issues, which remain myriad, weren't manageable, at least not by me. I did what I thought the best mother would do, which was to give him a life that provided for his specific needs. He'd been with me for nearly four years and I was his mom- I was in the best position to discern what those needs were. After countless hours of training, endless financial support and a lot of tears he was given access to a better life. I still support him financially and I'll always be there for him in every way but he's notably happier in his new surroundings." She continued: "Why should this story be subject to scrutiny and anger? It is willfully misunderstanding the truth. I hope those judging can imagine the incredible pain of letting go of your favorite creature on EARTH because you know you can't help them be healthy and happy. I would never say an unkind word about the staff of BARC, what they do is amazing and life saving for these animals- but we have different accounts of Lamby's behavior and they were not present in my home nor did they live with him for an extended period. They did not witness the consistent and responsible care I provided. I have weathered a lot of micro-scandals but this one hurts MOST, because of the vulnerability of letting people know Lamby and my story, and because I miss him so damn much. Dunham's words captioned a photo of a painting of Lamby. "This is the painting that greets me every day when I walk into my home," she wrote. "This is the animal who taught me about loving and letting go. I know I'm a lot of fun to place your issues on, but I won't let anyone hang their hat on this peg. Not this time."Bill Clinton took a jab at Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders on Tuesday in an attempt to deflect a heckler’s criticism over a 1994 crime bill that the former president signed into law. “Hillary didn’t vote for the ’94 crime bill, even though Senator Sanders did,” Clinton told the heckler, who interrupted the former president’s campaign speech at Ohio University. “Neither one of them were trying to send millions of your people to prison because there were fewer than 10 percent of our entire prison population are in the federal prison system,” he added. Sanders was in the House of Representatives when he voted for the bill. Bill Clinton’s Sanders slight comes as the Clinton campaign is trying to woo the democratic socialist’s supporters, many of whom have expressed frustration at the establishment-backed Clintons. It also follows the release over the weekend of an audio recording from February in which Hillary Clinton critiqued Sanders’ backers as too idealistic. The former first lady has been criticized heavily for her and her husband’s tough-on-crime stance during their White House days. Critics have pointed to her remarks in support of the bill in which she used the controversial term “superpredators.” “We’re making some progress,” Clinton said during a speech in 1996. “Much of it is related to the initiative called ‘community policing.’ Because we have finally gotten more police officers on the street. That was one of the goals that the president had when he pushed the crime bill that was passed in 1994.” “But we also have to have an organized effort against gangs,” she continued. “Just as in a previous generation we had an organized effort against the mob. We need to take these people on. They are often connected to big drug cartels, they are not just gangs of kids anymore. They are often the kinds of kids that are called superpredators — no conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first, we have to bring them to heel.” Clinton has since apologized for those remarks. The slam on Sanders is Bill Clinton’s second campaign stumble in as many days. He caused a stir on Monday when, during a speech in Michigan, he called Obamacare a “crazy system” that “doesn’t make any sense.” WATCH: Follow Chuck on TwitterHank Paulson is a dirty rotten liar. In July, along with Fed chairman Bernanke, he assured Congress that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were not in danger of failing. His testimony before Congress was instrumental in getting Congress to approve Treasury Department and Federal Reserve proposals to make sweeping changes to the relationship between the two institutions and the government. Within 7 weeks, Uncle Sam took over the mortgage giants preventing their inevitable collapse. Then at the beginning of October, the dynamic duo was swindling Congress again. This time Paulson and his banker buddy Bernanke told Congress that it had to act quickly and approve a $700 billion package to buy the bad assets (mortgages) of failing Wall Street firms otherwise America faced calamity – civil unrest, economic collapse, and extinction of our blessed (debt ridden) lifestyle. This past week Paulson announced that he would use the taxpayer assets not to buy troubled assets as he told Congress in October, but to inject capital into struggling banks by acquiring equity stakes in them. Now, perhaps calling Paulson a liar is harsh. Maybe he just doesn't know what he is doing. For instance, in a recent interview on National Public Radio, Paulson said, “I believe the banking system has been stabilized.” Oh really. Just this week, Citi Group, one of the biggest financial services companies in the country, indicated that it would cut at least 10,000 jobs. In October, foreclosures grew 25 percent nationally over the same month in 2007. Yet to come is the impending auto loan, student loan, and credit card crisis. Given his track record and the current circumstances it is amazing that anyone even listens to Paulson anymore. But, there is more. In his “I changed my mind about how to use the taxpayers $700 billion” speech this week, Paulson indicated that the economy was in better shape than it was two weeks ago. Again, the facts tell a different story. The Labor Department reported this week that the number of newly laid-off workers seeking unemployment benefits increased to a seven-year high. The big three automakers are on the verge of bankruptcy and the mayors of 3 American cities petitioned the federal government to use a portion of the $700 billion Wall Street bailout plan to assist cities with pension costs and cash flow problems. This news indicates that we are headed in the opposite direction of Paulson's analysis. Naturally, through his comments, Paulson is trying to justify his actions in handling the economic crisis to this point. Here is a summary of Treasury actions since March:· $29 billion for Bear Stearns · $143.8 billion for AIG (and growing)· $100 billion for Fannie Mae· $100 billion for Freddie Mac· $700 billion for Wall Street, including: Bank of America (Merrill Lynch), Citi Group, JP Morgan (WaMu), Wells Fargo (Wachovia), Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and others · $25 billion for the Big Three in Detroit· $8 billion for Indy Mac· $150 billion for stimulus package (from January)· $50 billion for money market funds· $138 billion for Lehman Bros. (post bankruptcy, through JP Morgan)· $620 billion for general currency swaps from the FedRough total: $2,063,800,000,000—Two trillion and still spending! Source: http://www.breakthebailout.com/node/3 When will the madness end? The federal government ran a deficit of $237 billion just in the month of October. It is well on its way to the unthinkable $1 trillion budget deficit by the end of the fiscal year. All of this money, created out of thin air by the Treasury Department and Federal Reserve with the blessings of Congress, is not stabilizing the markets as Paulson suggests. It is simply throwing good money at companies that deserve to go bankrupt. The current economic crisis is proof that debt does matter. At some point, it has to be paid back. The U.S. government is bankrupt, but it continues to spend money like a gambling addict in a casino. Months from now, when the economy is in even more of a mess and we are laden with even more debt, think back to the comments of Hank Paulson. At that point, it still might be hard to decide if he was lying or simply just didn't know what he was doing. Kenn Jacobine teaches History, English, and Information Technology in a Global Society for the American International School of Lusaka, Zambia. Visit his website at: The View from Abroad.Theresa May is heading for a rebellion over her Brexit strategy after the high court ruled that the UK could not leave the European union without the permission of the British parliament. Three senior judges ruled on Thursday that the government could not press ahead with triggering article 50 of the Lisbon treaty, the formal process for beginning Brexit, without first consulting MPs and peers in the Commons and Lords. Court ruling means act of parliament would be needed for Brexit, says May Read more The decision, made after a legal challenge brought following the EU referendum result in June, is a dramatic setback for the prime minister, who had argued that she had the personal authority to begin the process without a parliamentary vote on the issue. Downing Street has said they will challenge the judgment and an appeal with the supreme court is expected to be lodged. But David Davis, the Brexit secretary, acknowledged that the ruling (pdf) as it stood meant the UK’s departure from the bloc would require the consent of both MPs and peers through an act of parliament. “The judges have laid out what we can’t do, and not exactly what we can do, but we’re presuming that it requires an act of parliament and therefore both Commons and Lords,” he said. Parliamentarians are unlikely to block Brexit outright, given that 52% of voters among the public opted, on 23 June, to leave the EU, but the need for legislation gives MPs the opportunity to disrupt the process by demanding May reveals more details about her plan for negotiating the terms of departure. The Guardian understands that a cross-party group of Tory and Labour MPs met this Thursday afternoon to discuss how the ruling could be used to force May to reveal more about her broad negotiating aims. Facebook Twitter Pinterest The shadow Brexit secretary, Keir Starmer, says the PM must clarify her aims on the single market. Photograph: Ken McKay/ITV/Rex/Shutterstock Keir Starmer, the shadow Brexit secretary, said he now believed it was “inevitable the prime minister will have to answer the big questions” on whether she wanted the UK to be in the single market or the customs union, as there appeared to be a majority of MPs demanding greater transparency. “This is about accountability and scrutiny,” he said. “Very many MPs accept and respect the referendum of course, but the terms upon which we exit are vitally important. I think there is now consensus that the prime minister has got to disclose the overarching strategy. The idea that we are all to be kept in the dark until some time in 2019 only has to be said to be rejected.” May has repeatedly insisted that she will deliver the “best possible deal for the country” but has so far refused to specify whether that deal would include access to the single market or enhanced immigration controls. Within hours of the judgment senior Conservatives were openly calling for a change of approach. Andrew Tyrie, chair of the Treasury committee, said May’s government needed to be “much more transparent about its objectives in the negotiations, in some detail, and the sooner the better”. After this Brexit ruling, MPs must seize their moment \| Martin Kettle Read more He added: “It should also ensure that parliament can scrutinise the objectives and vote on them. The UK is leaving; a public debate is needed about where we want to arrive. Before taking off, it is always a good idea for the pilot to discuss with the passengers and crew where they might want to land.” Nicky Morgan, the former education secretary, told BBC Two’s Victoria Derbyshire show: “It does need to be not just a vote, but a formal short bill about the triggering of article 50, and then the focus is on that. The other thing, of course, that parliament will want then is a clearer plan on the government’s Brexit plans and that will be, I think, important in helping the government to win that vote.” On the other side of the debate the ruling infuriated many eurosceptics, with several Tory MPs suggesting May should call an early general election to get another mandate from voters. Dominic Raab, the former minister and Tory MP, said any attempt to stall the triggering of Brexit could increase the chances of an early general election. “If we get to the stage where effectively [some MPs] are not willing to allow this negotiation to even begin, I think there must be an increased chance that we must go to the country again. I think that would be a mistake and I don’t think those trying to break the verdict of the referendum would be rewarded,” he said. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Former UKip leader Nigel Farage warned on Thursday of ‘public anger’ over a Brexit delay. Photograph: Frederick Florin/AFP/Getty Douglas Carswell, the Ukip MP, even suggested it showed there needed to be reform of judicial appointments, while the party’s interim leader, Nigel Farage, said he feared a “betrayal may be near at hand”. He said: “I now fear that every attempt will be made to block or delay the triggering of article 50. If this is so, they have no idea of the level of public anger they will provoke.” The prime minister is expected on Friday to speak to Jean-Claude Juncker, the European commission president, to discuss her plans for keeping the article 50 process on track. However, the unanimous judgment delivered by three of the most senior judges in England and Wales will make it difficult for government lawyers to overturn the ruling in the supreme court and avoid delay. The three judges, the lord chief justice, Lord Thomas, the master of the rolls, Sir Terence Etherton, and lord justice Sales at one stage dismissed the government’s argument as being “divorced from reality”. Government lawyers had argued that prerogative powers were a legitimate way to give effect “to the will of the people” who voted by a majority to leave the EU in the referendum. But the lord chief justice declared: “The government does not have power under the crown’s prerogative to give notice pursuant to article 50 for the UK to withdraw from the European union.” Brexit has caused havoc already. Now parliament must save us \| Polly Toynbee Read more The judgment ruled: “The most fundamental rule of the UK constitution is that parliament is sovereign and can make and unmake any law it chooses... By making and unmaking treaties the crown [ie the government] creates legal effects on the plane of international law, but in doing so it does not and cannot change domestic law. It cannot without the intervention of parliament confer rights on individuals or deprive individuals of rights.” The pound surged to a four-week high in the hours after the ruling as investors interpreted it as a sign parliament could put the brakes on any attempt by May to pursue a so-called “hard Brexit” that prioritised controlling immigration over trade with the EU. Although a related legal challenge failed in Northern Ireland’s high court, the claimants are expected to appeal against that decision, particularly on Brexit’s impact on the devolved legislation. Their claim will be joined at the supreme court hearing with the London case. Nicola Sturgeon deciding whether to join article 50 legal battle Read more Nicola Sturgeon, the SNP first minister of Scotland, said the Scottish government would “actively consider” whether it would formally join in the next legal battle over the right of MPs to vote on article 50, opposing the Westminster government. The two main claimants in the high court case in London insisted they were not attempting to prevent Brexit. Gina Miller, an investment manager and lead claimant in the case, said: “It was the right decision because we were dealing with the sovereignty of parliament. It was not about winning or losing. It was about what was right. Now we can move forward with legal certainty.” Deir Dos Santos, a hairdresser and the other lead claimant, said: “Today’s judgment is a victory for everyone who believes in the supremacy of our parliament and the rule of law. I have never challenged the result of the referendum – in fact I voted for Brexit for the sole reason that I wanted power to be returned from Europe to the British parliament. But I did not think it was right for the government then just to bypass parliament and try to take away my legal rights without consulting parliament first.”Worldwide! Free shipping on all orders! Free paper map with every canvas order! "Close" Hallo Deutschland! Gute Nachrichten: Wir verschicken schnell und kostenlos aus Berlin. "Close" Olá Portugal! Boas notícias: entregamos gratuitamente a partir de Berlim, sem im-postos e com envio rápido! "Close" Olá Brasil! Boas notícias: a entrega para todo o mundo está incluída, grátis e rápida. "Close" Hola España! Buenas noticias: enviamos gratuitamente desde Berlín, así que no hay aduanas y el envío es rápido! "Close" Hola Chile! Buenas noticias: el envío a todo el mundo está incluido, gratis y rápido. "Close" Ciao Italia! Buone notizie: spediamo da Berlino gratuitamente, quindi niente tasse doganali e consegne veloci! "Close" Bonjour France! Bonne nouvelle: nous expédions de Berlin gratuitement, donc pas de douane et expédition rapide! "Close" Hello Australia! Good news: shipping to Australia is included, free and fast. "Close" Hello UK! Good news: we ship from Berlin, so no customs and fast shipping! "Close" Hello Europe! Good news: we ship from Berlin for free, so no customs and fast shipping! "Close"WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Archeologists have unearthed the oldest wine-making facility ever found, using biochemical techniques to identify a dry red vintage made about 6,000 years ago in what is now southern Armenia. A wine press (C) is seen, behind which an archaeological identification kit is placed in this undated photograph released to Reuters on January 10, 2011. REUTERS/Gregory Areshian/UCLA/National Geographic/Handout The excavation paints a picture of a complex society where mourners tasted a special vintage made at a caveside cemetery, the researchers reported on Tuesday in the Journal of Archaeological Science. “This is the world’s oldest known installation to make wine,” Gregory Areshian of the University of California Los Angeles, who helped lead the study, said in a telephone interview. Carbon dating showed a desiccated grape vine found near a wine press was grown around 4000 BC, his team reported. This makes it 1,000 years older than any other wine-making facility discovered, the team from Armenia, the United States and Ireland reported. The team found the world’s oldest leather shoe, about 5,500 years old, at the same cave complex last year. The wine press would have held a few gallons of juice and crushed grapes, likely working with the time-honored technique of barefoot stomping, Areshian said. “This was a relatively small installation related to the ritual inside the cave. For daily consumption they would have had much larger wine presses in the regular settlement,” said Areshian, who was deputy prime minister in the first government of the independent Republic of Armenia in 1991. Chemical traces point to grape juice and, given the lack of refrigeration, the juice would certainly have been fermented into wine, Areshian said. “We also know that still, in the villages in the vicinity, the culture of wine is very old and traditional,” he said. The rich red wines produced there are merlots and cabernet sauvignons, he said. The expedition, paid for in part by the National Geographic Society, also uncovered copper processing equipment. Areshian said the team would detail those findings later. The cave complex, known as Areni-1, is in the Little Caucasus Mountains near Armenia’s southern border with Iran. The press itself is a shallow clay basin about three feet (one meter) in diameter, surrounded by grape seeds and dried-out grape vines. The team found grave mounds nearby and obsidian tools — indicating some complicated trade was going on. The closest source of obsidian, a black glassy mineral, is 35 to 45 miles away, a three-day walk, Areshian said. “We can say that this was a quite complex society formed by multiple communities,” he said.Back during Rails Rumble 2013 the team I was on was building an application for use by peoples phones. We were deliberating on how we could easily get the application data from the server to the phone without having to resort to poor solutions like username/password combinations or some convoluted OAuth flow that requires embedding application secrets in the binary. Token-based authentication is an approach I've heard of before and is used in popular applications such as Campfire. The one problem though is the key distribution isn't the nicest thing in the world. With Campfire the user is required to find their token, copy it then paste it in the correct location of their API consumer in order to interface with the product. While this might work alright for a desktop client, once you venture into mobile data entry can sometimes be a little tedious. Our assumption for the application was that a user would be using the app from their desktop first. This would mean all their session data isn't available on their mobile device so in order to go somewhere to get the data they need would require logging in via their phones web browser and going through the same steps as described previously. I wanted an easy way to get the information to our mobile clients that required very little in terms of technology. Our approach was to provide a link embedded in a QR Code that could be scanned by your phones barcode scanning application. Once you've scanned the code you now know where to go in order to grab the token that you need in order to get API access. This Message will Self-Destruct in 5 Seconds There were a few things that needed to be taken care of when creating these URLs. Firstly, we couldn't lock the endpoints behind sessions since that would make it impossible to fetch the key. Secondly, it needed to be very hard for anyone to arbitrarily guess what the URL to get access to a token would be. Finally, we needed to be able to prevent "replay attacks" to the resource that contains the API token information. In order to prevent people from guessing what the URL would be to get a token, we simply used UUIDs as the resource location. We had an object that held a reference to a token and would provide the token details when requested via JSON. This meant that whenever we needed to provide access to a token we could just create one off objects and link off to it's UUID identifier. Another added benefit is that if we wanted to we could regenerate another object that would reference the same token. When it came to replay attacks, the main concern here was having someone watching traffic as it went by and clueing in that an endpoint is how keys were distributed. So what could possibly happen is I request my token, while this evil third party (let's call him Carçon) who is watching my requests also makes a request to get the same token. If we aren't careful we could accidentally give the API token to Carçon as well! The way we took care of this was by making it such that by looking at the token you destroy the external reference to it. In this case it would mean that when the attacker makes the request, instead of getting an API token they'd get a 404 instead since the object providing access was destroyed at the end of the initial request! While I'm certain there are still some problems that might exist with this approach it felt like a novel way of solving the problem of key distribution. It also made much simpler for the developer writing our Android app since there they didn't need to store user credentials or do the OAuth dance.OH! Just before the weekend Chucklefish CEO, Finn Brice (Chucklefish being the publishers of Stardew Valley but ALSO devs of their own games including Starbound) popped up a teaser image for their magic school RPG/sim project. It’s been described by Brice in the past as “something like Stardew Valley meets Harry Potter” and this image is reminding me of any number of nice sims I used to play on Nintendo handheld consoles… SDV still in testing, no news yet. Thought this sneak peak might tide you over. We’ve learned a lot of lessons from working with Stardew. pic.twitter.com/EcabZ8DGb7 — Tiy (@Tiyuri) August 31, 2017 The obvious comparison is probably Little Witch Academia but I’m going to suggest we go with the hope that it’s a reworking of The Worst Witch books. Or Meg and Mog. I LOVE a bit of Meg and Mog, although I probably couldn’t cope with the emotional rollercoaster of Mog having a case of the mumps again. Poor Mog :( So poorly! Anyway, I think the language of that first tweet struck a bunch of people as being unclear, especially as Chucklefish also have another game in the works (an Advance Wars-y, Fire Emblem-y thing) and are continuing to support Starbound so Brice followed up with: “To everyone asking, it’s our other new project. Something that builds on what we learned from Stardew. No formal announcement for a while.” …and then corrected the spelling of the original tweet, which I appreciated: “Also *peek, damn it”. It’s only ever the tweets with spelling or grammar errors that get traction, eh? That said, I have a soft spot for “sneak peak” specifically: The amusingly misspelled “sneak peak” could probably stay because it makes me think of this pic.twitter.com/CNRwp6URxT — Philippa Warr (@philippawarr) March 4, 2015 The “no formal announcement for a while” thing is interesting because the game appears to be in a state of semi-announcedness, right? Like, there have been a few hints/heavy-handed puns to indicate it’ll be called Spellbound: https://t.co/ryHxhoouy6 This mockup has me even more Spellbound — Tiy (@Tiyuri) October 27, 2016 Plus there was the art style demo video showing what was essentially a still image from a witchy, simmy-looking game but with flickering candles and dust motes: And then there was the statement to PC Gamer to note the Stardew Valley meets Harry Potter general direction and add “Lots of the sim features are present, day night cycles, dating, classes etc. But with some interesting gameplay twists.” Would you say that was announced or not announced at this point?The first Milner fundamental physics prize for advances in delving into the deepest mysteries of physics and the universe One million dollars. Each winner has received three similar piles of paper trash. Yuri Milner, a graduate physics school dropout, earned a few bucks [interview] via Internet games such as Facebook, Zynga (yes, I was just playing Mafia Wars for a few minutes), and Groupon and created a new prize: 9 Scientists Receive a New Physics Prize (The New York Times) Nima Arkani-Hamed Juan Maldacena Nathan Seiberg Edward Witten Alan Guth Andrei Linde Alexei Kitaev Maxim Kontsevich Ashoke Sen Each of the nine winners has won $3,000,000, more than twice the Nobel prize. The choice of the winners is very sensible; the selection is impressive, showing that Yuri Milner still understands what's shaking. The full list of winners include:This prize will be awarded every year (lots of bucks, indeed) and new winners will be chosen by the previous ones. He must be very rich although sources estimate his wealth as $1 billion "only"; if I were giving away $3 million every year, I would become hungry sooner than 300 years later. ;-)It's a very good selection, not only because I know most of the new multimillionaires in person. (I can't realize I've ever talked to Alexei Kitaev (the father of the topological quantum computer concept) but I've surely talked to everyone else – and in most cases, many many times.) Concerning the rumors that I was the person who was selecting the winners, I hope that you understand that I am not allowed to say whether the rumors are true.Alan Guth's office at MIT before he received the prize. Please superimpose this picture onto the picture at the top to get an idea how Alan Guth's office looks today. ;-)Alan Guth is an ex-student of a 2004-2005 string theory course of mine (he has always had the best questions even though he slept through most of the classes but I didn't take it personally; Alan Guth already announced that his bank charged him $12 when those three millions were added to his account), Nima Arkani-Hamed is a long-time ex-colleague and co-author of mine (I don't want to make it sound much more personal than that because it would sound like licking the buttocks of people who became multimillionaires), and so on. At Rutgers, I've worked next to Maldacena and Seiberg for quite some time.Of course, all of the winners are theorists and most of them are string theorists. I guess that they may choose more general physicists, too. I think that each of them may deserve a blog entry or several of them that would describe his major contributions to physics.Congratulations and thanks to Mr Milner for donating several bucks for a prize that seems to start with stellar names, indeed! The prize has instantly become the most lucrative academic prize in the world, beating the Templeton Prize and the Nobel Prize combined.It's a topic for deep philosophical debates – and your comments – whether or not such huge amounts of money actually help the folks to improve their creativity in the future. I have some doubts about this particular ability of the money; your humble correspondent may be close to Grigori Perelman's idea about the optimum amount of money available to a thinker.However, I have no doubts that physics needs to gain more authority in the society and creating multimillionaire physicists is a way to do so because most ordinary people understand the concept of the money even if they fail to understand the value of physics. This change of the atmosphere may be immensely good for the society – helping the mankind much more intensely and much more permanently than billions spent by other billionaires for random charities. It's plausible that some of the young people who are starting to work on string theory today will do so mostly because of their dreams to win the Milner prize in the future. While it's not the most innocent and purified motivation, I still think that it's a good thing if that's how many more smart people will be thinking.There are a few obvious people who deserve a prize with this description, including Stephen Hawking. This Gentleman could be another example, beyond the list of nine physicists at the top, of the important fact (also explicitly stated by Yuri Milner) that people often discover something that is quite obviously true, deep, and spectacularly important but they can't get down-to-Earth prizes such as the Nobel prize because their findings are ahead of their time.There's also a $100,000 prize for young emerging stars. The smartest young TRF readers may find this amount of money helpful, too.national The death of fellow inmate Manjula Shetye at Byculla jail is believed to be the trigger behind Indrani Mukerjea and 200 inmates apparently rioting. Here's what actually took place Indrani Mukerjea A recent news report about Indrani Mukerjea, the main accused in the Sheena Bora murder case, was accused of rioting in prison. Apparently, her tirade against jail officials was instigated after her fellow jail-mate Manjula Shetye was beaten to death by the jailer and five others. Manjula Shetye, was brutally beaten up for complaining when two eggs and five pieces of bread were missing from her barrack's morning ration sanction. As per a report by Hindustan Times, the report that contained the statement of the eye witness details the inhuman behaviour of the jailors, six of whom have been booked for murder. The prisoner’s death triggered violent protests by the inmates, one of whom was Indrani Mukherjea. The First Information Report states that the trouble started at around 9am on July 23rd, when Manjula found that the rations fell short by two eggs and five pieces of bread. Appointed as the warden for her barracks due to good behaviour, Manjula was called to the jail officer Manisha Pokharkar’s private room where she was beaten ruthlessly and as per an eye witness, the other inmates could hear her scream in pain. As per the eye witness account, Manjula returned to her barracks after the encounter, in visible pain. Also read - Mumbai: Indrani Mukerjea, 200 inmates booked for allegedly rioting in Byculla Jail It is believed that a group of jailors came back a little while later and proceeded to assault her again. As per another eyewitness, some of the lady constables (identified as Bindu Naikade, Waseema Shaikh, Shital Shegaonkar, Surekha Gulve and Aarti Shingne) stripped Manjula of her clothes and held her legs open, after which constable Waseema inserted the lathi into her private parts. Manjula was then left bleeding in the Barracks, and denied medical attention. It was only after Manjula became unconscious in he bathroom was she rushed to JJ hospital, where she succumbed to her injuries. Also read - Mumbai: Women prisoners vandalise Byculla jail after death of fellow inmate, injure six staffers In her post-mortem report, the dean of JJ hospital, TP Lahane, said that Manjula had 11-13 contusions all over her body and her lungs were damaged. The police have started an investigation, and based on the eyewitnesses’ statements an FIR has been lodged against the five constables and a jail officer, at the Nagpada police station. Manjula’s elder brother Sharad Shetye a Kalyan resident had told the national daily, "She was taken to the hospital on Friday around 7.30 pm and we were informed only at 7 am on Saturday when two constables from Manpada police station came to inform us. I want to know why it took them beyond one hour to inform me about my sister’s death." Manjula was serving a life imprisonment sentence and was due to be released in six months. Manjula was serving life imprisonment for murdering her sister-in-law Vidya Shetye. Her mother Godavari Shetye too had been convicted but had died. On January 4, 1996, Manjula poured kerosene over Vidya, while Godavari pushed Vidya towards a burning stove. This caused 100 per cent burns to Vidya who died on January 8, 1996. Vidya’s dying declaration had seen a sessions court convict Manjula and Godavari, which was later upheld by the Bombay High Court on October 8, 2009. Since her conviction, Manjula was lodged at Yerwada jail, and was moved to Byculla prison about three months back.Hello! I’ve had a number of people contact me in regards to a previous post “Essential Oils For Empaths” – wanting to know more specifically how they can use the oils, and especially in regards to energetic shielding. I have also included a special section below for how to use the oils to help children with this issue. Shielding is a technique that anyone can use to keep their own energetic field “closed” – both to incoming energies as well as preventing their own energy from “wandering” – so that they can stay grounded 🙂 For lots of people, but especially Empaths, they tend to have their energetic shields “down” most of the time (unbeknownst to them until someone points this out!) – which means that lots of other people and energies can easily come into their personal energetic space – causing symptoms such as physical and mental tiredness, emotional confusion (whose emotions are these anyway?! Why do I suddenly feel sad or anxious?), fear or anxiety and nightmares during sleep time. You know how it is… you’re just walking down the street, and someone passes by and suddenly you feel intense anger, or sadness or confusion. You know YOU weren’t feeling that way up until about 10 seconds ago – so why do you suddenly feel it now? Or how about when dealing with a particularly difficult person who has a lot of upset feelings on a regular basis. Every time they call you up to unload their feelings you hang up the phone feeling like the sunshine just got extinguished and you need a nap. I also had a very hard time with nightmares and energetic attacks all throughout my childhood and into my early adult years. I had no idea that I was leaving myself open to other energies. And you know what? There is a saying out there, ‘like attracts like’. So if you are a person with a very open energetic field who hasn’t learned how to shield yourself – you are sending out a beacon to other people and energies that says, “hey – I left my front door open. Come on in, make yourself at home. Eat my food, sit on my couch, take my stuff, leave your garbage on my floor and see yourself out when you feel like. Or not. Just move in!” You have an opening- and
announcement had accused Dandong Hongxiang of making up a "key illicit network supporting North Korea's weapons proliferation". Japan also signalled a toughening of its unilateral sanctions, expanding a ban on port calls by vessels that had visited North Korea, and new additions to its own sanctions blacklist of North Korean individuals and entities. North Korea has conducted two nuclear tests so far this year. With the fifth test, it claimed major strides in its efforts to fit a miniaturised warhead on a missile that could reach the United States.1990 studio album by They Might Be Giants Flood is the third studio album by Brooklyn-based alternative rock duo They Might Be Giants, released in January 1990. Flood was the duo's first album on the major label Elektra Records. It generated three singles: "Birdhouse in Your Soul", "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)", and the domestic promotional track "Twisting". The album is generally considered to be the band's definitive release, as it is their best-selling and most recognizable album. Despite minimal stylistic and instrumental differences from previous releases, Flood is distinguished by contributions from seasoned producers Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley. John Linnell and John Flansburgh also took advantage of new equipment and recording techniques, including unconventional, home-recorded samples, which were programmed through Casio FZ-1 synthesizers. The album was recorded in New York City at Skyline Studios, which was better equipped than studios the band had worked in previously. Promotion for Flood included television appearances, promotional videos, and an international tour. The album's mainstream promotion and success contributed to its status as the band's most well known album. Many fans, including young viewers of Tiny Toon Adventures, were first exposed to They Might Be Giants's music through Flood. The album was initially issued on CD, LP, and cassette. Upon its release, Flood was met with praise from critics and achieved moderate success on sales charts. In 2013, the album was reissued as part of a CD series spanning They Might Be Giants' four Elektra releases. In 2014, it was reissued on LP in Europe by Music On Vinyl and in the United States by Asbestos Records for Record Store Day and Black Friday, and it was reissued again on LP in 2015 on the band's label, Idlewild Recordings. Background [ edit ] Flood was They Might Be Giants' first release on any major label. Elektra Records approached the band following the unexpected success of their second album, Lincoln, which was released on the independent Bar/None label.[1] The record deal that Elektra presented was largely due to the work of Susan Drew, an A&R worker who had been following the band since 1986. Because of her confidence, the band was given an extensive level of creative control over their projects, in addition to the ability to take advantage of the label's strategies and resources.[2] Although They Might Be Giants recorded the album as a duo, they were joined by many guest musicians on brass and string instruments. The band also enlisted Alan Bezozi to help program some of the drums for the album.[3] Recording and production [ edit ] "We had never been in an actual, real, multitrack studio before. We had been in an 8-track studio run by a friend of ours that was essentially a demo place. But I didn't know anything about how to make a real record... [Langer and Winstanley] approach production the way that we approach songwriting. That is, we let the song take us in whatever direction it seems to want to go." — John Flansburgh[4] The album was recorded at Skyline Studios in New York City. Skyline was only a few blocks away from the Public Access Synthesizer Studio, where the band had recorded their previous albums.[5] Alan Bezozi and John Flansburgh worked together to create atypical drum tracks, including one that samples the sound of Flansburgh's kitchen sink and refrigerator being struck with a drum stick.[6] An Alesis SR-16 drum machine was used to program the drums.[7] Two-thirds of the album's budget was exhausted for the production of four songs: "Birdhouse in Your Soul", "Your Racist Friend", "We Want a Rock", and "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)".[6] These four tracks were produced by Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley.[3] Style and composition [ edit ] Like many of They Might Be Giants' early releases, Flood features a range of stylistic eclecticism. The press release for the album notes the "rock rave-up 'Twisting'... the [country] inflected 'Lucky Ball & Chain'... the existential oom-pah of 'Particle Man'", and "tender night-light metaphor and melody" of the lead single, "Birdhouse in Your Soul".[8] Jon Pareles wrote for The New York Times that the album "shrug[s] off most typecasting". He added that through releases like Flood, They Might Be Giants and a new wave of alternative musicians were gainsaying the standard practice of sticking to only one genre.[9] "Birdhouse in Your Soul" Chorus sample, including a shift from C major to E-flat major Problems playing this file? See media help. Regardless of the genre employed, They Might Be Giants are noted for unconventional lyrics, characterized by "bizarre" cleverness.[10] Flood includes abundant examples of this style, manifested in unusual subject matter, unreliable narrators, and wordplay.[6][11] However, John Linnell and Flansburgh took care to avoid using humor excessively, acknowledging the requirement that recorded music withstand repeated listens without losing value.[12] Linnell has pointed out that in general, he writes melodies prior to writing lyrics. This creates the challenge of fitting the appropriate syllables and stresses into each line; often, demos were recorded with dummy lyrics to simplify the process. Linnell's melodies are often based around scales.[13] DX Ferris, with commentary from John Linnell and John Flansburgh, outlined each individual track from Flood in a retrospective article published in Rolling Stone.[6] "Theme From Flood" acts as a tongue-in-cheek introduction to the album. The bombastic song is regarded by scholars Elizabeth Sandifer and Alex Reed to be one of the first in a recurring trend of processional tunes composed by John Linnell.[14] The "Theme" is followed by the album's lead single, "Birdhouse in Your Soul". Although the melody for "Birdhouse" was written years prior to the lyrics, the lyrics were "shoehorned in to match the melody", according to Linnell.[6] The narrative is given from the point of view of a child's nightlight.[15] According to John Linnell, the song was almost "wrecked" when he attempted to underscore it with a more dramatic drum track. Producers Winstanley and Langer opposed this decision and the drum track was scrapped. Linnell speculates that had this not been the case, the entire album may have been different—and far less exceptional.[16] Reed and Sandifer also note that the song makes an unanticipated jump from the key of C major to E-flat major, and then back to C major. This may be a product of the album's largely digital composition and production; they call the album in general "modular" in its movement between musical ideas.[17] The track's later shifts to F-sharp minor and A major lead to the division of the octave into equal intervals.[18] "Lucky Ball and Chain" is an example of a song employing the unreliable narrator motif, according to Linnell. Influenced by the country-western musical tradition, the song is a "simple regret song" dealing with "the one that got away".[6] The fourth track and second single, "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)", is a cover of the Four Lads song, which was originally released in 1953. Flansburgh and Linnell added "Istanbul" to their repertoire in the early 1980s in order to lengthen their live sets. From that point, it evolved from a folk-inspired cover to the baroque pop rendition that appears on Flood.[19] A Casio FZ-1 synthesizer was used to perform the song in the studio.[6] "Dead", described by Rolling Stone as "one of TMBG's most abstract and personal songs", follows the story of someone dying and then being "reincarnated as a bag of groceries". According to Linnell, "The dreamlike relationship between returning expired groceries and returning from the grave after you expire appealed to me".[6] "Your Racist Friend", produced by Langer and Winstanley, is a politically-charged song which follows a fairly straightforward narrative.[20][21] The song, which depicts a social conflict, is considered to be the band's most clear "political statement".[6] On the other hand, the accordion-tinged "Particle Man" lightheartedly chronicles the disputes of four characters, the titular Particle Man, Universe Man, Person Man, and Triangle Man. Linnell has claimed that the character Triangle Man was inspired by Robert Mitchum's appearance in the 1955 film The Night of the Hunter.[6] The final single, "Twisting", was selected over "Your Racist Friend", in part because it was more lyrically ambiguous.[20][21] The song references both The Young Fresh Fellows and The dB's, two groups that influenced the sound of the track itself.[6] Flansburgh has noted that, while recording the song, Bezozi accidentally erased the entire drum track for "Twisting". Flansburgh then had to recreate the track from scratch.[21] The cryptic "We Want a Rock" features a violin performance by Mark Feldman, and "Someone Keeps Moving My Chair" revolves around petty concerns and their importance "when everything else is going haywire".[6] "Hearing Aid" features the mixing of standard They Might Be Giants sounds with an "Arto Lindsay guitar solo and...vacuum-cleaner synth sounds", experimentations that Flansburgh felt were difficult to achieve.[6] "Minimum Wage", which features only two words, saw the band dabbling in sampling. The sound of the whip was crafted in the studio when the band was unable to find a suitable stock sound effect; the effect was a composite of a wind sound from Linnell's Moog keyboard and the crack of a wet towel, courtesy of Roger Moutenot. "Letterbox", which was also considered as a potential single from the album, was another track that had been in live setlists years prior to the release of the album. For "Whistling in the Dark", Flansburgh and Linnell wanted the bass drum to be extremely pronounced, although they were later unhappy with the result. Linnell noted that, lyrically, the song is about two men who engage in a fight, only for the listener to soon learn that they are both in prison. "Hot Cha!" references the name of a wooden horse in the Parker Brothers board game Derby Day; musically, the song is a mix of eclectic sounds (such as the noise of mallets and drumsticks banging on a sink and base of a refrigerator), samples (such as a door buzzer), and unique recording methods (such as running horn samples through a guitar fuzz box). In the cheerful tune "Women and Men", the band examines human reproduction from a "disengaged view", and "Sapphire Bullets of Pure Love" takes its title from a Mahavishnu Orchestra album cut of the same name. "They Might Be Giants" operates as the band's manifesto, and was inspired by The Monkees song "(Theme From) The Monkees".[6] Flood concludes with "Road Movie to Berlin", which was written by John Flansburgh in Germany in 1989 (at which point the Berlin Wall still stood). The song deals with the clash between absurdism and existentialism that the band encountered while touring Europe.[22] Flansburgh's voice was slowed down for this song, an effect that he later called "creepy".[6] Due to the haste with which the final portion of the album was recording, the band accidentally forgot to include an entire verse of the song in the finished product; Linnell and Flansburgh, however, felt that they did not have the time to fix it, and the mistake remained. The song also makes use of "synthetic or sampled" trumpet sounds, one of which was also included in "Birdhouse in Your Soul".[6] Artwork [ edit ] The photograph used for the cover of the album depicts a man rowing a boat made out of strung-together washbasins. The image was captured by Margaret Bourke-White as part of a series taken to document the Ohio River flood of 1937.[23][24] The cover, which was designed by band member John Flansburgh with Elizabeth van Itallie, originally featured only the photo; however, an emblem including the band's name, inked by Flansburgh's former coworker Barbara Lipp, was later added.[25] The emblem resembles the logo of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees.[6] Promotion [ edit ] In order to promote Flood, Elektra produced a promotional video featuring Linnell and Flansburgh facetiously extolling the album's merits. One sarcastic quip was that the album included nineteen songs, which made it inherently better than other albums with fewer tracks.[26] The video also included a live performance of "Particle Man" and a sample of the lead single "Birdhouse in Your Soul". The band also produced a music video, directed by Adam Bernstein, for "Birdhouse in Your Soul". In April, the band appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson to perform the song with Doc Severinsen and the Tonight Show Band. Severinsen's unusually fast count-off resulted in a quicker arrangement of the song, which Linnell and Flansburgh went on to use for subsequent live performances.[1] Tour [ edit ] In support of Flood, They Might Be Giants toured North America and Europe, including a series of shows in Germany. Due to the scale of the tour, the band's road crew doubled in size—increasing from two members to four.[27] Linnell and Flansburgh have recounted the unfamiliarity of touring outside of North America. In Europe, they report that crowds acted differently due to cultural gaps.[28] The band continued to tour as a duo, with Linnell playing accordion and Flansburgh on guitars, or occasionally playing a marching band bass drum. Large posters of postage stamps adorned the stage as props; the minimal arrangement was received as a boldly simple choice. Sets included a combination of old and new material.[29] As in the past, the band was backed by a tape deck playing drum tracks or a metronome in lieu of a full rhythm section.[30] Reception [ edit ] Critical reception [ edit ] Flood received generally positive reviews, though some critics expressed reservations. In an AllMusic review, Stephen Thomas Erlewine wrote that despite some inconsistencies and awkward selections, the album is musically superior to its predecessors. He observed that through Flood, Flansburgh and Linnell "exchange quirky artiness for unabashed geekiness". Six of the album's nineteen tracks are designated as AllMusic "picks".[31] Chris Heim wrote for the Chicago Tribune that the album is a rare example of success for a "quirky cult band" signed to a major label.[32] Steve Simels, writing for Stereo Review, compared the album's structural complexities to The Beach Boys at the peak of their career. Simels praised the album's originality and intellect, while heavily criticizing other contemporary music for lacking those characteristics.[41] Writing in Spin, Ira Robbins called Flood "another captivating variety show of art-rock, swing, the Bonzo Dog Band, cow-pop, show tunes and the Schmenge Brothers... Boundless imagination, loopy mix-and-match arrangements and a gyroscopic sense of what makes a pop tune click are still responsible for the easy and abiding appeal of TMBG's ingenious material."[42] Reviews in the UK were also mostly positive. In a review for Q, Peter Kane lauded the record for its uniqueness and for the sheer quantity of tracks, which he said ensured that the listener would enjoy at least one song, and concluded that Flood was "as playful an entertainment as will be heard all year".[36] In NME Jerry Smith called the collection "a weird and wonderful varied combination of the zany, trivial, witty and wacky, delivered with a spritely foot-tapping ease that belies their bizarre subject matter".[35] Record Mirror's Iestyn George observed that "if it's to be faulted, the album is a mite too cluttered for its own good, but the virtues of imagination and originality that these native New Yorkers display are worthy of enthusiastic approval".[37] Andy Ross of Sounds believed that it was the duo's melodic talents that prevented them from becoming just a novelty act, and wrote that Flood was "a real cryptic crossword of an album, requiring perseverance and application with ultimately rewarding and fulfilling results".[40] Conversely, Robert Christgau and Rolling Stone's David Browne found Flood to be unremarkable overall. Both critics chastised the band's novelty, which they found to be wearing thin as time progressed.[33][38] In the UK Caroline Sullivan of Melody Maker felt that enjoyment of Flood "hinges upon one's general feelings about similarly zany characters like Talking Heads and Frank Zappa. If their very American, very beatnik, surrealism spells instant yawnorama, forget TMBG—they're the same thing, but minus the good tunes."[43] However, in a 2009 Rolling Stone article revisiting Flood near its twentieth anniversary, DX Ferris praised the album as both the band's most iconic release and one that revolutionized the college radio scene.[6] Commercial response [ edit ] Flood peaked at number 75 on the Billboard 200, spending 22 weeks on the chart. The lead single from the album, "Birdhouse in Your Soul", reached number 3 on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart. The single also charted in Ireland and the UK.[44][45] "Twisting", which was released as a domestic promotional single, peaked at number 22 on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart.[46] The album also contains two of the band's most well known songs, "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)" and "Particle Man".[47] The former was released as a single, reaching number 61 on the UK Singles Chart, but failing to chart in the US.[44] Flood was the first album released by They Might Be Giants to receive the RIAA Platinum sales award—indicating sales over one million copies—which it achieved on July 10, 2009.[48] It is also certified Gold by the BPI in the United Kingdom.[49] Legacy [ edit ] Lincoln and Flood show Flansburgh and Linnell in 2012 performing a dualandshow Flood is They Might Be Giants' best-selling album, and it is widely regarded as their most iconic.[6] Due to the acclaim with which it was received, the album is considered to have cemented the band's reputation as a staple of alternative and college rock.[50] They Might Be Giants has performed the album live in its entirety on numerous occasions, including during their 2010 US tour and their 2013 tour of Australia.[51][52] In 2015, the band released the live album Flood Live in Australia, a recording of the album played live in 2013,[53] in which the songs are played in reverse order, starting with "Road Movie to Berlin" and ending with "Theme from Flood". This is a common staple of live shows.[54] Curtis Silver, in a retrospective for Wired, collected anecdotes from They Might Be Giants fans, many of whom were first exposed to the band through Flood. Silver concluded that new fans are drawn just as much to the band's old material as they are their more recent work, due to its sustaining accessibility.[55] In fact, many fans cite the band's earliest albums as their favorites—though often not Flood, despite (or perhaps due to) its longstanding mainstream success.[56] In 1990, Tiny Toon Adventures aired animated music videos for two tracks from the album, "Particle Man" and "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)". Through the popular program, the band was exposed to a younger set of fans.[57] This ultimately led the band to begin releasing children's music alongside their "rock albums" over a decade later.[58][59] Track listing [ edit ] All tracks written by John Flansburgh and John Linnell, except where noted. Side two No. Title Length 10. "Someone Keeps Moving My Chair" 2:23 11. "Hearing Aid" 3:26 12. "Minimum Wage" 0:47 13. "Letterbox" 1:25 14. "Whistling in the Dark" 3:25 15. "Hot Cha" 1:34 16. "Women & Men" 1:46 17. "Sapphire Bullets of Pure Love" 1:36 18. "They Might Be Giants" 2:46 19. "Road Movie to Berlin" 2:22 Total length: 43:24 Personnel [ edit ] Chart performance [ edit ] Album Chart (1990) Position Australian Albums (ARIA)[60] 99 UK Albums (OCC)[61] 14 US Billboard 200[62] 75 Singles Certifications & sales [ edit ] Region Certification Certified units/Sales United States (RIAA)[48] Platinum 1,000,000^ United Kingdom (BPI)[49] Gold 100,000^ ^shipments figures based on certification alone Release history [ edit ] Flood was released in CD, LP, and cassette formats both in the United States and foreign markets by Elektra Records. In addition to two vinyl reissues in 2014, the entire album was included in a two-part 2013 CD compilation that collected They Might Be Giants's work from their period with Elektra.[63] Notes [ edit ] ^ The album's European release date was sometime between February and March 5, 1990; the exact date is unclear. References [ edit ]Bruce Boudreau never wanted to leave Washington. He offers this information matter-of-factly, even though he’s thoroughly enjoying his time as Anaheim Ducks head coach and the incredible 12-2-1 start they’ve had this season –14 points ahead of his old team back East. Scroll to continue with content Ad “I’m trying to get over it. I’d be lying if I said I still didn’t watch what they do,” said Boudreau on Tuesday. “Not for where they are; but you build relationships with some players that you want to see successful all the time and with fans.” Boudreau’s time with the Capitals ended on Nov. 28, 2011, when he was fired and replaced by Dale Hunter. Japers’ Rink has a great chronicle of where it may have all gone wrong; needless to say, Washington has never been able to regain the momentum and undeniable spark of those early Boudreau teams. Neither has the Capitals’ captain, to the point where some are asking if Alex Ovechkin is even still considered a superstar. “He’s a superstar,” said Boudreau. “The bottom line is that anybody that wins the Hart Trophy two years in a row and is voted the best player in the world by his peers three years in a row, he’s a star. People like to attack him, when he’s not scoring at the rate they want him to score at. He still is the most feared player coming down on you in the League.” If the Western Conference didn’t fear Boudreau’s Ducks before the season – and many predictions had them missing the playoffs – it may fear them now. Their plus-14 goal differential is tied for second best in the NHL behind Chicago, who hasn’t lost in regulation yet. Teemu Selanne has 15 points in 15 games. Jonas Hiller and Viktor Fasth may give Anaheim the best goaltending battery in the conference this season. Story continues We spoke with Boudreau about the surging Ducks; Ryan Getzlaf’s leadership; Bobby Ryan on the trading block; Cam Fowler vs. Mike Green; Francois Beauchemin for the Norris;Selanne’s ageless domination; and a little bit about Boudreau’s affinity for pro wrestling. But first, the coach wanted to set the record straight about his status as a “run and gun” coach. There’s been a perception that the change from Randy Carlyle to you has made the difference here, stylistically. That the shackles were taken off these players offensively and now they’re thriving. Do you buy that juxtaposition? BOUDREAU: That’s a media [creation]. We’re a pretty defensive minded team. We’re almost getting offended these days when they say we’re ‘Boudreau’s run-and-gun’ team. We’re not, at all. In Washington, we used the players we had. When we were scoring, we’d win 6-3. When we weren’t scoring, we’d become the best defense team in the League. It wasn’t that we couldn’t play defense. We preached it all the time. The guys know they have to play strong without the puck, and when we have the puck they have to try and score. I don’t see the big deal, and why anybody makes a big deal about it. So if you don’t play ‘run and gun’, is that just a reputation that you earned early with the Capitals that’s been tough to shake? Evidently. I haven’t shaken it. I think because we led the League in goals by so many that people thought we were an offensive machine. Our power play was at 26 percent that year. The next year, we couldn’t score. And then we changed our whole way of thinking. From Dec. 5 on, we became the best defensive team in the League. People, because they see who’s on your team, they think you’re an offensive team. Has there been anything that’s really surprised you about this team? Before every season, you dream of starting out really good. Those are the expectations. They you look at the rest of the League and you’re going, ‘Wow, this is a pretty good start.’ I didn’t know what kind of team we had, because there were so many guys I hadn’t see play before. I hadn’t seen Viktor Fasth. I’d never seen Sheldon Souray. Daniel Winnik, I didn’t remember him too much. We knew our minor league guys were really good in the minors, but we didn’t know how they were. Viktor Fasth’s start to this season has been extraordinary for a rookie. We keep wanting to call him a “kid”, but he’s not. Is being a 30 year old an essential part of his brilliant start? Well, I think that none of it has overwhelmed him. I think a young guy might get caught up in the whole thing. He seems to be very grounded, which is great. Have you thought about how you’re juggling him and Jonas Hiller? Has his emergence made life more complicated or happy for you? I think “happy” is a good word. No matter who you choose, you’re getting somebody good in there. It makes it complicated. You start really thinking about how you’re going to do this, and then you overthink it – did he practice good on Friday to play Saturday? Rather than just saying ‘you’re going to start here, and you’re going to start here.’ Jonas earned the No. 1 goalie position [last season]. At the start of the season, we were thinking Jonas would play 40 games. Is that still the plan? Well, I think we’ll deviate from that a bit, considering Fasth as already been in nine [games]. What’s been your reaction to Ryan Getzlaf, as a captain? He takes the job seriously. Sometimes he overthinks the role. This year, he’s done a great job of leading by example on the ice. That’s probably the best way to be a captain: Lead on the ice, not just talk. He’s good with the players, a good go-between – me and him chat a lot. But on the ice, he practices what he preaches. Sometimes you sit there and worry. ‘I’m the captain: Should I do this or do that?’ Instead of just going out there and having the situations present themselves to you. He did that a little bit last year when I first came, and he’s maturing as he goes. Every day. Corey Perry is a guy who plays on the edge. Have you reined him in at all since coming to Anaheim? I don’t want to rein it in too much. He’s great the way he is. He needs to play with that edge to be a star. When he doesn’t … well, it’s just not Corey Perry. Last summer, things got a little weird with Bobby Ryan, and all those conversations about him being on the trading block. You’re making a mountain out of a molehill. We haven’t talked trade with Bobby Ryan. He hasn’t asked about it from us, since before I got here. It’s not even an issue. If you had to guess, how many more years could Teemu Selanne play? [Laughs] Chelios played until he was 48. I kinda believe that Teemu takes care of himself better than Chris did. I can’t even imagine doing that at 42. He’s the greatest athlete for his age in the world today, in any sport. I can’t think of any athlete doing what he’s doing at his age at the highest level. In baseball, you might get the odd relief pitcher or knuckleball pitcher. In football, there’s no body that age. In tennis there’s nobody. In basketball, there’s nobody that age. I don’t know what’s going on overseas – is Pele still playing? Francois Beauchemin is having an incredible season, but is never in the conversation about the Norris Trophy or top defensemen in the League. Why is that? He’s not a high profile guy. Never has been. He’s always been part of a supporting cast. When he was in Toronto, it wasn’t a great situation for him. Media remember what they last saw of him, so they’ll never put him in that category. Unlike the guys that get that award, that are usually flashy offensively, he does everything for us. He plays the most minutes, he blocks shots, he’s strong down low. I don’t know if he fulfills the [Norris] criteria, but he’s been very solid for us. What has Sheldon Souray shown you this year? I don’t know what my expectations were. Two years ago, he was in Hershey [in the AHL]. A year ago, he started out great in Dallas and tapered off a little bit. But Sheldon’s been a pleasant surprise. Probably the most pleasant surprise for me. Can you draw any comparisons between Cam Fowler and Mike Green, who had his best seasons with the Washington Capitals when you were his coach? I don’t know … they’re both great skaters. I think Mike knows where the holes are a little bit better. Cam’s still learning those ropes a little bit. When to jump. Cam, believe it or not, is a little more defense oriented while Mike would always jump into the play. Cam’s a little more hesitant to do that. Fowler will be in Anaheim for quite some time, but the perception is that the window might be closing for this group. Getzlaf and Perry are free agents. Selanne might be near the end. Do you have a sense of that urgency, or is that off the radar? Completely off the radar. I’m concerned about winning this year. You take every team in the NHL, and there might be two whose rosters are pretty well intact in the next season. So I take it one game at a time. Finally, I know you’re a big pro wrestling fan, as am I. What, sir, is your favorite finishing move of all-time? [Laughs] Well, quite frankly, being a big Bret Hart fan, it would be the Sharpshooter. It’s sort of the same thing that Chris Jericho has and a lot of other guys. But that would have been the one I’d like to see. Well, they’re really just modified Boston Crabs. They’re better than a lot of the other finishing moves, I’ll tell you that much. I’ve never practiced to see if I could get somebody in that move, to see if it would hurt. I totally practiced the figure-four leg lock when I was a kid. Ric Flair style. I think you could really [expletive] up an ankle with the figure-four. I agree. There used to be a guy before Flair named Johnny Powers, and he called it the Power Lock, and I know it’s exactly what the figure-four is. When you’re 9 years old and you’re watching this and you’re like, ‘Oh, wow, that’s a killer move.’ What I never believed was that by rolling on your stomach, you could reverse the pain of the figure-four back onto the guy that’s giving it to you. [Laughs] I’m sure, like anything they do, it’s painful. I wouldn’t even want to try anything they do. I fall down on the ice and it’s painful. I can’t imagine jumping off the ropes and landing on somebody, what it would do.Debate ends. Winner: Romney. Loser: Gingrich who, despite strong performance, gives Romney big opening to savage him on amnesty for illegals. As for the others: Bachmann does well. Perry doesn’t make a mistake but Cain flounders as usual. Ron Paul probably helped himself by getting so much time to answer though he was clearly out of step with his own party. * China just getting mentioned as a throwaway line in final questions. * Paul’s rationalization of the Taliban is disgusting. He forgets they were the 9/11 killers hosts and defenders. * Romney points out that Perry’s no-fly zone makes no sense because Assad isn’t bombing his people, he’s shooting them. No drive zone for tanks? Also makes good points about convincing Alawites to abandon Assad. Again, sounds presidential and knowledgeable. * Romney finally gets a chance to talk about American exceptionalism and the contrast between his vision of an American century and Obama’s globalist view. * Ron Paul appears to be getting more time than many of the other contenders. * Cain won’t support no fly-zone proposed by Perry in Syria. Says we should stop the export of oil from Syria. Guess he was dozing when he got the briefing that mentioned that Syria doesn’t export much oil. Ouch. First real gaffe from him tonight. * Finally getting a question on the Arab spring. But still nothing on China. * Perry, who was killed on immigration over in-state tuition issue, looks pleased to see that someone else has just stepped on the immigration land mine. In response, Romney sticks to his position against amnesty for illegals. This is going to hurt Gingrich. * Bachmann challenges Gingrich’s liberal stand on immigration. Gingrich makes sense but how does this well-considered position jive with idea that he can flank Romney from the right? Romney predictably answers by denouncing amnesty and drawing distinction between legal and illegal immigration. Gingrich may have just given Romney the opening he needs to remind conservatives that Gingrich is to his left on a lot of issues. * Blitzer reminds Gingrich he once supported amnesty for immigrants. He answers that immigrants with graduate degrees should be encouraged to stay. Says he and Romney were both snookered by plan that was also supposed to secure the border. Wants selective service-style board to review illegals giving those with long ties and good record a pass. That isn’t what right-wingers want to hear but it makes sense. * Ron Paul doesn’t a war on terror or a war on drugs. Libertarian catnip but irrelevant in a serious discussion of foreign policy. * Perry wants a 21st century Monroe Doctrine on infiltration of Latin America by terrorists. Says fence along border with Mexico isn’t enough. Security cooperation requires more than that. Good point. * Bachmann says budget debate isn’t about “Monopoly money.” True but it’s hard to argue that her stand during debt ceiling crisis in which she seemed okay with default was realistic. * Santorum says Obama has “poisoned the well” in Congress and made bipartisanship impossible. Good point but his bragging about his achievements in the 1990’s reminds us that it’s been a long time since he won an election. * In denouncing Obama for his lack of leadership, Perry cites his experience as “commander-in-chief” of the Texas National Guard. Lines like that show how his goofiness can come out even when he’s making good points. * Huntsman says foreign policy should be “driven by economics.” For a guy who claims to be running on his international experience, that’s a pretty cynical stand. * Gingrich again says we’ve got to get serious about Iran, says bombing campaign that leaves Islamist regime in place won’t work but as a last resort won’t leave Israel alone to face nuclear threat. But he then seems to say that Israel intends to use them. That’s a misstatement. * Ronney points out that the money that will be cut on defense will be spent on Obamacare. He answers Ron Paul’s cynicism about defense by mentioning programs that will be cut. Points out the failure of Obama because he’s left Israel alone to face Iran. Higher gas costs hurt but not as much as a nuclear Iran. Then pledges his first foreign trip will be to Israel to show the U.S. cares. Good moment for him. * Santorum answers Paul Wolfowitz question about aid to Africa and other foreign aid by pointing out the importance of expanding US influence in the world and that money spent on it is saved on military expenditures. * Bachmann turns question about helping Israel bomb Iran around by pointing out that Iran wants to eradicate Israel and chides Obama for wasting time on pointless diplomacy with Tehran. * Gingrich says if we were serious we could shut down Iran’s nuclear program in a year. * AEI’s Danielle Pletka poses intelligent question about the futility of sanctions on Iran. Perry answers by speaking of the need to sanction Iran’s Central Bank. Then chimes in with his idea about a no-fly zone in Syria and Obama’s weakness. *** Herman Cain gives a clear answer about supporting Israel in an attack on Iran. Ron Paul says no and quotes retired Moss
somehow removed all gold trades instantaneously and simultaneously from outside, or caused a systematic failure all at once. This implies vast computing power, knowledge of the trading system and algorithms. In short, folks, someone is toying with the computerized trading world, sending messages, and the message is loud and clear: we can crash, and erase, the whole thing, any time we choose. That has to have them burning the midnight LEDs at various intelligence agencies and banks... unless, of course, they're the ones behind it, and I doubt that, since they're the ones benefiting from that financial system. Nor does it make much sense for a foreign power to do so either. Sending messages that they are capable of crashing the economy that, like it or not, continues to be the locomotive of the rest, is more than a little suicidal. Of course, I wouldn't put it past certain banksters or corporate fascists or their institutions to flirt with wholesale fraud and theft that such a capability would give them. Stupid parasites that many of them are, it would not be beyond them to kill the host that provides their own wealthy and comfortably corrupt existence. Still, most of them have minds, even if addled. So I think that scenario, too, is a bit weak... Which leaves... ...see you on the flip side.WASHINGTON -- A bipartisan group of senators struck a deal late Wednesday to overhaul the federal student loan program, tying interest rates on new loans to the U.S. government’s cost to borrow in a move that immediately reduces the cost to finance higher education, but is forecast to raise borrowing costs for millions of graduate students and parents in about three years. Rates on new student loans from the Department of Education, the dominant source of college loans, would be pegged to the yield on the 10-year Treasury note. Undergraduates would pay 1.8 percentage points above the government’s cost to borrow for 10 years. Graduate students would pay 3.8 percentage points above the rate. Parents would pay 4.5 percentage points above the benchmark, officials said. The yield on the 10-year note was 2.57 percent late Wednesday, according to Bloomberg. Assuming the measure is signed into law as is, most students starting school this fall and their parents would enjoy lower borrowing costs than the rates that prevailed during the last school year. But their savings would effectively be subsidized by future borrowers, who would pay more relative to current law as the economy improves and interest rates rise. Interest rates on subsidized Stafford loans, meant for students from moderate-income and low-income households, had been at fixed at 3.4 percent the last few years before doubling to 6.8 percent on July 1 as a result of previous legislation. Unsubsidized Stafford loans, used by other undergraduates and graduate students, are set at 6.8 percent. PLUS loans, used by parents of undergraduates and graduate students who exhaust Stafford borrowing limits, are fixed at 7.9 percent. Congress has been setting the interest rates, as opposed to allowing the rate to fluctuate with market borrowing costs. The average of three forecasts on the 10-year Treasury note, taken from a recent White House budget report, shows that graduate students are estimated to pay more beginning around 2016. Parents of undergraduate students, who increasingly have been taking out loans from the government to cover rising tuition costs for their children, are forecast to pay more beginning in 2016. The deal, driven by the July 1 doubling of interest rates on some new student loans, comes as the Obama administration is forecast to reap a record $51 billion profit off federal student loans this fiscal year, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. That sum tops the earnings of Exxon Mobil Corp., the nation's most profitable publicly traded company. The CBO estimated last month that the government would generate $184 billion in profit for loans made from this fiscal year through 2023, not including $15 billion in profit the government booked this year from loans made in previous years. The federal government has booked nearly $120 billion in profit from student borrowers and their families over the past five fiscal years, budget documents show. It’s unclear whether Wednesday’s proposal would increase the government’s profit even higher than current law. Some lawmakers, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) have argued that the federal government should not be generating profit off the backs of students and their families. The CBO is expected to detail its forecast on Thursday. The bill is likely to pass the Senate after securing support from two leading Democrats, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa). It’s likely to be approved by the Republican-led House of Representatives, which passed a similar bill earlier this year. The White House proposed a plan earlier this year to fix borrowing costs to the 10-year note. Durbin had floated a similar deal last month, but it was quickly shot down by lawmakers concerned it would raise borrowing costs for future students. Harkin has long favored reducing borrowing costs. Representatives for the lawmakers could not be reached after normal business hours late Wednesday. Interest rates for new loans would be published every year and would be fixed for the life of the debt. The cost to borrow for undergraduates would be capped at 8.25 percent. For graduate students, interest rates would be capped at 9.25 percent. The deal was first reported by Inside Higher Ed, an online news organization. Many Senate Democrats have been reluctant to support the measures, in part because of the possibility that future students would pay much higher rates than they do under current law. “Congress must preserve its historical commitment to protecting students from outrageous interest rates now and in the future,” Harkin, chairman of the chamber’s education committee, said last month through a spokeswoman. In recent weeks, a bipartisan group of lawmakers including Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), Angus King (I-Maine), Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), Richard Burr (R-N.C.), and Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) had sought to broker a compromise between Democrats and Republicans by pegging borrowing costs to the yield on the 10-year note, but setting them between the House measure and the White House plan. Students would pay more under the House-approved bill, but that proposal capped interest rates. The White House plan did not. Senate Democrats at first had rejected the bipartisan compromise. Durbin and Harkin appear to have blessed a modified version of that original plan. If the measure becomes law, policymakers’ attention is likely to turn to existing debtors, struggling under the weight of a cumulative $1.2 trillion in outstanding college loans. Policymakers increasingly have focused on skyrocketing student debt levels and record borrowing costs as a potential impediment to economic growth. Regulators and officials at agencies that include the Federal Reserve, Treasury Department, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Federal Reserve Bank of New York have warned that student borrowing may reduce consumption, dampen purchases of autos and homes, depress the economy, limit credit creation, and prevent debtors from accumulating savings or building up nest eggs for retirement. In May, President Barack Obama noted that the average new college graduate carries more than $26,000 in student debt. He said: “That doesn’t just hold back our young graduates. It holds back our entire middle class.” Student loan payments “can last for years, even decades, which means young people are putting off buying their first car or their first house -- the things that grow our economy and create new jobs,” Obama added. The White House may tackle the issue, given the increasingly dire nature of the warnings from policymakers and regulators and the limited effectiveness of existing programs run by the Education Department. Democratic senators, including Sherrod Brown (Ohio), Kirsten Gillibrand (N.Y.), Heidi Heitkamp (N.D.), Patty Murray (Wash.) and Durbin have proposed measures that would allow existing borrowers to reduce their debt by refinancing. The CFPB has supported plans that would jump-start refinancings of existing high-rate debt and modifications of troubled loans.AlterKot Profile Joined January 2014 Poland 5252 Posts January 12 2015 20:43 GMT #3 I have deja vu :p Americans don't like to use unblockables, it is considered not honest. You press a button at the wrong time and hit the other person, you are random, not a top player. You DP Sim's far fierce, it is random and not honest. mouzChase Profile Joined April 2011 Germany 4 Posts January 12 2015 20:46 GMT #5 looking forward to your opinion of my style :D Will apply asap (maybe tomorrow, wednesday latest)looking forward to your opinion of my style :D My opinion here does not reflect the views of my team / twitter @mouzChase / I <3 Scarlett 739 Profile Joined May 2009 Bearded Elder 8116 Posts January 12 2015 20:46 GMT #6 On January 13 2015 05:46 mouzChase wrote: Will apply asap (maybe tomorrow, wednesday latest) looking forward to your opinion of my style :D Will apply asap (maybe tomorrow, wednesday latest)looking forward to your opinion of my style :D hey Chase, long time no see my friend hey Chase, long time no see my friend Moderator Salty oldboy that loves memes \| One and only back-to-back Liquibet Winner NeoIllusions Profile Joined December 2002 United States 15606 Posts January 12 2015 20:58 GMT #7 On January 13 2015 05:35 739 wrote: Damn I'd apply if I didn't have such a low-level english :\ Anyway I'd rather apply as a part of LR/Coverage/Event/Liquibet (if that's coming any nearest future) staff, so that sucks. Good luck to everyone, I'm jelous. If you're serious about helping out, I'm sure we can find stuff for you to do. Even stuff like Event submissions as you've mentioned, is mostly done by Chexx and other staff. If we have a dedicated volunteer to take that over, it would free up some time for our staff to get other things done. LL is very much community driven. No one should forget that. If you're serious about helping out, I'm sure we can find stuff for you to do. Even stuff like Event submissions as you've mentioned, is mostly done by Chexx and other staff. If we have a dedicated volunteer to take that over, it would free up some time for our staff to get other things done.LL is very much community driven. No one should forget that. Administrator For the Glory that is TeamLiquid (-9 \| 155) \| Twitter: @NeoIllusions \| Discord: NeoIllusions#1984 NeoIllusions Profile Joined December 2002 United States 15606 Posts January 12 2015 21:25 GMT #9 On January 13 2015 06:18 Lord Tolkien wrote: time to apply for every position I'm sure everyone will appreciate confirmed Silver V guides on how to play Fiora or Teeto. Stick to HS. zz Stick to HS.zz Administrator For the Glory that is TeamLiquid (-9 \| 155) \| Twitter: @NeoIllusions \| Discord: NeoIllusions#1984 739 Profile Joined May 2009 Bearded Elder 8116 Posts January 12 2015 21:26 GMT #10 On January 13 2015 05:58 NeoIllusions wrote: Show nested quote + On January 13 2015 05:35 739 wrote: Damn I'd apply if I didn't have such a low-level english :\ Anyway I'd rather apply as a part of LR/Coverage/Event/Liquibet (if that's coming any nearest future) staff, so that sucks. Good luck to everyone, I'm jelous. If you're serious about helping out, I'm sure we can find stuff for you to do. Even stuff like Event submissions as you've mentioned, is mostly done by Chexx and other staff. If we have a dedicated volunteer to take that over, it would free up some time for our staff to get other things done. LL is very much community driven. No one should forget that. If you're serious about helping out, I'm sure we can find stuff for you to do. Even stuff like Event submissions as you've mentioned, is mostly done by Chexx and other staff. If we have a dedicated volunteer to take that over, it would free up some time for our staff to get other things done.LL is very much community driven. No one should forget that. I'm totally into this, if you have anything like that, I'd apply happily. I'm totally into this, if you have anything like that, I'd apply happily. Moderator Salty oldboy that loves memes \| One and only back-to-back Liquibet Winner mouzChase Profile Joined April 2011 Germany 4 Posts January 12 2015 21:34 GMT #11 On January 13 2015 05:46 739 wrote: Show nested quote + On January 13 2015 05:46 mouzChase wrote: Will apply asap (maybe tomorrow, wednesday latest) looking forward to your opinion of my style :D Will apply asap (maybe tomorrow, wednesday latest)looking forward to your opinion of my style :D hey Chase, long time no see my friend hey Chase, long time no see my friend Hey Buddy, how are u? Hey Buddy, how are u? My opinion here does not reflect the views of my team / twitter @mouzChase / I <3 Scarlett McTaters Profile Joined January 2015 United States 114 Posts January 12 2015 21:35 GMT #12 Best of luck to all those applying. Can't imagine it will be easy to meet the high standards of TL. Im Fury Profile Joined January 2015 United States 1 Post January 12 2015 22:13 GMT #13 Is this just for the site covering different games and other events? I'm a high school student and aspiring to hopefully be covering Esports media in some writer journalist like position. Was wondering what exactly this offers and if there is some restrictions that would effect me because of my age and currently in schooling? Fionn Profile Joined October 2009 United States 3012 Posts January 12 2015 22:25 GMT #14 On January 13 2015 07:13 Im Fury wrote: Is this just for the site covering different games and other events? I'm a high school student and aspiring to hopefully be covering Esports media in some writer journalist like position. Was wondering what exactly this offers and if there is some restrictions that would effect me because of my age and currently in schooling? TeamLiquid.net has a 14-year-old on staff, so you should be fine. This site is primarily covering League of Legends, but you're allowed to cover whatever aspect of the pro-scene you'd like. TeamLiquid.net has a 14-year-old on staff, so you should be fine. This site is primarily covering League of Legends, but you're allowed to cover whatever aspect of the pro-scene you'd like. https://twitter.com/FionnOnFire 739 Profile Joined May 2009 Bearded Elder 8116 Posts January 12 2015 22:43 GMT #15 On January 13 2015 07:25 Fionn wrote: Show nested quote + On January 13 2015 07:13 Im Fury wrote: Is this just for the site covering different games and other events? I'm a high school student and aspiring to hopefully be covering Esports media in some writer journalist like position. Was wondering what exactly this offers and if there is some restrictions that would effect me because of my age and currently in schooling? TeamLiquid.net has a 14-year-old on staff, so you should be fine. This site is primarily covering League of Legends, but you're allowed to cover whatever aspect of the pro-scene you'd like. TeamLiquid.net has a 14-year-old on staff, so you should be fine. This site is primarily covering League of Legends, but you're allowed to cover whatever aspect of the pro-scene you'd like. Must be Kollin! Must be Kollin! Moderator Salty oldboy that loves memes \| One and only back-to-back Liquibet Winner TheEmulator Profile Joined July 2010 PrairieLand 915 Posts January 12 2015 22:46 GMT #16 On January 13 2015 07:43 739 wrote: Show nested quote + On January 13 2015 07:25 Fionn wrote: On January 13 2015 07:13 Im Fury wrote: Is this just for the site covering different games and other events? I'm a high school student and aspiring to hopefully be covering Esports media in some writer journalist like position. Was wondering what exactly this offers and if there is some restrictions that would effect me because of my age and currently in schooling? TeamLiquid.net has a 14-year-old on staff, so you should be fine. This site is primarily covering League of Legends, but you're allowed to cover whatever aspect of the pro-scene you'd like. TeamLiquid.net has a 14-year-old on staff, so you should be fine. This site is primarily covering League of Legends, but you're allowed to cover whatever aspect of the pro-scene you'd like. Must be Kollin! Must be Kollin! He was de-staffed, but yeah he started when he was 13. Should be 15 (maybe 16 by now). He was de-staffed, but yeah he started when he was 13. Should be 15 (maybe 16 by now). Administrator ~_~ Wita Profile Joined January 2015 Denmark 267 Posts January 12 2015 22:49 GMT #17 Been looking for this kind of opening for a while will give this my all, will most likely write a few things to choose from and then send the best one. NeoIllusions Profile Joined December 2002 United States 15606 Posts January 12 2015 23:00 GMT #19 On January 13 2015 07:56 Ansibled wrote: I like how your shortest example of a 600 word recap is 1800 words. You can't contain that level of passion~ You can't contain that level of passion~ Administrator For the Glory that is TeamLiquid (-9 \| 155) \| Twitter: @NeoIllusions \| Discord: NeoIllusions#1984 1 2 3 4 5 Next AllHouse Speaker Paul Ryan Paul Davis RyanBrexit and exit: A transatlantic comparison Five takeaways from McCabe’s allegations against Trump The Hill's 12:30 Report: Sanders set to shake up 2020 race MORE (R-Wis.) on Sunday wouldn't guarantee that every middle-class person would get a tax cut under President Trump's tax reform proposal. "That's the purpose of doing this," Ryan said on CBS's "Face The Nation." "The purpose of this is to get a middle-class tax cut." Ryan was pressed on whether that was a guarantee that every middle-class person would get a tax cut under the president's plan. ADVERTISEMENT "Well, I don't know every single person's little, small problem or issue," he said. Ryan said the purpose of the tax reform plan is to lower middle-class taxes. "So yes, people are going to get tax cuts. How big are those tax cuts? That depends on the individual," he said. He reiterated the "objective" is to lower taxes for middle class taxpayers. Trump and congressional Republicans last week rolled out a sweeping tax overhaul proposal that won immediate praise from conservatives. Trump said the framework “represents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reduce taxes, rebuild our economy and restore America’s competitive edge.” The president stressed that the benefits would go to the middle class, not the wealthy.With the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, political commentators pronounced the death of socialism and the triumph of the United States. Amid the celebration, the ideological and military defeats in Southeast Asia less than two decades earlier were soon forgotten. Francis Fukuyama, one of the country's most prominent political scientists, for example, wrote a nearly 500-page treatise that posited that the world had witnessed its political-economic endpoint: liberal democratic capitalism. The narrative seemed so accurate. It proclaimed: The United States triumphed. Democracy triumphed. Capitalism triumphed. The Soviet Union failed. Dictatorship failed. Socialism failed. And yet, not all the pieces of the U.S. political puzzle congealed. In the same year as the Soviet collapse, Bernie Sanders, an avowed democratic socialist, first sauntered into Washington as a congressional representative from Vermont. Five years later, local citizens elected former Cleveland Mayor Dennis Kucinich, who, although he never voiced an affinity for socialism, recurrently challenged corporate capitalist excess. Fast forward to the 2016 presidential race and Fukuyama's thesis appears remarkably premature. On the surface, Sen. Sanders' rise as a serious presidential candidate is indeed startling. For many U.S. citizens, the idea of socialism connotes authoritarian rule, queuing in lines, and the absence of individuality. In 2012, the Pew Research Center found that six in ten citizens evidenced a negative reaction to idea of socialism. More recently, in a 2015 Gallup poll, less than half of respondents (47 percent) said they would vote for a socialist. To put that in perspective, Gallup respondents reported that they were more likely to vote for an atheist (58 percent), a Muslim (60 percent), and an evangelical Christian (73 percent). Perhaps it's been the surface-level understanding of socialism, though that has provoked such sharp responses. Instead of Soviet-style authoritarianism, what Sanders has, in fact, proposed are comparatively (by international standards) modest reforms that purport to equalize access to our national resources and end the privileges that accrue to a finite number of individuals as a result of the chance of birth. Put simply, Sanders has promised to democratize access to our national resources. This includes our hospitals and medical facilities, our universities, our political system, and our economy. For Sanders, this is what true democracy entails - allowing all to participate and benefit regardless of location in the socio-economic hierarchy. The most covert obstacles Sen. Sanders now faces are the politicized mental shortcuts that many have collectively assumed: Socialism equals dictatorship, socialism equals disincentive, socialism equals control. Let's not forget that it was the Socialist Party's presidential candidate, Eugene Debs, who was arrested in Canton, Ohio, in 1918 for delivering a speech against U.S. militarism and subsequently ran in the 1920 presidential election, and garnered nearly a million votes, from a federal prison cell. Whatever the outcome, the durability of Sen. Sanders and his campaign is nothing short of historic. He has initiated a national rehabilitation of the idea of democratic socialism. In doing so, he has struck a national chord that will reverberate for decades to come. Tim Gill of Cleveland is a doctoral student in the department of sociology at the University of Georgia.Play 00:38 Play 00:38 Can a county compete in all competitions? Chris Rogers feels that "life has come full circle" as he settles in the south-west of England for the first time since he left Australia to pursue his cricket career as a fresh-faced 18-year-old. Twenty years on, the Somerset captaincy might have been a challenge designed for him as Rogers seeks new inspiration following his retirement from international cricket at the end of last summer's Ashes series. That circle, though, has not quite been joined up. Mark Overton provided early guidance as skipper of North Devon at a time when his sons - Somerset's fast-bowling twins Craig and Jamie - were still in nappies. But when Rogers leads Somerset for the first time in the Championship against Durham at Chester-le-Street on Sunday the fast bowlers he expects to light up his season will be conspicuous by their absence. Rogers was already braced for the absence of Craig Overton as he completes a two-match suspension for an alleged racist outburst and now Jamie Overton will also miss Somerset's opening Championship match of the season against Durham at Chester-le-Street because of a slight hamstring tear suffered on a pre-season tour to Spain. It is an unfortunate start for two quick bowlers who spent time with England's senior squad last summer - although neither made a debut - and who Rogers expects to be at the heart of Somerset's youthful pace attack. Craig Overton, in particular, is regarded by Somerset's head coach Matt Maynard as "one of the most consistent bowlers in England in the last couple of seasons" and both Maynard and Rogers will be anxious for him to achieve his international potential this summer and become potty trained as far as sledging is concerned - he fell foul of the umpires three times last season. It all culminated in an alleged outburst to Ashar Zaidi, then at Sussex, now with Essex, to "go back to your own f******* country." The ECB only charged him with a Level One offence after receiving reports from all parties, but his third transgression of the season brought an automatic two-match ban - a punishment immediately condemned as inadequate by Kick It Out, sport's anti-racism pressure group. Without the identical twins, Somerset's pace attack will be stretched. Josh Davey, the Scotland seamer, could make his Championship debut for the county or 18-year-old Ben Green could earn a first-class debut on a ground where, especially in April, seam bowling can be expected to dominate. Rogers is aware of the possibility that this might turn out to be his farewell season and, if so, he yearns for a happy ending. If he fulfils the prediction of Maynard, that he can develop the side "like Viv Richards" - Maynard played under Richards' captaincy at Glamorgan - then all will be well. "I don't think I've ever been compared to Viv before," Rogers laughed. He has built a career on dependability - cautious drives and shrewd nudges - so if he charges a fast bowler on Sunday in an effort to whack him over midwicket it could have expected consequences. Rogers has averaged more than 50 in first-class matches at all four English counties he has represented - Derbyshire, Northants, Leicestershire and Middlesex - and if he wants a lesson in how to maintain commitment after calling time on Australia, he only needs to consider the example of the man he has replaced, Marcus Trescothick, who is beginning his 10th county summer since a stress-related illness brought his England career to a close. His Somerset finale only became a possibility when Middlesex decided to look elsewhere. "They wanted their overseas player to be involved in T20 and my hope was to finish my career at Lord's, so that was a bit disappointing," he said, "but completely understandable." The south-west, though, is a wonderful consolation. "I came here as an 18-year-old at North Devon and had three years there and a year at Exeter," Rogers said. "I love the south west - it is as close as you can get to Australia in the UK. "When I got the chance to sign here it was in many ways like coming full circle. It would have been nice in many respects to finish at Middlesex but in many ways this was equally a great opportunity. "It's a new challenge and that is something to look forward to as an older player. Coming as a captain that is as important as anything. Our pride is on the line. So that is going to drive me. I think it is part of my make-up to want to compete all the time. I want to lead from the front not just with the captaincy but with the runs." David Hopps is a general editor at ESPNcricinfo @davidkhopps © ESPN Sports Media Ltd.BY: Follow @DavidRutz Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) said the 15 percent polling threshold for candidates to be allowed into the presidential debates was too high during an interview Sunday on Meet The Press. According to the Huffington Post, the five polls in which the candidates must average 15 percent support are ABC-Washington Post, CBS-New York Times, CNN-Opinion Research Corporation, Fox News, and NBC-Wall Street Journal. Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson and Green Party nominee Dr. Jill Stein are coming up short of that number, and they appear unlikely to reach it with the first debate coming up Sept. 26. NBC host Chuck Todd asked Sanders whether he felt Johnson should be allowed in. "Generally speaking, my view is that if people reach a certain level—you can debate about what that level is—what is it, 15 percent, they should be in the debates," Sanders said. "You think that level, that 15 percent is a fair metric?" Todd asked. "It's probably too high," Sanders said. "Probably should be lower than that." Both Johnson and Stein have made plays for supporters of Sanders, who made a strong challenge to Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination by winning more than 20 primaries and caucuses. They have pointed to the historic unpopularity of Clinton and Republican nominee Donald Trump, the two most disliked major party candidates in polling history.He had a bad tournament in Paris, but his start in Leuven was excellent. Wesley So leads the rapid segment of the Grand Chess Tour with 2.5/3, after beating Magnus Carlsen in round three. So won after Carlsen played for a win too long. \| Photo: Maria Emelianova. The weather in central Europe changed dramatically on Wednesday. Also in Leuven, which is about 20 km east of Brussels, there was more rain than sunshine today. It was good weather for playing chess. Nonetheless, the tournament in Leuven seemed to start where the one in Paris had finished: with quite a few errors. "Blunderfest" might be too strong, although one non-playing top GM called it just that. The wonderful Leuven Town Hall is again the location for this event. \| Photo: Maria Emelianova. A blunder occurred for instance in Magnus Carlsen vs Levon Aronian, and it was a pity because up till then it was actually a great game from both sides. This Nimzo-Indian, the world champion explained, is a slightly unusual line where White gets the two bishops but Black gets serious counterplay in the center. "I need to open up at some point," said Carlsen, who sacrificed a pawn with the d4-d5 push. "When he blundered, the position is a draw. In such a complicated position it's... considering that, I think the game was relatively well played until 28...Qf4. If he had played Qd1 it would have concluded in a more or less logical draw." Carlsen was the first and the last to laugh! \| Photo: Maria Emelianova. Vassily Ivanchuk didn't really blunder, but the way he handled the Philidor against Maxime Vachier-Lagrave wasn't great. He got a terrible endgame with a doubled pawn on the queenside, so it was kind of a Berlin endgame gone wrong for Black. MVL on beating a player he didn't have a good score against: "My mood these days is when I play someone against whom I don't manage so well, to fire back!" And, reflecting more generally: "My play was not convincing since the beginning of the year, and maybe even earlier. I was just happy in Paris to somehow connect my neurons back. It's a state of mind that I need to be careful with yet, because it doesn't mean that I feel it quite yet but it gives me some confidence that I'm trying to use." Not a great start for the reigning world rapid champion. \| Photo: Maria Emelianova. In round two Vladimir Kramnik defeated Vishy Anand, and that was the third time in a row since the Russian player had also won both their games in the Norway Chess blitz and main tournaments. Somehow Anand couldn't prevent his opponent from creating a huge pawn center. Is Kramnik, after all those years, turning Anand into his "client?" \| Photo: Maria Emelianova. Birthday boy dad Anish Giri, who turned 23 today (and came to Leuven with his wife Sopiko and son Daniel), seemed to be receiving an early birthday gift from Ian Nepomniachtchi. However, although the Russian GM got absolutely nothing out of the opening and was two pawns down at some point, he still managed to win. "I thought at least I can try to threaten him [with] mate in one a couple of times, here and there," said Nepomniachtchi. "After I put my queen on c4 and I was able to bring my rook back to e4 maybe it's not that clear already. "In time trouble I found out that it's extremely easy for me to play with this b5 stuff, and my king is placed much better than his. And then those pawns e5 and d4 became a beautiful cover for my king." Nepomniachtchi: "I thought at least I can try to threaten him [with] mate in one a couple of times, here and there." \| Photo: Maria Emelianova. But that present came for Anish Giri after all. In the very next round he crushed Levon Aronian using home-cooked analysis in a line Aronian normally doesn't play. "He decided to grab a piece. If he were White he would see that it is an awful decision," said Giri. Aronian graciously offers his hand to Giri. \| Photo: Maria Emelianova. Here's Giri talking about this game, the one against Nepomniachtchi but also about a game you might not have seen yet. It was played by his regular second Erwin l'Ami in the second round of the Dutch championship, and is given below the video. Don't miss it. Thanks everyone for your birthday wishes and gifts! They were all special, but the one of @LevAronian moved me the most. #23 #b3 #2003 — Anish Giri ( @anishgiri ) June 28, 2017 The third round also saw the top clash between Magnus Carlsen and Wesley So, and it didn't end well for the world champion. He simply overpressed, and suffered his first rapid loss of the Grand Chess Tour so far. Nigel Short: "It seems Magnus can't just push in any position. Sometimes he is losing his objectivity." Carlsen hadn't lost a single rapid game in Paris. \| Photo: Maria Emelianova. An absolutely incredible game was Vachier-Lagrave vs Vladimir Kramnik. How is it possible that Black didn't win this one? Well, time trouble of course. As Short said today: "With engines we're all geniuses." Or Anand: "At the board crazy things happen." An incredible draw between Kramnik and Vachier-Lagrave. \| Photo: Maria Emelianova. Luckily Kramnik could see the humor of it all! \| Photo: Maria Emelianova. Speaking of spectacular games, we should also include Baadur Jobava vs Vassily Ivanchuk. The Georgian GM lost his three games on the first day, but at least he's good for some entertainment! Jobava threw everything but the kitchen sink to Ivanchuk. \| Photo: Maria Emelianova. Your Next Move (Leuven) Grand Chess Tour \| Rapid, Round 3 Standings # Fed Name Rtg Perf 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 Pts SB 1 So,Wesley 2789 3087 1 2 2 5.0/6 2 Vachier-Lagrave,Maxime 2783 2898 1 1 2 4.0/6 3.50 3 Nepomniachtchi,Ian 2766 2867 0 2 2 4.0/6 1.50 4 Anand,Viswanathan 2775 2773 2 0 1 3.0/6 2.75 5 Kramnik,Vladimir 2789 2783 0 1 2 3.0/6 2.50 6 Carlsen,Magnus 2851 2776 0 1 2 3.0/6 1.75 7 Giri,Anish 2764 2773 0 1 2 3.0/6 1.75 8 Ivanchuk,Vassily 2757 2779 0 1 2 3.0/6 0.75 9 Aronian,Levon 2780 2653 0 0 2 2.0/6 10 Jobava,Baadur 2703 1968 0 0 0 0.0/6 You can watch the Grand Chess Tour on www.Chess.com/tv, and the games at www.Chess.com/live starting daily from 2 p.m. CET, 8 a.m. New York or 5 a.m. Pacific. Commentary is provided by GM Maurice Ashley and GM Nigel Short in Leuven, and GM Yasser Seirawan, IM Jovanka Houska & GM Christian Chirilla from St Louis. The rapid tournament is a round-robin with games played at 25 minutes with a 10-second delay from move one. The blitz tournament is a double round-robin with games played at five minutes with a three-second delay from move one. The prize fund is $150,000, with the first prize of $37,500. Previous reports:Even though I am a born and raised Canadian, and should be a die hard hockey fan, my heart has always belonged to the diamond. However, I found that to pair my love of baseball and board games was often difficult. There are some baseball board games, but I found the ones I had played to be statistics heavy, and I would have a difficult time finding someone to play with. That is why I was incredibly happy to pick up Baseball Highlights 2045 on Tabletop Day. Baseball Highlights 2045 is a deck building game that was published in 2015 by Eagle-Gryphon Games. The premise of the game is that, in 2045, baseball has been changed to allow cyborgs, and robots into the league, as well as shortening the game to six innings. Some humans are still in the game, and they named themselves after famous players that we would know, and combined their names, such as Moose Giambi. The game is pretty easy to learn, the rules are simple enough to pick up after
on that attorney.“ “I love fair use, and I love free speech,” Morrison says. “This game is neither. Some free advice for the developer, take this game down yesterday.” [Source: Frontwire Studios] Our Take Fair use is a term thrown around a lot, especially on the internet. However, many people see it as a shield against being the target of lawsuits rather than the defense against those actually filed. Frontwire can't stop Disney from using its legal muscle. Romanelli says that Disney would have to outlast the small studio in a legal fight. I suspect that won't be a problem. With regard to the Fair Use Protection Account, anyone with fair use concerns can email Ryan Morrison at fupa@morrisonlee.com for more information.Share. But is it an accident or a publicity stunt? But is it an accident or a publicity stunt? Emails sent out by an alternate reality game designed to promote Ubisoft's upcoming techno-thriller Watch Dogs have leaked over 1,000 email addresses. It's not yet clear whether this is a rather unfortunate blunder or an incredibly canny move that's sure to get us all feeling nice and paranoid ahead of the title's release. “ It's not yet clear whether this is a rather unfortunate blunder or an incredibly canny move that's sure to get us all feeling nice and paranoid ahead of the title's release. The emails were sent out in relation to the alternate reality game that Ubisoft has been running since E3, centred around the dotconnexion gallery we saw in Watch Dog's first demo. The dotconnexion team sent out an email update today, which you can see at Kotaku, only instead of putting all recipients in the BCC field, they were sent CC messages meaning the addresses were visible to all. The update which caused the furore was announcing the death of Joseph Demarco, the fictional owner of dotconnexion. It reads, "It is with great regret that we inform you that Joseph Demarco passed away in a tragic, yet unexplained accident. Being one of the most important philanthropists in the local digital art scene, his demise has left a deep void in the community. Out of respect for his friends and family, the dotconnexion exhibition will be cancelled." We aren't sure whether this is a PR stunt or the result of human error, but the fact that only some people were affected suggests the latter. The emails were sent out in batches of 500 and whilst those at the start of the alphabet were affected, by the time the sender reached addresses beginning with I and M they seemed to have rectified the purported mistake. We're not quite sure what to make of this. It seems far too perfect for this to happen over a game centred on hacking and the management of your digital footprint, but the fact only the first waves were hit by the BCC field not being used suggests it's a mistake. What do you guys think, a brilliant piece of PR or an accidental oversight? Exit Theatre Mode Luke Karmali is IGN's UK Editorial Assistant. You too can revel in mediocrity by following him on IGN and on Twitter.Story highlights A Chicago alderman says Chick-fil-A's president contradicts what executives told him The alderman says the execs assured him donations to anti-gay groups will stop Company President Dan Cathy said Friday there is no change in practices Cathy's comments on marriage stirred controversy earlier this year A Chicago alderman says Chick-fil-A's president is publicly contradicting what company executives personally assured him for months -- that the fast-food chain is changing its stance on gay marriage -- and he asked the company Sunday to clarify. Alderman Joe Moreno made news last week when he announced Chick-fil-A has ceased making donations to anti-gay groups and has enacted workplace protections for its employees against discrimination. Moreno said the two concessions were the result of 10 months of negotiations he had with Chick-fil-A executives as he weighed whether to support a new Chick-fil-A restaurant in his Chicago ward. He said the executives gave him documents backing up the new positions. Chick-fil-A, in a statement Thursday, affirmed the workplace protections. Friday, however, company President Dan Cathy denied the company has ceased making donations to groups that oppose gay marriage and said Chick-fil-A "made no such concessions." JUST WATCHED Alderman defends Chick-fil-A position Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Alderman defends Chick-fil-A position 04:56 JUST WATCHED Chick-fil-A gets the boot Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Chick-fil-A gets the boot 02:22 JUST WATCHED Blocking construction of Chick-fil-A Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Blocking construction of Chick-fil-A 02:51 "There continues to be erroneous implications in the media that Chick-fil-A changed our practices and priorities in order to obtain permission for a new restaurant in Chicago," Cathy said in a statement to Mike Huckabee, the former Republican presidential candidate who now runs a conservative website. "That is incorrect." Moreno said Sunday that Cathy's statement "at the least, muddied the progress we had made with Chick-fil-A and, at the worst, contradicted the documents and promises Chick-fil-A made to me and the community earlier this month." Moreno said Chick-fil-A executives gave him a letter earlier this year saying the company's non-profit arm, the WinShape Foundation, will not support organizations with political agendas. "We were told that these organizations included groups that politically work against the rights of gay and lesbian people," Moreno said. He said the executives confirmed to him that both the foundation and the company in 2012 has not given money and will not give money to those groups. Cathy's conflicting statement, Moreno said Sunday, is "disturbing." "I am simply asking Mr. Cathy to confirm statements and documents that HIS company executives provided to me," Moreno said in a written statement, capitalizing "his" for emphasis. "It's pretty simple, Mr. Cathy. Do you acknowledge and support the policies that your executives outlined to me in writing or do you not? Yes or no?" the statement added. Chick-fil-A, whose restaurants are closed on Sundays, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. While the company has never hidden its conservative principles, Cathy caused an uproar in July when, in an interview with the Baptist Press, he said the company supports "the biblical definition of the family unit." The interview brought attention to donations the company made to organizations some activists said were anti-gay. Gay rights activists and others denounced the company and promised a boycott, while others vowed to support the company. Huckabee suggested a "Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day" and thousands turned out to show their support. Moreno said Sunday he has yet to introduce legislation for the new Chick-fil-A restaurant in his ward and will wait for Cathy's response before moving forward.The wave heard 'round the world: KK at Teahupo'o, where she made history in 2005 and again this year with the first women's tube award nomination. Photo: Baldassari. WSL To mere mortals, Keala Kennelly does the impossible. Year after year the Kauai native, who is nominated in two categories at Saturday's Big Wave Awards, rides waves that would make the average surfer quake in horror. She made history in 2005 as the first women to be towed into Teahupo'o, Tahiti's technical reefbreak, and again this spring as the first female to be nominated for a tube award at the BWAs. Kennelly is a BWA regular: She's already won three for best women's performance, and has been nominated nearly every year since the women's category was introduced, including this year. A successful Championship Tour surfer, she transitioned to bigger stuff after her fateful first ride at Teahupo'o (aka "Chopes"). Before the awards night unfolds, Kennelly discussed her motivation -- even after wipeouts that "scared the shit out of her." From Maverick's to Jaws, don't miss Keala Kennelly's impressive year. AD: How did you make that jump from mortal-sized waves to heavier ones? KK: Well the waves in Kauai can be heavier. And the progression from there, when I was on the Tour, I went to Tahiti and that was a game-changer for me. I loved charging that wave as hard as I could. And then when the guys started towing, I tried that. AD: Are you ever scared on heavy days? KK: The first really heavy wipeout I had was the first time I went to Chopes, back in 1999 or so. It wasn't a CT event yet, it was like the Gotcha Black Pearl Pro. It was huge for the holding period and I was really excited, it's such a perfect wave. I knew it was big but I didn't realize how big. I thought it was six- or eight-foot. Along with the heavier stuff, KK's not too shabby in smaller waves, too. In December, she competed in the women's Pipe Invitational, an exhibition heat during the Billabong Pipe Masters. WSL / Kirstin Scholtz I saw Shane Dorian and he was like, "Oh, KK charging?" I was like, "Yeah, whatever!," not realizing it was 12-to-15 feet. So I paddled for the smaller wave, and it didn't even break. And I turn around and had a whole, huge set just coming for me, and crush me for a two-wave hold-down. This was before we had inflatable safety vests. So no flotation, two-wave hold-down, board was broken into pieces, it scared the shit out of me. AD: What did you do after that? KK: I paddled the pieces of broken board out to the channel. I was shaking. It took me a whole year before I got the balls to get back out there. KK, charging Jaws (Pe'ahi, Maui) in 2015. WSL / Aaron Lynton AD: What changed over that year? KK: Well, there was that one. And there was the one I smashed my face in. That one took me two years to get over. I think for both of those, it shakes you up, and makes you afraid. And you live with that fear for a while. Then you start to ask yourself, ‘Well, is that it? Am I ever going to do that again?' Then the fear of missing out, and never experiencing that again becomes more powerful than the fear of doing it. The fear of never feeling how f-g incredible it feels to stand in this wave outweighs the fear of something going wrong. I really questioned whether I was going to go back after I hit my face. To this day, that's in the back of my mind. It still affects me. But I got to the point where I asked myself, "You're really never going to stand in a Chopes barrel? Ever again, in your life?" The fear of what could happen is very strong. But then, the fear of never feeling how f-g incredible it feels to stand in this incredible wave outweighs that. AD: What does it feel like? KK: When you paddle into one, it feels like a huge cavern of water spinning all around you. You're so, so focused because you have to be, it's life and death basically. You're so focused on making it out of that barrel, picking the right line, you're focused and your sense of touch is super-heightened. It's like I can feel every drop of water on the wave and anticipate where it's going to move. When you get spat out, you feel like king of the world. KK, facing down a 2015 crowd at Maverick's in Northern California. WSL / Shannon Quirk AD: What does daily life look like these days? KK: Well, I don't make money surfing, so I have to hustle doing other things. I definitely don't get to surf as many big swells as I used to, and that's frustrating. I'm looking into more television and film stuff again. I stay active, stay in the gym. I'd like to do some QS events this year, there were some that sound fun. It does get frustrating sometimes -- But I love what I do, and I feel like it's going to be a viable career one day. AD: You're a mom as well. Do you get to see your son much? KK: No, not really. He's in St. Louis with his biological mom. AD: What's the best part of what you do? KK: The actual surfing. When you go out there and get an amazing ride. That's what it's all about, really. It does get frustrating sometimes -- I walked away from it before. But I love what I do, and I feel like there's value in it. And I feel like it's going to be a viable sport and a viable career one day. Catch the Big Wave Awards streaming live here Saturday, April 23, starting at 8 p.m. local time.78: Sewing projects This post marks one and a half years of one-of-a-kind useless crap! So, I’m cheating celebrating by showing a couple things I made a long time ago but never posted. First we have the meta-tie: It’s a tie, wearing a tie! What black magic is this!? Anyway, I made that for my dad for father’s day a while back. And the next thing: A sad little cloud purse. But don’t be too sad, because… …every cloud has a silver lining. Boom! Cute purse with a joke in it. This was made almost entirely out of old clothes. The only thing I bought was the silver fabric. That picture’s so you can see the scale. If you really love this purse, then… ahem. Thanks for reading for the last 18 months. It’s been a lot of fun, so I guess I’ll keep it going. See ya next week.This article is about the baseball player. For the author, see Sean Doolittle (author) Sean Robert Doolittle (born September 26, 1986) is an American professional baseball pitcher for the Washington Nationals of Major League Baseball (MLB). He previously played for the Oakland Athletics and was an All-Star in 2014. Early life [ edit ] Doolittle grew up in Tabernacle Township New Jersey. Sean lived close to the baseball field and often would go there to practice. He played Babe Ruth Baseball, and excelled as a pitcher. He attended Shawnee High School, in Medford, New Jersey where he was a stand-out pitcher and broke the state record for most strikeouts in a game. A great hitter, Doolittle led Shawnee to a state championship. Doolittle played for the University of Virginia as both a starting pitcher and first baseman. He formerly held the record for wins in a career for a Virginia pitcher — 22 — which has since been passed by Danny Hultzen.[1] In 2005 and 2006, Doolittle was named to the USA National (Collegiate) Baseball Team.[2][3][4] Minor-league career [ edit ] The Oakland Athletics selected Doolittle in the first round, with the 41st overall selection, in the 2007 Major League Baseball Draft, as a first baseman/outfielder. He made his professional debut on June 18, 2007 and was expected to make his major league debut in 2009. Despite being injured for most of the 2009 season, Doolittle was ranked tenth in Oakland's farm system according to Baseball America.[5] Doolittle missed the entire 2010 season while rehabbing from 2 knee surgeries. In the 2011 offseason, he was placed on Oakland's 40-man roster to be protected from the Rule 5 draft. After missing more than two years, Doolittle converted back to pitching,[6] making his professional pitching debut in the instructional league in Arizona in 2011. Major-league career [ edit ] Oakland Athletics [ edit ] After just 26 professional innings, 25 of those at three minor league stops in 2012, Doolittle was called up to the majors on June 5, 2012 against the Texas Rangers pitching one and a third inning while striking out three with all fastballs and none going below 94 mph. He quickly became a key bullpen piece as the top lefty specialist earning his first career save on July 21 against the New York Yankees. He served as a set-up man for A's closer Grant Balfour the rest of the way as Oakland went on to win the AL West on the final day of the season. Doolittle signed a five-year, $10.5 million[7] extension with the Athletics on April 18, 2014.[8] Doolittle and righty Luke Gregerson entered the regular season as late-inning setup pitchers for new closer Jim Johnson. However, after an abysmal April, Johnson was removed from the exclusive closing role. Doolittle, Gregerson and Johnson spent the next 3 weeks pitching under closer by committee. Doolittle was ultimately named A's closer on May 20. Doolittle was one of six A's players named to the 2014 American League All-Star Team; he faced three batters late in the game - striking out two. Doolittle began the 2015 season on the disabled list due to a shoulder injury.[9] Sean Doolittle Gnome Day was April 30, 2016. The first 15,000 fans received a Doolittle Gnome which plays a brief Metallica sound, Doolittle's entry music. [10] While on rehab assignment with the Triple-A Nashville Sounds, Doolittle pitched the seventh inning of a combined no-hitter against the Omaha Storm Chasers on June 7, 2017. Starter Chris Smith pitched the first six innings and was then followed by Doolittle, Tucker Healy, and Simón Castro who each pitched one inning.[11] Washington Nationals [ edit ] On July 16, 2017, Doolittle was traded to the Washington Nationals, along with Ryan Madson, for Blake Treinen, Sheldon Neuse, and Jesus Luzardo.[12] On July 18, Doolittle recorded his first save for the Nationals in a 4-3 win over the Los Angeles Angels. In 30 games for the Nationals, he was 21/22 in save opportunities. For the 2018 season, he was named closer to begin the season and up until July 11, he was 22/23 in save opportunities before falling to the disabled list with a left toe inflammation.[13] He was activated off the disabled list on September 7.[14] In 2018 he was 3-3 with 25 saves and a 1.60 ERA.[15] He threw a four-seam fastball 88.8% of the time, tops in MLB.[16] Personal life [ edit ] Doolittle is active off the field with a number of charities, and was recognized for his work in 2016 by being nominated for the Roberto Clemente Award.[17] Doolittle supports Operation Finally Home, a nonprofit dedicated to providing housing for U.S. military veterans and their families,[18] and Swords to Ploughshares, a Bay Area organization devoted to helping veterans with housing and employment.[19] In June 2015, when the Oakland Athletics Pride Night received backlash from some fans for the team's support of LGBT rights, Doolittle and then-girlfriend Eireann Dolan bought hundreds of game tickets, which they donated to local LGBT groups, and raised an additional $40,000 in donations.[18] Doolittle and Dolan married on October 2, 2017, eloping the day after the Washington Nationals' last game of the regular season.[20] Doolittle's father is a Air Force veteran, and his seventh cousin is pilot Jimmy Doolittle, famous for the Doolittle Raid of Japan during World War II.[21] In November 2015, Doolittle and Dolan hosted a Thanksgiving dinner in Chicago for 17 Syrian refugee families.[22] In October 2016, he was one of several professional athletes to denounce Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump's comments about non-consensual groping of women as not being "locker room talk".[23] Doolittle identifies as independent politically.[19] Of his charity work, Doolittle told the New York Times: "When I was a kid, I remember my parents would say, 'Baseball is what you do, but that's not who you are' — like that might be my job, but that's not the end-all, be-all. I feel like I might even be able to use it to help other people or open some doors or explore more opportunities."[18] Sean's brother, Ryan Doolittle, was also a part of the Athletics' farm system at the same time as he.[24] Awards [ edit ] 2008 California League Mid-Season All-Star 2008 Arizona Fall League Rising Stars 2008 Arizona Fall League All-Prospect Team[25]Accepting the very existence of trans* people is an act that threatens conservative Christians' image of God. Prayer hands via Shutterstock At its annual meeting this past June, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC)—one of the largest Christian denominations in the world—passed a landmark resolution on the issue of transgender rights, making its stance on trans* people an official part of the doctrine. The resolution says, in part, that SBC’s leaders “condemn acts of abuse or bullying committed against [transgender individuals].” But they also resolve that no efforts should be made to “alter one’s bodily identity (e.g. cross-sex hormone therapy, gender reassignment surgery) to bring it in line with one’s perceived gender identity,” and that they “continue to oppose steadfastly all efforts by any court or state legislature to validate transgender identity as morally praiseworthy.” In other words, even as the SBC ostensibly condemns physical aggression against trans* individuals, it has resolved to support state and institutional violence against the same people. Visibility for trans* individuals has notably increased over the last decade, with the last two years in particular ushering in a skyrocketing amount of press and media aimed at trans* celebrities. Several prominent artists—musician Laura Jane Grace and director Lana Wachowski, for instance—came out as transgender women; Emmy-nominated actress and trans woman Laverne Cox appeared on the cover of Time magazine this June. And as the nation begins to look at LGBT rights with a wider lens, many prominent members of America’s conservative Christian churches have begun to shift their focus as well. Get the facts, direct to your inbox. Subscribe to our daily or weekly digest. SUBSCRIBE Several popular leaders of these denominations have brought transgender issues to the forefront of their rhetoric and teachings. Unfortunately, this shift in focus comes largely without corresponding education, resulting in skewed, transphobic sermons. Most famously, the president of SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, Russell Moore, wrote in 2009 about the ethical quandary that “repentant” transgender individuals posed for a pastor. Moore came to the conclusion that pastors should encourage people to embrace a gender identity that matches their assigned sex at birth and that transgender identity is, first and foremost, a sin. In more recent years, Denny Burk, professor of biblical studies at Boyce College in Louisville, Kentucky, has apparently resolved to set himself up as SBC’s resident “expert” on transgender identity. Unfortunately, Burk’s writing mangles even the easiest explanations: He continuously uses “transgender” as a noun rather than an adjective, for example, and purposefully misgenders trans* individuals. The misgendering, in particular, seems to extend from a desire to “correct” others on their gender by reminding them of the one they were assigned at birth—a possible manifestation of many SBC leaders’ proposed method of “loving” trans* people. Overall, the religious right’s recent push against transgender identity has been led by white, straight, cisgender men—and it has developed political implications outside the church. Shortly following the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision in June, the heads of numerous religiously affiliated organizations wrote a letter to President Obama asking for similar exemptions to his recent executive order barring federal contractors from discriminating against the LGBT community in the workplace. In fact, this letter specifically objected to the idea of transgender inclusion. One of the most notable of these signatories was D. Michael Lindsay, president of the evangelical Gordon College in Wenham, Massachusetts. Lindsay’s move in signing the letter has led some alumni of the college to return their diplomas in protest, indicating that the anti-trans* sentiment is largely a generational gap. But Gordon is not the first Christian college to embroil itself in controversy regarding transgender students. George Fox University, a Quaker school in the liberal bastion of Portland, Oregon, also found itself in hot water with activists this summer when it refused a transgender student the opportunity to live with his male friends. The questions of religious exemptions and the liberty to practice religion as one sees fit are complex and complicated—far too much to go into here. One aspect of this quickly moving battle for both civil rights and understanding, however, is the theological ground for rejecting transgender identity. Simply put: Conservative Christians are standing on shifting sands. The Bible doesn’t speak directly to transgender identity. So leaders on the religious right get around this by conflating non-binary gender with sexual sin—namely, “sexual immorality,” a vague umbrella term covering everything from sex outside of marriage to homosexual acts. Gender, in the eyes of evangelicals, determines sexuality: If you are a man, it is your God-given role to marry and bed a woman. If you are a woman, you are to submit yourself to your husband. All other deviations from this norm are sin. Without fixed gender, one’s sexuality is therefore unstable. And fixed sexual and gendered roles are a necessity for the evangelical vision of family and church. This series of assumptions is at the root of the evangelical fear of both marriage equality and transgender acceptance. The cultural hegemony that conservative Christian culture enjoyed for barely a generation is eroding, and with it the power evangelicals had to adapt the world to their whims. The very existence of gender outside a binary puts fear in the hearts of evangelicals because their narrow theology is dependent upon them: male and female, good and evil, heaven and hell. But since the Bible doesn’t speak directly to the topic—the most we see is discussion of eunuchs—evangelicals must figure out a way to make transgender identity a sin of sexuality, forever muddying and confusing the issue. In an August 2014 article for 9 Marks journal, for instance, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary President R. Albert Mohler Jr. addresses the issue of transgender identity by addressing sexual sin, arguing that the physical body is vital “to our personhood,” and as embodied creatures of God, a fixed gender is therefore necessary for human reproduction and, in turn, playing out the creation drama in which God placed us. Mohler admits that the Bible does not speak to transgender identity; therefore he must connect it to the evangelical concept of family—that reproduction is part of God’s plan for everyone—in order to speak against it. And in Good, an eBook recently released by celebrity pastor John Piper’s Desiring God ministry, Burk continues his quest to undercut trans* identity, writing: We must tell the truth about what the Bible teaches about gender. Among other things, the Bible is clear that there is a normative connection between biological sex and gender identity. The ‘normative connection’ I am speaking of is not defined by the sociological observation that a certain percentage of the population experiences their own gender in a that conflicts with their biological sex. The sociological norm knows nothing of the Fall and confuses what is with what ought to be. The norm that we must insist on is the norm that is not normed by any other norm: Scripture. Amidst that word salad, what Burk is essentially saying is that while transgender identity may occur as a sociological and statistical reality, such “realities” don’t take into account the influence of sin and the fall of man into evil; therefore, sociological facts don’t represent the kingdom of God as what should be. In other words, Burk recognizes that transgender people exist as a matter of course, but he doesn’t care because the scripture—which he does not cite—allegedly says they shouldn’t. This is the theological basis for denying the rights of real people who survive in the real world: that they don’t match up with an eschatological conception of life without sin, and therefore should be rejected and discriminated against. Any person who is unrepentantly trans—who does not flagellate themselves before the altar of the binary and biologically determined gender—is therefore acting in open defiance to God’s good law about gender. And sinning so openly means discrimination is the only holy response. Such a belief is so dependent upon a number of evaporating cultural assumptions—straight marriage that will always produce children, gender and sexuality as fixed states, the idea that men are leaders and women are followers—that it’s fairly easy to see why representatives of various Christian organizations are panicked at the idea of affirming transgender identities. That affirmation, after all, would be a devastating blow for the house of cards upon which they’ve built their faith. Accepting the very existence of trans people is an act that threatens their image of God—because God, in conservative Christians’ eyes, only created (and called “good”) male and female in a compulsory heterosexual binary. And yet, this is precisely why trans* visibility and laws protecting trans* identities are so important. One shouldn’t have to engage in an in-depth theological debate simply to exist as the person they are. One shouldn’t have to make a theological case simply to justify why they should be allowed to hold a job or attend the college of their choosing. But this is the reality for many trans* Christians today—even if it is a house of cards, evangelicals are still fighting with all their might to keep it standing.The Departure of Cloud9 Challenger During the 2016 NACS Summer Split, we at Cloud9 had the privilege of supporting the return of first generation Cloud9 members Hai Hai Lam, An Balls Le, and Daerek LemonNation Hart to the North American Challenger scene. Paired with former NRG ad-carry Johnny Altec Ru, now starting Cloud9 jungler Juan Contractz Garcia, and former CLG sub Thomas Thinkcard Slotkin, the veteran-led roster ran through their competition, securing Cloud9 an LCS spot for the second time ever. Now, on the eve of the 2017 NALCS Spring Split, we bid farewell to Hai, LemonNation, Balls, Altec, and Thinkcard as they look to re-enter the NALCS. Please join us in bidding a heartfelt farewell to Hai, Balls, LemonNation, Altec, and Thinkcard! We wish them the best of luck and look forward to competing against them throughout 2017.Female Taxidermist Gets Even with Anti-Hunting Trolls Anti-hunters decided to attack a Lauren Hull, a taxidermist out of Oregon. They didn't know who they were up against! A little while back, Oregon taxidermist Lauren Hull of Lauren Hull's Skull Cleaning, found herself in the crosshairs of keyboard warrior anti-hunters. I know--insert appropriate eye roll here. Lauren's Facebook page received a barrage of 1-star reviews from people who are clearly anti-hunting non-customers. In fact, she received over one hundred 1-star reviews in about 24 hours. Instead of taking the safe, PC move and just laying low until the controversy blew over, she decided to fire back with possibly the best response ever. Before anyone condemns me for killing in vain, this is a Eurasian Collared Dove. In my state they are an invasive... Posted by Lauren Hull's Skull Cleaning on Friday, December 16, 2016 I celebrate Lauren's unique and powerful response. However, when responding to anti-hunting keyboard warriors, I believe it's best for the everyday hunter to use facts and reason. You won't change the anti-hunters' minds, but you can sway the opinion of the non-hunters viewing it from the sidelines. About the Author: Dominic Aiello is an avid hunter, angler, and wildlife policy expert. He is the President of the Oregon Outdoor Council, Cabela's Prostaff, and Outdoor Writer. Follow his adventures on Instagram @daiello91 or Twitter @HunterInformant. NEXT: HERE'S HOW TO SHOW OFF YOUR DEER PHOTOS TO THE ENTIRE WIDE OPEN SPACES COMMUNITY WATCHHeather Nauert, former news anchor on “Fox & Friends,” has been named spokesperson at the State Department. Nauert has been on “Fox & Friends” since 2012 and also co-anchored other programs and served as correspondent. The State Department noted that she has reported on the 9/11 terror attacks, the war in Iraq and the genocide in Darfur. “Heather’s media experience and long interest in international affairs will be invaluable as she conveys the Administration’s foreign policy priorities to the American people and the world,” the State Department said in its announcement. Before Fox News, Nauert was a network correspondent for ABC News, and was nominated for an Emmy for a piece on teenage girls in Iraq. President Trump was a regular guest on “Fox & Friends” before he ran for president, and, through his tweets and other statements, has frequently cited stories he has seen on the show. Nauert is not the first journalist to jump to the role of State Department spokesperson. During the Reagan administration, Bernard Kalb served in the post after working for a number of news organizations, including NBC News and CBS News.When bits don't stick: More portability bugs in Perl modules A. Sinan Unur December 17, 2014 First off, a heartfelt thank you to NY.pm and mongoDB for giving me the opportunity to talk a little about my adventures in compiling perl with Microsoft Visual Studio 2013 Community Edition. The process of putting together the talk lead me to discover another two more of those pesky bugs due to platform differences in handling files. These are more interesting than the directory separator character style issues that I have been ranting about, mostly because of how hard they were to see just by looking at the code. I will submit patches, obviously, but my hope with these blog posts is to re-emphasize that these platform-specific differences do exist, whether we like it or not, and if more people are aware, fewer bugs will make it into CPAN modules in the first place. Bug 1: Corrupt images with App::revealup I decided to put together the presentation using App::revealup. As I was reviewing my presentation, I noticed various screenshots would not display properly, or not at all. I noticed that PNG images were not displaying. It didn't matter what browser I was using. It also did not matter whether I was using Strawberry's perl, or the perl I had built. I could not figure out the problem, but I did realize JPGs were mostly displayed intact, if only with occasional corruption, and sometimes really visible artifacts. The screenshots below show a PNG that does not display, a JPG that does not display, and the same image saved with a different compression level seemingly displaying perfectly fine: There was one image, a screenshot of the Visual Studio's GUI IDE window, which, no matter what I tried, did not display properly. There was always some visible problem with it. I tried several compression levels, and decided to stick with the one that looked the least bad. I just could not figure out what was wrong, but I also wanted to finish the presentation. About an hour or so before the talk, however, something occurred to me. I decided to check what would happen if I used a Windows BMP. Compare the screenshots below, showing a JPG and a BMP, respectively: By now, knowing what I know about file and compression formats, I was pretty certain I knew what was going on. As one final test, I decided to temporarily serve the exact same presentation from one of my Linode VPSs. Absolutely no problems there. Mystery solved. However, I had to go give my talk, and I did not have a chance to locate source of the problem in the module. I'll come back to this at the end of the post. For now, see if you can tell what's going on. Bug 2: Failing tests with Complete::Util At the end of the talk, I decided to install a recently uploaded module from CPAN. After looking briefly at the list of recent uploads, I decided App::wordlist which looked innocent enough. Unfortunately, cpanm App::wordlist failed, due to a failing test in Complete::Util. The test script complete_program.t tests the routine Complete::Util::complete_program. A brief look at both the module and the test script reveal a lot of opportunities for making sure platform specific paths don't cause problems, but that is not where the bug lies. After all, passing Unix style paths to Windows APIs works with no problems. The test fails because of the last check in this line: push @res, $_ if $_ =~ $word_re &&!(-d "$dir/$_") && (-x _); The test script creates the following files: mkexe("$dir/dir1/prog1"); mkexe("$dir/dir1/prog2"); mkexe("$dir/dir2/prog3"); mkexe is defined above: sub mkexe { write_file($_[0], ""); chmod 0755, $_[0] } Here is what perldoc perlport has to say about that: chmod Only good for changing "owner" read-write access, "group", and "other" bits are meaningless. (Win32) Only good for changing "owner" and "other" read-write access. (RISC OS) Access permissions are mapped onto VOS access-control list changes. (VOS) The actual permissions set depend on the value of the CYGWIN in the SYSTEM environment settings. (Cygwin) Setting the exec bit on some locations (generally /sdcard) will return true but not actually set the bit. (Android) On Windows, if you want to create a zero-byte executable, you might want to give it the.bat {title="batch file"} extension. As far I can see, that won't cause any more portability problems than the module already might have, but at least, it won't cause a spurious test failure on Windows. Again, I will, of course submit a match in due course, but I also find it helpful to document the process of exploration. After all, I would like to have something to show for the effort of diving into someone else's code, trying to figure out what is failing and why etc. Back to App::revealup I am assuming by now you have already realized that the images being served by App::revealup were
) The List Rule 1, when it comes to list building, is this: You have to like what you fly. Simple. Yes, there might be some meta-busting lists out there, and yes, there might be different mathematical equations that can determine the most efficient ships you should take, and yes, there might be whatever the latest winner of Worlds flew (it definitely wasn’t Dengaroo was it, captainjacksbutt?) but ultimately none of that matters if you’re not loving what you’re flying. First, I love my Fenn Rau so much I wrote an article about how I spent a whole day painting him. He was definitely in the team. Second, I have always loved flying the Jumpmaster. With its crazy good dial and its ravishing beauty, it’s always been a blast to field. From a tactical perspective, too, both ships offer a lot of manoeuvrability and variety (and, of course, Manaroo is an excellent way to help Fenn hit his 5-shot attack and maybe even survive…). Atanni Mindlink has, as you will know, been very popular lately and it’s pretty easy to see why. I leave all that theory with other authors on this website but, needless to say, it was about time I got a bit of the action.Whacking Mindlink on Fenn and Manaroo put me at 57 points. Well, Fenn needs his Autothrusters and his Title, of course, so I was really at 60. Turns out you can fit quite a bit of ship in a list when you don’t take all that many upgrade cards. Boba Fett, for example, costs 39 points basic and, with Mindlink, would plug that 40-point hole in my list quite nicely. Thing was, I’ve flown the Firespray quite a lot already – it was Kath’s big booty that got me into collecting and playing Scum in the first place – so I looked elsewhere. I didn’t need to look too far. Having sat quietly in its box since its purchase, the Shadowcaster was starting to wonder whether it would ever see the light of Tatooine’s twin suns. Coming in at 38 points (with Mindlink), Asajj seemed like the natural choice. With a fairly tasty pilot ability (that might well help against other Mindlinkers and those who enjoy Pushing Limits) and featuring an exquisite dial, I was starting to wonder whether I might have a new favourite ship. Plus, I even had 2 points to spend on an upgrade! Cool! I built a list. Now, I’ll just Google it to see whether anyone else has had this idea… Oh. Okay, well I guess it’s hard to have an original idea these days. But, after 6 hours of frantic painting on Saturday (couldn’t even get it finished… note: the Shadowcaster is really, really big) we had a list that we were going to enjoy flying. Round 1: Waking Up Simran flew Chiraneau in his Deci with Vader, VI, Gunner and Engine Upgrade, alongside Whisper with Kallus, VI, Fire Control System and Advanced Cloaking Device. Having spent a somewhat inebriated evening with friends, I didn’t get nearly as much sleep as I would have liked. After traversing the A3 with bleary eyes and a pounding headache I arrived to sit, giant mug of coffee in hand, opposite my opponent in Round 1. Not altogether in the best frame of mind, I formed a sort of hazy game plan that revolved around not dying and blowing up my opponent’s ships. Seems good. I deployed, as I would for much of the day, with Manaroo dead centre, Asajj on the far left and Fenn on the far right. With his ships deployed opposite Fenn, I quickly decided that this was a joust I would not be taking. Fortunately, the bait was taken by the Imperials as they launched themselves forwards along the right hand table edge. Fenn unceremoniously ducked behind an asteroid and barrel rolled towards my board edge. Hoping to open the jaws into which my opponent would fly, Asajj sped forwards up the left edge and Manaroo trundled slowly into the centre of the table. Keeping most of my guns trained on the Decimator, with only Asajj getting too close for comfort now and again, I was able to bring it down in a few rounds. Vader helped, of course, as he force choked his way through a load of Imperial officers in order to deal some criticals to Fenn. My ace survived, fortunately, and lived to provide some much needed manoeuvrability as my squad chased Whisper around the table. Asajj took a good four turns to clear a Damaged Sensor Array and a Weapons Malfunction but, as she did so, was able to put the occasional stress token on Whisper with her auxiliary firing arc, which seriously hampered the Phantom’s effectiveness. Eventually, the Scum and the Villains would surround the hapless Imperial who, without a shot on that particular turn, could not trigger his cloaking device. 100-20 Round 2 – A Proper Razzing Zombie Squadron’s Phil flew (deep breath…): Poe with BB-8, Push the Limit, Sensor Cluster, Black One and Autothrusters; Jake Farrell with PtL, VI, A-Wing Test Pilot, Chardaan Refit and Autothrusters; and Jan Ors with an Autoblaster Turret, Adaptability and Vectored Thrusters. Having now had enough coffee to be declared legally awake, I had no excuses for any mistakes. Looking at all the little synergies in Phil’s list made my head hurt, though, so I just plonked my ships on the table in much the same manner as before and told myself not to worry too much. Basically, he was flying some very mobile and efficient ships. I chose to bide my time and let him make the first move. Phil started with a whole load of cool little manoeuvres on the far right of the board, dodging, dipping, ducking, diving and dodging into a line which he flew towards the centre of the playing field. Again, Manaroo trundled up the middle, handing out focus. Again, Asajj swung into the centre from the left flank. But, unlike last time, Fenn blitzed it towards my opponent’s board edge, potentially posing a threat to the HWK in the back corner. As my ships made neat little circles around the asteroid line across the diagonal of the board, Phil sent Jake after Asajj. Given that he was Pushing the Limit every turn, Latts was able to get to work here, saving 3 damage (at least one of which was critical) over the course of this game. This was a fight Jake would not win. At the same time, and having had enough of trundling, Manaroo launched forward to block Poe as he made his way through the asteroids. Without any tokens, the Hero of the Resistance was at the mercy of Fenn as he swung in from the right flank, feinting away from Jan’s Autoblaster (I like my evade dice, thank you very much). Landing a hefty blow, as 5 dice are wont to do, Poe was finished off by Manaroo’s turret as he K-turned behind her the following turn. With the world against her, there was little Jan could do as my ships advanced towards her corner. 100-20 Round 3 – Arc, Arc, Baby The excellently nicknamed “Hazard” Wall brought Miranda Doni with a TLT, Nora Wexley with Push the Limit, BB-8, Title and Nien Numb, and Thane Kyrell with R3-A2, Vectored Thrusters, Title and Chopper. Hazard had driven over from Swindon with a group of friends and, because of his week working night shifts, was perhaps the only man in the room more tired than I was. Despite some absolutely atrocious dice at critical moments, he kept his head up and stayed positive throughout this one. That’s what excellent opponents are made of. Thane and Nora deployed dead centre opposite Manaroo, with Miranda on their right being deployed opposite to Asajj (on my left). Fenn would once again be hoofing it up the right flank. This time, Asajj did not turn into the centre, but posed enough of a threat by flying straight to push Miranda towards the middle. Thane turned towards the Shadowcaster, while Nora headed in the opposite direction to take a look at what Fenn Rau was up to. Thanks to the difference in mobility between Fenn’s Starfighter and the Rebel Arc, I was able to bypass Nora almost entirely and, keeping her at Range 3 after a successful first pass (which landed some unfortunate crits for my opponent), Fenn zoomed across to deal with Thane’s stressbot. I knew I didn’t want R3-A2 around for long – those stress tokens are problematic at the best of times, even more so when you’re Mindlinked up. Having made Thane my priority, Fenn actually got quite badly caught out by Hazard’s use of Chopper to ignore the Arc’s stress tokens so he could take his free actions. This put the Rebel scum in range one of Fenn and allowed him to deliver a nasty couple of crits via his auxiliary arc. The ace survived, however, and remained tight enough to Miranda to avoid getting caught out by her TLT. After Asajj finished off Thane, and Manaroo delivered the final blow to Nora in the centre of the table, Fenn & Co. were able to close Miranda down having suffered minimal damage due to Hazard’s ability to roll a lot of blanks. Ultimately, Hazard was let down at times by some poor rolls but, even so, he had his work cut out for him here. I had brought a lot of hit points to the table and, as he divided his force, it was hard for him to land as many shots on my ships as I was landing on his. With consistent damage being put on the low agility Arcs while the Rebels ponderously repositioned, my opponent was left with limited options. 100-0 Round 4 – A Game of Chess Ollie flew Rey in the Millenium Falcon with Finn, Expert Handling, Kanan and its Title, alongside Corran Horn with Push the Limit, Fire Control System and R2-D2. Having now spent a lot longer on the top tables than I was comfortable with, I was glad that my long-anticipated loss would be at the hands of the 186th Squadron’s Ollie “Gentleman-and-a-Scholar” Pocknell. Another excellent opponent, he brought a tangible positivity to the table and was good enough to educate me on what when wrong for him and what went right for me in a post-match debrief. See, the thing was, I didn’t lose. Somehow. The starting positions were much the same as they had been against my first opponent of the day. His Big Ship Little Ship started in the far right corner, with my ships deploying as before. This time, however, Ollie charged straight down the flank at Fenn, leaving the Shadowcaster with quite some distance to cover before becoming relevant. With the realisation that Fenn would not be able to duck out of this fight, the bait had to turn in and launch himself into Range 1 of Rey for the best chance to do something useful. Well, it turns out that Rey and Finn work incredibly well together, particularly when, as Ollie did on multiple occasions early on, you convert your initial single blank evade dice into two evade results after Rey’s re-roll. Mildly frustrated at not having done all that much damage with his 5-dice 1-inch punch, and taken an almighty slap in the face in return, Fenn had to fly verrrrrry carefully for the rest of the game to keep his 1 hull point intact. Ollie certainly had the best of the first engagement, and the following few turns flew by as my brain went into overdrive to keep it from all falling apart. In brief, Rey had to disengage from the scrum, having been knocked down to 3 hull points after falling foul of an unexpected blocking move by Manaroo on top of having to deal with the stress dished out by Asajj. With the Falcon escaping into the bottom left of the table, my three ships focused on catching Corran in a position where R2-D2’s regen powers could not help him. Chasing Fenn (a decision Ollie regretted, he told me afterwards) the Scum caught Corran as he was forced to K-turn while approaching his table edge. Ultimately, Ollie said afterwards, he played too aggressively with Corran and regretted not targeting Manaroo earlier in the game. With Corran gone, all that was left was for my ships to turn and re-engage the Falcon as it crossed the centre of the table. It was, ultimately, Fenn that made up for his earlier failures and delivered the killing blow. Tactically speaking, this was one of the most enjoyable games of X-Wing I think I’ve ever played. Something just seemed to click. With a calm demeanour, a holistic view of the playing field and a readiness to make moves that would benefit me in the long term rather than the short, I felt like I was playing a game of chess. ‘That’s how it’s supposed to feel,’ Ollie pointed out. Oh. 100-0 Game 5 – The Final Countdown Zombie Squadron’s Tom Forstner, rarely seen without his trusty Decimator, brought Chiraneau with VI, Hotshot Co-Pilot, Engine Upgrade, Rebel Captive and Gunner, alongside Marek Steele in an X7 Defender with Juke and a Twin Ion Mk2 Engine. I’m going to precede this by saying that I had never managed to beat Tom – falling foul, on numerous occasions, of his Decimator/Whisper combo and his excellent tactical awareness. ‘You’ve beaten one Chiraneau already today,’ I told myself, ‘stop your bitching and get this final over with. No I don’t care how tired you are. Shut up.’ When I was done speaking to myself I put some ships on the table. The set up was almost identical to the previous game, with Tom placing both of his ships in the same corner Ollie had occupied. Again, the hope was that I could use my mobility to encircle enemy ships in the centre of the table if they committed aggressively. Fenn acted as bait once again, drawing Tom’s squad down the right hand side. Firmly in the sights of the Decimator’s Hotshot Co-Pilot and Gunner, Fenn fled into the centre of the table. The eventual realisation that my ace would have to stand his ground at some point was not particularly welcome. Chiraneau’s crew and pilot ability combined to land a big early hit on Fenn which left him limping a little. A five straight manoeuvre, with a boost for good measure, got the Scum pilot out of dodge, but not before he’d landed a significant blow on the Decimator. With Marek slightly out of position, and stressed thanks to Asajj, Manaroo was able to block Chiraneau for 3 turns in a row with her de-stressingly good green 1-turns, all the while staying alive by shifting Tom’s target locks onto Fenn, who was out of the fight at this point. I thought I was just giving Fenn extra focus every turn but, thanks to Tom knowing the rules better than me, I was actually making an ingenious play (thanks, Tom!). With Asajj now swinging in close behind the repeatedly blocked Decimator, Chiraneau’s life span became very limited. Latts got to work once again, staving off two crits in the ensuing scrum, before the Imperial ship was turned to space dust. All that was left for the Scum to do was to trap the remaining Defender. Asajj’s stress helped to limit Tom’s options and Fenn rocked up, once again at the last minute, to steal the glory with a kill shot. There were a few factors that worked in my favour in this game. Firstly, Rebel Captive didn’t present as much of a problem as I had anticipated, what with the vast quantity of green manoeuvres available to my ships. Secondly, the weight of red dice and hull points in my list meant it was tough for Tom to deal with my ships before I could chew through the Decimator. All in all, this was another excellent game with a host of difficult decisions having been made on either side of the table. I consider Tom to be the best player never to have won a tournament and, unfortunately, it will remain that way at least for a little longer. 100-34 So, I guess I won a thing. That’s nice. Maybe it was the list I took – its action efficiency, flexibility and resilience allowing me to deal with a variety of lists at a tournament where the meta was incredibly hard to define. Maybe it was my tiredness-induced Zen-like state of mind which, by alleviating any pressure on, or expectations of, my performance, allowed me to approach each game with a clear head. Maybe it was the fact that I didn’t lose a single ship all day. Or, maybe, I just got lucky. Until next time, Merry Christmas!Emmanuel Adebayor's 2009 move from Arsenal to Manchester City made him a very rich man. But his lucrative contract has made it difficult to find a new home after he fell out of favor with City boss Roberto Mancini. Adebayor's agent is in talks about a shock switch to Major League Soccer club New York Red Bulls. The London Evening Standard reports an MLS move has become an option, as few English clubs are willing to meet Adebayor's salary demands. "Emmanuel Adebayor will be offered the opportunity to link up again with Thierry Henry in New York if the Americans can agree terms with Manchester City," the report says. "The Major League Soccer side have been in contact with Adebayor's advisors and are believed to be willing to match his £175,000-a-week wage ($14.7 million per year) at the Premier League club." The Togolese striker spent this season on loan with Tottenham Hotspur. His 16 goals in 32 Premier League games made him a favorite with fans and teammates. Tottenham has expressed interest in making the loan switch a permanent one, but the money involved — both in terms of salary and a potential transfer fee — makes it difficult to pull off. It's hard to believe the Red Bulls would match what Manchester City pays the 29-year-old. Thierry Henry is the team's highest earner at $5.6 million (£3.6 million). Adebayor's current wages are almost three-times that amount. A move to N.Y. could happen if Adebayor is willing to terminate his City contract, and sign with the Red Bulls for a lower amount. It expires at the end of the 2012-13 season. At that point, he would be able to choose his next destination. A move to MLS, or anywhere else would be much more likely in a year's time. Have a question for Marcus Kwesi O'Mard? Send it to him via Twitter at @NESNsoccer, NESN Soccer's Facebook page or send it here. He will pick a few questions to answer every week for his mailbag.MIAMI - A Miami police officer is the subject of an internal investigation that includes allegations that she performed in pornographic movies while serving as a cop. Local 10 News obtained copies of some of the films featuring Officer Sabine Raymonvil, 30, an eight-year veteran of the Miami Police Department. Among those she performs sex acts with in the clips is Emerson Callum, a pornographer who is now serving a life sentence in federal prison after being convicted of drugging and raping women who auditioned for his company in 2012. Also convicted in that case was Callum's partner and cameraman, Lavont Flanders, a former Miami Beach police officer. Callum had been charged with similar crimes in 2007, but he was not prosecuted. Raymonvil refused to answer questions while on camera, but later telephoned the station and said that her work in porn films was done prior to her becoming a police officer. "Right now there is a lot going on with this whole situation," Raymonvil said. "It's currently under investigation by two police agencies. So I can't say very much. I'm willing to speak with you after the investigations are closed. I never made porn while I was a police officer." RELATED: Sentencing of ex-Miami cop with Batman fetish continued A source close to the investigation alleged that Raymonvil appeared in the porn films well into her tenure as a cop. Her social media postings show a woman who enjoys the club life, sporting photos of Raymonvil with Snoop Dogg, football player Daunte Culpepper, actor Idris Elba, actor Laz Alonso, Hollywood film director John Singleton and Miami Commissioner Kion Hardemon, among others. There are no direct rules forbidding officers from engaging in pornography, but it could fall under other common police policies such as conduct unbecoming. In 2009, a Hollywood police officer named Mike Verdugo was fired after it was discovered he'd appeared in a single gay porn film three years prior to his becoming a cop. The reason for that firing was that he failed to disclose he made the film in his application to become an officer. The Miami Police Department, citing an open investigation, refused to comment. Follow Bob Norman on Twitter @NormanOn10 Follow Local 10 News on Twitter @WPLGLocal10 Copyright 2015 by Local10.com. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.This is my daily flyer. Custom sub-50g freestyle micro, designed to replicate a 5" top mounted battery layout and flight characteristics. Best flown with a 350-400mah 2S Battery due to space limitations. Anything bigger has to be underslung and retuned. Frame designed for 1103 - 1106 motors (8.5-9mm mounting pattern). Requires 4x 15mm nylon standoffs & 8x 6mm m3 nylon bolts. Supports up to 3" props (with alternative 3D Printed pod design). 2.5" (65mm) prop size max with carbon canopy. Femto FC mounted with foam tape, but the frame supports 16-20mm FC standoffs as well as standard 30.5mm for the lols. Motors are soft mounted with bicycle inner tube rubber. Same material used for the battery slip pad. RX and VTX antennas are custom cut from 1.13mm IPEX coax cable, routed through the plastic straw from behind the LED panel to route them away from the carbon cage. Range could be greatly improved with an XM+ receiver. Then 2.4 will outrange the video on a 25mW whip VTX, but there's no space for a CP. Flight footage (youtube) Betaflight PIDs for acro tune 350mah 67g AUW. Every gram affects the tune at this scale. R 37 : 58 : 20 P 40 : 55 : 20 Y 120 : 60 0.82 Rate - 0.3 ExpoLouis van Gaal has been told he is free to break the world transfer record to bring the right player to Manchester United. Last year Real Madrid set the record by signing Gareth Bale from Tottenham Hotspur for £86m, eclipsing the £80m they had paid United four years earlier for Cristiano Ronaldo. Van Gaal, who will take charge of United for the first time in a friendly against LA Galaxy that kicks off in the early hours of tomorrow morning UK time, has been told his transfer activity will not be constrained by money. “It’s difficult to deal in hypotheticals based on lots of different things,” Ed Woodward said. “The reality is that we’re not afraid of spending significant amounts of money in the transfer market.” The club’s executive vice-chairman added: “Whether it’s a record or not doesn’t really resonate with us. What resonates is an elite player that the manager wants who is going to be a star for Manchester United.” United have already paid £27m for Southampton’s Luke Shaw and £28.5m for Athletic Bilbao’s Ander Herrera. The £37.5m paid to Chelsea for Juan Mata in January is a United club record but Woodward says United will not be put off spending what it takes to secure the players of Van Gaal’s choice. “Of course it’s in our capabilities,” he said. “You guys think about the money in a way that I don’t. I get pointed in the direction of a target that the manager wants and there is an assessment of what that might cost and I’ll negotiate hard to do the best I can on the trade. “I stand by what I said – there is no budget. We are in a very strong financial position. We can make big signings. That doesn’t mean we go and throw money around. Louis is the manager. We have a lot of scouting output through the last 12 months, flagging up various things to us. Louis is the one that makes the ultimate decision around who he wants in the squad. I’m not going to force feed him with a player that he hasn’t selected.” Although Van Gaal wants to assess the squad Woodward says no time is being lost with regard to signings. “We’re still looking at options. We’re not sitting on our hands waiting for Louis. He is very good at communicating clearly what he wants.” With Patrice Evra, Rio Ferdinand and Nemanja Vidic having left, United need at least one central defender, potentially another left-back, and are still chasing another central midfielder despite Herrera’s arrival. Although Germany’s World Cup winning central defender Mats Hummels is wanted by Van Gaal, Dortmund are unlikely to agree to sell as the club have already lost Robert Lewandowski to Bayern Munich. Yet with Ilkay Gundogan having two years left on his contract at Dortmund and his fellow central midfielder Marco Reus, whose terms end in 2017, having a buyout clause activated next summer, United recognise the situation at the German club is fluid. While Fiorentina’s Juan Cuadrado is not thought to be high on Van Gaal’s list, the Ajax midfielder Daley Blind, is on the manager’s radar, along with countryman Stefan de Vrij, the Feyenoord defender, and Arsenal’s Thomas Vermaelen, though it is not thought any deal for him would currently involve a United player in part-exchange with Arsenal. The United manager is an admirer of Roma’s Kevin Strootman, though the midfielder is recovering from a knee injury so any transfer may not occur until January. While United understand Real Madrid’s Ángel di María is for sale he is not currently being considered. Woodward said the record £750m kit deal signed with Adidas was evidence that despite United not being in Europe next season, they are the world’s biggest club. “What the deal shows and what we’re seeing with everything we’re doing from a commercial perspective, talking to agents, talking from a player’s perspective about wanting to come to us, we are the biggest club in the world, there’s no question about that,” he said. Despite the departures of Ferdinand and Vidic having left Jonny Evans, Phil Jones and Chris Smalling as the sole recognised central defenders Van Gaal has been informed by United’s medical department the trio can expect to enjoy a campaign in which all will be the freest of injury they have been in their careers. Woodward admits that his first 12 months in charge of United following David Gill’s resignation as the chief executive have been trying. Yet he believes Van Gaal has restored the aura to the 20-times champions thatwas lost during the season under David Moyes. “It was a challenging year. In an ideal situation I would have worked with [Sir] Alex [Ferguson] for a year. I feel a lot more positivity in terms of this coming season. Part of that is simply because of what Louis did at the World Cup.” After Van Gaal twice mentioned the club’s commercial links at his unveiling, Woodward denied these were an issue for the manager. “We are a different sized club. You have not experienced what being a Manchester United manager is until you have been Manchester United manager.”Tech – Entity Component Templates: Entity Component Templates (or ECT for short) is a system we’re building to allow our designers to build templates for entities out of components. A component could be something simple like “Inventory”, “Skills”, or “Spawn Point”, or it could be something more complex like “NPCSpawner”. This system will allow someone like Ben to create things like a plot that spawns guards when captured, or a spawn point that has guards and a murderous kill field to reduce spawn camping. We’ll begin testing this work in the next scenario. WIP – Design – Dragonfang: Speaking of which, Ben was tasked with creating a rough design of the next scenario map. He knocked it out of the park! This scenario will re-incorporate the first Place of Power model, which was included in our Beta 1 list. You can get more info from today’s livestream HERE. Tech – Scenario Automation: Caleb added more functionality to the scenarios, now allowing players to queue up to a certain threshold that triggers the start of a scenario. Players are added in, and NPCs can be automatically added to balance teams. If new players join, they replace existing NPCs. WIP – Tech – NPCs: Colin is adding more functionality to NPCs so they will spawn, move to an area, and defend it, returning if pulled too far from their defense point. These changes will be the beginning of simple mechanics for guards, and may get incorporated into the next scenario. WIP – Tech – New Skill Buttons: AJ has been making solid progress on the updated skill buttons. We showed a work-in-progress example from JB, waaaay back when, which you can still see HERE. These new buttons provide better visual feedback on what’s happening, and are part of our improvements to combat readability. Currently, we’ll only be showing cooldown, error, queued, and hit. After a new backend is built for these buttons, we’ll also be able to display things like preparation, disruption, casting, and recovery. WIP – World Space UI: This week, Dave began to work on implementing UI elements into world space. This is primarily going to be used for things like damage numbers at first, as well as status effects like “rooted” or “slowed.” This not only improves combat readability in the near-term, but helps us and our Backers debug issues better. WIP – Tech – Status Effect Icons: We tested the first iteration of status effect icons from Rob and AJ this week. The goal is obviously better communication to the player of what is happening during combat. This way you’ll know why you’re moving slowly, bleeding from your legs, or have purple stuff flying about your head! Tech – Embedded WebAPI Server: Colin’s work has allowed devs to spin up local servers much faster. How fast, you ask? Five times faster than before! WIP – Tech – Animation Viewer in the Editor: Brad created a first-pass animation viewer in the editor. As he said this morning, “This is as much for me as for the animators!” This allows us to work offline, with more available info to debug animations. This first iteration also has a timeline scrubber, which really helps us see how animations behave in-game, as opposed to the programs they are authored in. WIP – Design – Updated Abilities: Ben has been heads-down this week, continuing the lengthy task of updating the abilities. This update addresses some existing issues, adds new functionality like shout animations and VFX, and improves quality-of-life working with the many XML files that make everything work. WIP – VFX – Combat: Continuing from last week’s broad focus, Mike continues to debug issues and hook up new VFX, primarily for readability and testing, before we get into class-specific variations. This week focused on blood splatters for different types of melee hits, more shout VFX and tweaks to make sure healer generic effects are working. WIP – Art – Place of Power: Dionne started the week off with fresh eyes on the Place of Power map, adding a bit more cleanup, then moving on to the assets needed for the surrounding terrain. This will include a mix of new and old assets, trying out a sort of “wasteland” look, using the spiky rock models predominant in the PoP model. Art – Female NPC Generic Clothing: Jon finished up the last of the three outfits materials this week. The next step is handing these off to Scott to be skinned and weighted for animation, and imported into the database. Later, Ben will create item defs for them so we can use them in-game! WIP – Art – Books: Jon began work sculpting out different Realm variations of books, the magic tomes a caster might use as a type of focus. You can catch his stream from yesterday, HERE. These, like our other weapons, are being designed to include interchangeable pieces that can be used in crafting. WIP – Casting and Focus 1 handed animations: Scott completed some additional work on these spellcasting animations this week. You can catch his livestream HERE. We’ll make use of these animations when we add focus items into player inventory and hook up the corresponding item functionality. WIP – Art – Deflect Animation Tuning: Earlier this week, Sandra finished up the polish on the test polearm shout. She has since moved to exploratory tuning for the timings of deflects, starting with the bow animations. The goal here is making sure deflects are visually different enough from attacks and flinches, that they can be read clearly, and hit their mark quickly. Results of this will inform tweaks to other deflect animations, as part of our goal to improve combat readability. WIP – Art – Patcher Update: Working from review feedback this week, James and Michelle are working on updates to the patcher, which will be handed of to JB and AJ. You can catch the concepts we showed last week HERE and HERE. WIP – Art – Armor Variations: This week, Michelle also began to work on designs for variation to our existing armor geometry. Jon will will sculpt on top of the high poly models and make new materials for them. A few simple examples of this would be adding embossing designs, material, or color variations.At it’s best, Spring Awakening is a musical that guy like me can not only appreciate, but enjoy thoroughly. I’m not the type of person who will go out of his way to see a theatrical production, but impressive songs, stories and performances can turn my ordinarily black heart into something which slightly resembles a human heart. In 2009 Nicci brought me to Costa Mesa to see the national tour of Spring Awakening and I was very impressed [review]. Nicci and I decided that we’d make last night our official Valentine’s Day celebration, so we had a delicious dinner at Delphine and then saw Spring Awakening at the Pantages. In short, it was a vastly different performance from the 2009 tour and, sadly, an underwhelming one. The story hasn’t changed, it is still set in late-nineteenth century Germany, and concerns teenagers who are discovering the inner and outer tumult of sexuality. The music hasn’t changed, much. In this production, certain songs have added slight variations. “The Song Of Purple Summer” benefited greatly from a couple extra harmonies. One song — I think it was “Whispering” but I’m not certain — is supposed to be a solo but this production included a second character singing which didn’t work. What has changed, of course, is the direction and the acting. And this touring cast and crew, though they put forth an amazing amount of effort, is where the show faltered. It was obvious from the first musical number (“Mama Who Bore Me”) that the lead female character Wendla (Elizabeth Judd) was a bit too weak for the role. Her voice breathy and nasal, she did not seem to take command of any of her songs, and in concert with other performers the color of her voice was dampened by those singing with her. She was not the only weak link. In fact, it would be easier to list the cast member’s voices I enjoyed than those I did not. Georg (Jim Hogan), Thea (Emily Mest), and Moritz (Coby Getzug) stood out above the rest of the cast. Otto (George E. Salazar) sounded way too poppy for his role, Martha (Aliya Bowles) couldn’t quite capture the quiet rage of her physically abused character, and Ilse (Courtney Markowitz) — who I’d read great things about — did not blow me away either. It’s a shame, because she’s featured in two of the best songs in the show (“The Dark I Know Well” and “Don’t Do Sadness/Blue Wind”). Furthermore, on at least three numbers (“Mama Who Bore Me,” “All That’s Known” and “Those You’ve Known”) the cast members were one beat ahead of the band. In Act II especially this was a problem, as the band sped up in an attempt to catch Melchior (Chistopher Wood) and he in turn sped up even more. It’s hard to hold the cast responsible for a disappointing show, as their direction is the weakest aspect of this touring company. Someone (I imagine director Lucy Skilbeck) made damn sure every syllable was enunciated, and the result was just awful. I understand stylistically what the director was going for, but there’s a way to do it without billboarding it, and these people — save for melchior most of the time — were billboarding.�I’ve yet to hear such annoyingly-precise delivery in a rock musical. Every “T” was so sharp they began to feel like pin pricks. Spring Awakening isn’t really the ideal setting for Shakespearian delivery. It’s okay if the words to these songs flow, run together, or are treated more like typical rock songs than ones specifically tailored for a theatrical performance. Let’s be honest, the songs in Spring Awakening don’t really help to develop the characters or advance the story anyway. Let the kids sing. Not everything has to be so exact. �It was unnatural, it was distracting, and it really took away from the performance. Lastly, the sound of the band and the singers was off at times. In one song Melchior’s microphone was potted down too long and we missed part of what he was singing. The cello and viola were way too low for my liking. When featured more prominently, they add great depth to the music. Lest I
to Jared Kushner, as well as several Trump cabinet members. But fewer people know about Schwarzman the fracking profiteer, with billions invested in the fossil fuel industry that is fueling the climate crisis. With this in mind, this installment of Eyes on the Ties “Frackateer of the Month” series shines a light on Schwarzman’s investments and influence within the oil and gas sector. Finance, Fossil Fuels, and Trump The oil and gas and high finance industries are deeply intertwined and dependent upon one another. Debt fuels the build-out of capital-intensive drilling projects and pipelines worldwide, while fossil fuels power global commerce, which Wall Street financiers make their living from betting on. Through Blackstone Group, Schwarzman has bet billions of dollars on the oil and gas industry, buying interests in drilling fields, fracking companies, major pipeline projects, power plants and export facilities. Earlier this month the Wall Street Journal reported that Blackstone’s investment in the Energy Transfer Partners’ controversial Rover Pipeline brought its oil and gas investments up to $7 billion. The next week, Bloomberg reported that Blackstone had acquired Harvest Fund Advisors, an oil and gas investment firm with $10 billion in assets, for an undisclosed sum. These wagers have occurred amid rhetoric from President Donald Trump promising to “unleash” the energy industry in the United States. As mentioned above, Schwarzman occupied a key Trump advisory role, leading a council of CEOs advising the president on economic issues until blowback from Trump’s sympathetic comments about white supremacists led Trump to dissolve the council. Blackstone has already benefited from Trump’s energy policy. Trump reversed the Obama administration block of the Dakota Access Pipeline — which Blackstone has invested in — and has filled vacancies on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission with appointees who are all but certain to continue the agency’s practice of rubber-stamping pipeline projects. If Trump continues to make good on his pledge to expand fracking and pipeline infrastructure, Blackstone’s oil and gas bets could prove incredibly lucrative for Schwarzman, whose $425 million 2016 pay package mainly came in the form of stock dividends. Blackstone’s Energy Bets Blackstone’s billions of dollars worth of oil and gas investments span nearly every industry sector and include several extremely controversial pipelines being constructed by Energy Transfer Partners. It was widely reported when Blackstone recently bought a 32.4 percent stake in ETP’s Rover Pipeline from West Virginia and Pennsylvania through Ohio to Michigan and Canada. Rover has been beset by problems throughout its construction: the pipeline has reportedly racked up more environmental violations than any other major pipeline in the past two years, leading to several government-ordered construction stoppages. Just before Blackstone bought into Rover, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission stopped drilling on certain segments of the pipeline after ETP spilled 2 million gallons of drilling fluid, polluting wetlands in Ohio. Blackstone also has a considerable stake in the Dakota Access Pipeline through its acquisition of Harvest Fund Advisors, a financial firm focused on investing in oil and gas infrastructure. According to regulatory filings, Harvest Fund owns 16.6 percent of outstanding shares of Energy Transfer Partners, which is a 38.25 percent owner of Dakota Access and 3.9 percent of outstanding shares of Energy Transfer Equity, ETP’s parent organization. Harvest Fund Advisors also owns 4.4 percent of outstanding shares of MPLX LP, a subsidiary of Marathon Petroleum that is a partial Dakota Access owner through a joint venture with Enbridge. Dakota Access — which was halted by former President Barack Obama after months of public outcry over the threat the pipeline posed to the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, only to be resumed once Donald Trump took office — went into service in June 2017. Blackstone’s stake in ETP through Harvest Fund also means that it owns a stake in the controversial Bayou Bridge Pipeline planned along the southern coast of Louisiana. Bayou Bridge will bring crude oil from a hub Nederland, Texas (which is connected to Dakota Access by the Energy Transfer Crude Oil Pipeline) to refineries in St. James parish, Louisiana. The pipeline, which is co-owned by ETP and Phillips 66, has inspired protests similar to those against Dakota Access as well as a lawsuit on behalf of the communities that will bear the brunt of the pipeline’s negative impacts. These pipeline interests, and other Blackstone oil and gas investments can be seen in the map embedded below: Beyond pipelines, Blackstone is invested in the fracking operations that extract oil and gas from the ground. The firm entered into a joint partnership with Sanchez Resources to buy a $2.3 billion interest in drilling fields in the Eagle Ford Shale in Texas. In 2016, Blackstone invested $250 million in the Appalachian driller Huntley & Huntley. Earlier this spring, Vine Resources, a company formed by Blackstone to drill acreage it had purchased from Royal Dutch Shell, filed paperwork to make an initial public offering. In the downstream sector, Blackstone is a major backer of Cheniere Energy’s Sabine Pass liquefied natural gas (LNG) export facility, in which it invested $2 billion in 2012 and which was approved to start exporting gas by the Obama administration. The firm also bought three natural gas power plants from American Electric Power for $2.17 billion in late 2016, in a deal that also included a coal plant. Schwarzman’s 'Trump Edge' Could Bring a Big Payday Though he did not endorse Trump or donate to his campaign, Stephen Schwarzman quickly insinuated himself into the president’s circle of advisors. In December 2016, less than a month after the election and more than a month before Trump’s inauguration, Blackstone issued a press release announcing that Schwarzman had agreed to chair the “President’s Strategic and Policy Forum,” a council of business elites advising Trump on “his plan to bring back jobs and Make America Great Again.” According to the New York Times, the forum was Schwarzman’s conception, and Schwarzman told Bloomberg that he personally chose all of its members for Trump to listen and learn from. Those members included former GE CEO Jack Welch, a vociferous climate change denier; Adebayo Ogunlesi, director of African offshore drilling company Kosmos energy and chairman and managing partner of Global Infrastructure Partners, a private equity fund set up by Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs with many oil and gas investments; and Daniel Yergin, who operates an oil and gas industry consulting firm. The council’s assignment — “cutting the government red tape that is holding back our businesses” — was a good fit for Schwarzman’s ethos; he once said that Obama administration taxes on private equity firms were “like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.” The Strategic and Policy Forum only met a handful of times before it disbanded in August 2017 amid public furor over remarks Trump made sympathizing with the organizers of a violent white supremacist rally that left a counter-protester dead. While the council was meeting, however, Schwarzman appears to have enjoyed wide access to and influence over the president. In April, Politico reported that Trump and Schwarzman talked “several times a week” and the New York Times reported after the council disbanded that “Schwarzman, of all council members, maintained the most consistent contact with the president.” Trump’s policies have been a major boon for many of Blackstone’s businesses. In February, Trump canceled implementation of the fiduciary rule, which would have required firms like Blackstone to act in the best financial interest of their clients. That day, Trump boasted to Schwarzman that “we’re getting rid of your regulations.” During Trump’s May visit to Saudi Arabia, the Saudi sovereign wealth fund announced a joint plan with Blackstone to invest $40 billion in infrastructure projects, primarily in the United States. Trump’s efforts to “unleash” the oil and gas industry in the United States have been especially beneficial for Blackstone, which, as described above, has dramatically ramped up its oil and gas investments. Four days after taking office, Trump reversed former-President Obama’s December 4, 2016 decision to stop construction of Energy Transfer’s Dakota Access Pipeline, issuing a memorandum ordering the Army Corps of Engineers to “review and approve in an expedited manner” all “requests for approval to construct and operate the DAPL.” Though a judge ruled in June 2017 that Army Corps of Engineers February 2017 approval for the pipeline “failed to adequately consider the impacts of an oil spill on Standing Rock’s fishing and hunting rights and on environmental justice,” Dakota Access remains in operation, generating revenue for Blackstone and its other owners. Trump has also restored the quorum on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), appointing two industry-friendly commissioners — former Mitch McConnell staffer Neil Chatterjee and former Pennsylvania Public Utility Commissioner Robert Powelson — to the agency in charge of approving pipeline projects. Under the chairmanship of Chatterjee, who led the Republican campaign to approve TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline, and with Powelson, who sat on a business council pushing for an expansion of oil and gas infrastructure in Philadelphia, FERC appears primed to resume its rate of approving nearly 100 percent of pipeline applications that come before it. Other Trump actions that will benefit Blackstone’s oil and gas investments include permitting oil drilling in the Arctic Circle, ramping up the sale of oil and gas drilling leases on public lands, and pulling out of the Paris climate accord. Though Trump’s proposed Muslim ban and his rejection of international action on climate change led several business leaders to quit the Schwarzman-helmed council, the Blackstone CEO stood by the president until the council dissolved in the wake of Trump’s response to the white supremacist violence in Charlottesville. Schwarzman later issued a statement condemning “bigotry, hatred and extremism,” though he supported the president’s comments blaming “many sides” for the violence at the right-wing rally the day afterwards. “I thought he was talking about the violence on both sides,” Schwarzman told Bloomberg at a party in the Hamptons. “I don’t think it was a far-reaching statement.” While it remains to be seen if Schwarzman’s influence over Trump will outlast the disbandment of the Strategic and Policy Council, there has been no indication that Trump plans to abandon his agenda of deregulation and drilling bonanza. If this remains the case, then Schwarzman’s massive oil and gas bets are sure to bring him some big returns. Main image: Stephen Schwarzman at a 2016 World Economic Forum event hosted by The Financial Times and CNBC. Credit: The Financial Times, CC BY 2.0A small southern American town makes the Second Amendment right of US citizens to bear arms an obligatory duty. Welcome to Nelson, Georgia, a rural town about 50 miles (80 km) north of Atlanta that passed on Monday the ‘Family Protection Ordinance’, which requires the head of each household to own a gun and ammunition. “We’re making a statement,” City Council member Jackie Jarrett told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “If you plan on doing us harm, we’ll be armed.” Jarrett emphasized that the law grants liberal loopholes for those who do not wish to follow the new legal code. In addition to people who are mentally or physically handicapped, an exception to the law is given to “paupers or [those] who conscientiously oppose maintaining firearms as a result of beliefs or religious doctrine,” he noted. Jarrett said he supported the legislation because he is concerned about the future of his community. “Crime is moving on up the road,” he warned. “Subdivisions are opening up, and we don’t know who those people are.” Admitting that the legislation is largely symbolic, Councilman Duane Cronic, who introduced the measure last month, said the law will serve as an effective deterrent to crime, comparing it to homes that warn of a security system on the premise, even when there may be none. “This is like a big security sign for our city,” Cronic said. Nelson City Council says the measure - which closely mirrors one adopted in the 1980s in Kennesaw, Georgia, that supporters say has tamped down crime rates - has been warmly endorsed by this community of 1,300 people. The unanimous vote places Nelson front and center in a heated debate that has polarized the nation between gun rights advocates and those who believe it is time to lock up the country’s estimated 250 million privately-owned firearms. US President Barack Obama, in the wake of the Sandy Hook school shooting on December 14 that left 26 people dead, the majority of them young children, has pledged to fight for gun control legislation, including universal background checks on gun purchases, an assault weapons ban, and limiting magazine capacity. The influential National Rifle Association (NRA), however, is passionately opposed to government background checks like the one put forward by New York Senator Chuck Schumer, arguing that a national registry on gun owners would set the stage for gun confiscation. In fact, the NRA says more guns – not fewer – will make American communities safer. The powerful gun lobby - which has seen its membership numbers soar at the same time as cases of tragic shootings have increased - has called on US Congress to provide funds for the hiring of armed police officers in every US school to protect students. Justin Dupuy, president of the Armed Citizen Project, said people have a right to protect themselves with guns because law enforcement agencies are usually arrive on the scene only after a crime has been committed. “You have a much better chance of defending yourself with a firearm than without one,” Dupuy, told RT. “Law enforcement officials can only do their jobs to a certain extent…In a home-invasion situation, they’re only there to roll out the crime scene tape.” If guns are taken from people, the only ones going to relinquish them are the ones who are following the rules in the first place, he added. Not every US community, however, believes that more guns in the hands of more people will solve America's gun violence issue. In the state of Connecticut, for example, where the Sandy Hook tragedy occurred in the town of Newtown, a series of new gun regulations have just been passed. Following weeks of heated debate, the state will enact a new registry for high-capacity magazines, as well as background checks for gun purchases. According to state Senator Donald Williams, Jr., Connecticut now has the “strongest and most comprehensive bill in the US” on gun control. Meanwhile, the citizens of Nelson, Georgia, like many other communities across the country, seem determined to protect the message of the Second Amendment at any cost, guaranteeing many more passionate debates on the issue in the future.Changing its longstanding neutrality on the issue of circumcision, the American Academy of Pediatrics suggested recently that the health benefits of the procedure outweigh its risks. In order to understand the reasoning behind the shift, along with its likely implications, The Jewish Week spoke to Dr. Andrew Freedman, a urologist at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. Freedman was one of the members of the task force that issued the new, qualified endorsement of circumcision. Q: Why did the AAP decide to alter its stance toward circumcision? A: We felt, based on a series of recent studies that showed that circumcised men were somewhat less likely to contract HIV, penile cancer and other diseases, that it was time to re-examine our position on the procedure. We also knew that there are modest risks in having the procedure done. On balance, we found that it made sense to recommend that insurance companies begin to cover circumcisions. If circumcision can help to prevent these diseases, then why not simply recommend that every male child be circumcised? Get Jewish Week's Newsletter by email and never miss our top stories Free Sign Up Circumcision only helps in certain cases. For example, in terms of HIV transmission, it only helps if an HIV negative man is having vaginal intercourse with an HIV positive woman. That’s because an intact prepuce has Langerhans cells that are a target of the HIV virus — the uncircumcised penis has a moister, softer, thinner skin that is more prone to trauma than the skin of a circumcised penis, which is tougher and drier. Still, it might take 2,000 circumcisions to prevent one case of HIV transmission, with a complication rate of one in 500 circumcisions. It’s hard to measure the risks and benefits, but we can say that both appear to be quite modest. So you’re not actually advocating circumcision? No, we’re not. Circumcision cuts across cultural, religious, medical and aesthetic lines. We don’t see ourselves as partisan in the battle over circumcision. It might be better to be a vegetarian, or to double-knot your shoelaces, but it’s not for us to tell people what’s in the best interest of their children. The benefits aren’t enough to justify it if it doesn’t fit with the values of a particular family. Why is there such negative sentiment against circumcision? I can’t really say. However, I can tell you that I’ve received thousands of e-mails over the years from parents telling me that circumcision is a terrible thing to do to a child, because of what they see as an overriding ethical principle of maintaining bodily integrity until the age of consent. This is where there’s such a big divide between America and Europe; it’s much more accepted here, whereas in Europe there is no tradition, outside of the two religious minorities [Jews and Muslims], of circumcision. Did the task force examine the question of metzitzah b’peh, or oral suction? We had a lot of discussion about whether or not to incorporate that into our recommendations, but in the end decided not to, since there are so few that are done that way in this country, and they will continue to be done that way whether or not we recommend against it. I do work occasionally with an Orthodox mohel who uses a tube so that there is no oral-genital contact. Do you think that the new policy will lead to an increase in the number of circumcisions performed in the U.S.? I doubt it. There’s definitely been a sea change in people’s attitudes. Circumcisions have declined from 1965, which was the peak, when 85 percent of boys were circumcised, to about 55 percent today. The circumcision rate will probably continue to dwindle. [Those against it] have had an influence in making people think twice about circumcision. Do you have a son and, if so, did you have him circumcised? Yes, I do. I circumcised him myself on my parents’ kitchen table on the eighth day of his life. But I did it for religious, not medical reasons. I did it because I had 3,000 years of ancestors looking over my shoulder. This is an edited transcript.CHICAGO (CBS) — Mayor Emanuel says the Chicago Public Schools will hold its cleaning contractors accountable, amid complaints from principals and announcement of layoffs among janitors, reports WBBM Political Editor Craig Dellimore. Principals have complained about poorly cleaned schools since janitorial services were privatized and now Aramark, the principle contractor, is threatening to layoff nearly 500 custodial workers. WBBM 780’s Craig Dellimore Emanuel has heard the complaints and has a message for the contractor. “Aramark’s job is to clean the schools so our principals and our teachers can focus on their fundamental responsibility: education,” Emanuel said. “They will either live up to that contract and clean up the schools or they can clean up their desks and get out.” The mayor says School Board President David Vitale has met with Aramark officials to deliver that message and he expects the contractor to get the job done. An Aramark spokeswoman said in a statement, “Aramark’s top priority is to make sure that CPS students, faculty and staff have clean, comfortable learning environments. We recognize the importance of a smooth transition and are meeting with every principal in the district to address their concerns, as well as review our program, which we have in place at hundreds of school districts across the country. We have been training all CPS custodial staff on new equipment, using more efficient, environmentally friendly cleaning techniques, and are confident that this new program will deliver the results and savings we promised the CPS administration and the Mayor.”October 23, 2012 We are forty-seven years into the clad era and the dust is yet to settle. Even though there's a lot of action to be had, it seems the hobby as a whole can give the clad era one great big shrug of the shoulders. I maintain that our apathy is at least partly due to the low opinion that '50s- and '60s-era collectors held and still hold about clad coinage. Another factor, and one that can't be dismissed, is that design malaise has set in. The United States made great strides beautifying its coinage under Theodore Roosevelt. By the time Teddy's fifth cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was memorialized on the dime, America had come full circle. The modern era of coinage, I argue, is best described as the era in which we stopped idealizing notions of Liberty and began to valorize the image of Presidents. Identifying denominational coinage with the busts of Lincoln, Jefferson, Roosevelt, Washington, and Kennedy creates the impression that these denominations "belong" to the figures they depict. Who would wish to evict the Great Emancipator, the author of the Declaration of Independence, FDR, or the martyred JFK from their homes on our money? The longevity of these series led to design malaise. This design malaise lulls us into the false assumption that the circulating coinage we use isn't going anywhere. Of course, this line of thinking is not factually correct. Despite soaring mintage numbers in recent years, the attrition rate for circulating coinage is high. Sadly, we in the numismatic community do not have the tools necessary to measure attrition rates with any precision and thus the malaise is perpetuated. The Roosevelt dime, a series often relegated to the ranks of beginners' sets, is still chock full of interesting dates, conditional rarities, and full strike rarities. Fans of the (physically) smallest circulating denomination typically look to the series' 1946-1964 period to collect the last of the silver dimes, but there is ample enough reason to give the clad era some consideration. For starters, much of the Mint's output in the 60s and 70s was plagued by a lack of fineness and attractive gems well struck gems can prove elusive. Second, the FB or FT designation (depending upon your grading authority) is a rather recent development, so mainstream collectors were not necessarily hoarding these coins for future returns. While still a speculative pursuit, collectors looking for high grade fully struck coins still have a chance of putting together a world-class and potentially valuable set without spending a fortune if they employ patience and persistence. Finally, it is my opinion that most people are looking at the wrong coin in the clad-era Roosevelt series as the coin's key. This will prove advantageous to those who consider what I have to say below. So, let's take a look at a few notable Roosevelt issues during the clad era to see what desirables are hiding in plain sight. The Modern Low Mintage/Low Value Paradox: 1996-W A prime example of the modern low mintage/low value paradox can be found in the Roosevelt dime series. In 1996, the Mint celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Roosevelt Dime by including a dime minted at the West Point Mint. The West Point Mint had filled overflow orders for Philadelphia throughout the '70s and '80s (their circulating coinage output lacked a distinguishing mint mark) but the 1996-W dime would be the first "circulating" coin bearing the W mint mark. Just under 1.5 million of these dimes were minted. All were included as an insert to the 1996 Uncirculated Set. This, unfortunately, is a number that is not likely to see massive attrition anytime soon, nor will dealer stock levels of this coin diminish to the point where there are more buyers than sellers, thus giving the coin the upward pricing pressures necessary for it to become a valuable collectible in raw form, and since most of the dimes were well struck and carefully handled by the mint, there are no conditional rarities until you get to MS-69. Furthermore, the 1996-W dime is the most submitted (by a wide margin) of any of the clad Roosevelt dimes, save the rare and highly prized collectible 1982 "No P" variety. The quick overview of PCGS clad-era Roosevelt dime population totals is a great primer into the mentality of the mainstream coin market makers, as the 1996-W dime could not become the most submitted clad-era dime, by such a wide margin, without institutional dealers submitting the coin in bulk. This leads me to believe that the pricing levels of the coin are not necessarily organic to the coin based on its lack of accessibility, but simply profit taking on the part of the industry. So, if the key to the series is not the 1.5 million-minted not-intended-for-circulation 1996-W commemorative dime, which coin is? I propose that it's probably one of the following candidates. Overlooked: 1975 The first clad era dime I think of in terms of true opportunity is actually the 1975 Philly dime. Lost in the excitement of the 1975-1976 Bicentennial production run of quarters, half dollars, and dollar coins, the 1975 dime is a typical product of mid-1970s clad production. With a production run of 585,673,900, this is not the type of coin that casual passers-by would assume is scarce, and it's not. Most of the preserved population of this year, based on my experience, would grade MS-63 or MS-64. The strike tends to be mushy, and incomplete detail on the reverse is the norm (washed-out torches and the "-US" in PLURIBUS are not uncommon). Since there's been little interest in this date, each BU roll should contain a few gems. Superb gems, specifically any fully-struck Full Torch piece in MS-66 requires access to many, many rolls to find. Recent auctions show MS-66 FT bringing $200+ per coin- but this is the result of too few people doing the legwork to pull these coins from the wild (there are 16 PCGS-holdered coins at this level as of the time of this writing). If you want to take a shot at finding your own high end piece from this date, I recommend rolls over mint sets. The Non-Mint Set Years: 1982-1983 Roll hoarders and coin dealers saved 1982 and 1983 mint output because of the discontinuation of Mint Sets for these two years. The most notable dime from this period is the rare, thought to be one die, "No-P" variety. The 1982 "No-P" was the result of a mint worker oversight when one of the working dies used to strike coinage was not punched with the Philly "P" mintmark. The oddity was discovered in late 1982, and according to PCGS' Jaime Hernandez, discovered to be distributed in parts of Ohio, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and also Boston, Massachussetts. The 1982 "No-P" is the most-submitted clad Roosevelt dime for grading outside of the 1996-W, but unlike the not intended for circulation novelty coin, the "No-P" is genuinely scarce and desirable from a numismatic standpoint. It's a coin I wholeheartedly recommend as it is a variety that has cross-over appeal for non-variety collectors. Of all of the submitted "No-P" dimes, only 4% qualified as Full Band, which is par for the course for this date. Certified ratios from the general population of 1982-Ps show an artificially higher distribution of fully-struck pieces, but this is merely the result of highly selective submissions on the part of dealers and specialists trying to encapsulate higher quality coins. As fascinating and coveted as the 1982 "No-P" is, fully-struck dimes from both mints from 1982 and 1983 are equally challenging to find. The good news for dime enthusiasts is that dealers and sellers tend not to hold this type of material in high regard, which means that a patient and determined collector can hunt through rolls and dealer stock for choice pieces with the potential for significant upside down the road. There is a no mint set premium for '82s and '83s, but this pricing model tends to affect the larger denomination coins more noticeably. The Special Mint Set Years: 1965-1967 Because the mint issued hybrid proof/business strike quality Special Mint Sets in 1965 through 1967, the majority of certified dimes from this era are SMS releases. Business strike specimens of common date Roosevelt dimes are hardly on anybody's radar, not particularly searched out or traded in certified holders, and are therefore what I consider an "at risk" clad type coin. In terms of possible varieties alone, the Denver mint had to churn out over one billion 1964-D dimes as the silver era came to a close. The heavy workload led to scores of doubled dies and RPMs. Production in 1965 through 1967 continued at the same pace, but so far Variety Vista has only verified a handful of varieties, and only one, DDO FS-101 (FS-019), is listed in the Cherrypickers' Guide and attributed by PCGS and NGC. Who's to say dozens more aren't out there? Ignored coins have a poor history of being preserved in sufficient numbers to satisfy demand once they become considered scarce. How many years will we go before collectors start to desire coins from the beginning of the clad era? The first three dimes released in the clad era may have been made in an effort to stop hoarding and loosen up the flow of coinage in circulation, but if it turns out that this effort was successful, then there may be fewer high quality dimes available from this period than we suspect. Dimes of a More Recent Vintage: 2005-2010 The Mint's decision to strike satin finish coins for their annual mint sets didn't sit well with many collectors. While it's true that the matte finish 1994-P Jefferson nickel from the 1993/1994 Thomas Jefferson Coinage and Currency Set, and the 1998-S matte finish Kennedy half from the Kennedy Collector's Set, are liked by some as interesting one-year specimen coins, the decision to produce satin finish business strikes on a larger scale turned off collectors who felt that they did not satisfy the requirement of being an actual minted for circulation type coin. As such, these satin finish hybrid specimens created a new category of numismatic collectible, and one (according to some) that we have seen the last of (for now). Of course, all of this just makes actual circulation strikes from 2005-2010 that much more prone to attrition, and judging by the scant amount of material from these dates being certified by PCGS and NGC up to this point, it will take a matter of years to figure out what the prospects are for dimes from this period on the secondary market. My guess is that in the long run, the mint's satin finish experiment will only add to collector confusion as new collectors enter the marketplace. Following the "low mintage/low value" paradox I outlined earlier, I feel that the equally low mintage satin finish coins will remain abundantly available and over-slabbed, while the business strike dimes will be harder to find in higher grades and much more desirable. As to which one will be the scarcest of the lot, I'm not sure. The 2009-D has the lowest mintage with just under 50 million, but with modern coins, it's anybody's guess. A Possible Key Date Emerges: 1969 Finally, we arrive to the coin I favor as being the key to the clad series: high quality, fully-struck Philadelphia dimes from 1969. With a mintage of 145,790,000, the 1969 is the lowest mintage clad dime. It is behind both 2009 issues, and like the 1975 dime, 1969s tend to come in MS-63 and MS-64, with MS-65s being on the upper end of typical production and MS-66s and above being scarce. PCGS has only attributed four coins to be Full Torch, while NGC has holdered fourteen. These figures are implausibly low, but the general mushiness of the date and normal attrition will place a hard limit on the possible number of high end Full Torch coins on the market. That mint sets containing 1969 dimes also include a 40% silver clad Kennedy half dollar raise the spectre of risk that many of these perceived "low value" sets will be broken apart and destroyed without regard to saving better preserved dimes. Further adding to the mystique of the 1969 dime is the newly publicized reverse die variety (CONECA: RDV-002), which apparently uses the high relief proof reverse of 1968 on certain circulation strike dimes (the Philadelphia Mint would do the same thing three years later with the 1972 Eisenhower dollar reverse). How many of these RDVs got out into the wild? And as interest in the date is still relatively small, we may have to wait for a clear picture of things. For you thrill-seekers out there, this is a golden opportunity. Conclusion As we said before, we are forty-seven years into the clad era and much is still unknown. Nevertheless, by seriously diving into series like the Roosevelt dime, you are in some respects ahead of the curve. The low hanging fruit is still out there to be had at reasonable prices if one employs patience, common sense, and tenacity as one looks through countless rolls and loose pieces. Buying top pop coins with populations this low is a highly speculative matter. Those that typically bash moderns as being abundantly available are right insofar as we accept that the vast majority of what's being held back is MS-65 or poorer, that less than half are fully-struck, and that fewer still are problem free. The time comes for every series once viewed as common that collectors realize certain dates aren't as available as previously thought. It is inevitable that this will happen to the Roosevelt dime. Whether you are buying now for cheap or buying later when collector's turn their eye towards this great series is up to you. Have at it and happy hunting!Thursday, March 23, 2017 A woman in a Lady Deadpool outfit, known under the pseudonym "Tumbling Cosplay", is interviewed. Pop culture event Toronto ComiCon continued to grow this year, the sixth year since its restructuring as a three day program. Beginning on Friday evening, it continued through to Sunday. Organized by the same company as Fan Expo Canada, the event offered exhibitors, retailers, an artist's alley, and panels. Cast members from Canadian teen show Degrassi Junior High were among the featured guests at the convention. While the current series in the franchise, best known as Degrassi: The Next Generation, has spawned Broadway star Jake Epstein, rapper Drake, and others, the earlier show including Stacie Mistysyn and Stefan Brogren remains popular, particularly in Canada. Brogren told industry publication Kidscreen: "A part of me thought we would do it for five years and maybe get recognized for a couple of years afterwards and then that would be it. I had no idea it would turn out to be such an important thing in so many peopleʼs lives and not just in Canada, but around the world." The current program is now distributed by Netflix, and Brogen remains a cast member as school principal, in addition to being a producer and director. It was the first time the cast did a convention event. The cast also plan to tour to other conventions in Canada this year. Also appearing were Robert Picardo, the holographic doctor on Star Trek: Voyager, and Ray Park, Darth Maul in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. Panels at the convention focused on topics like steampunk costuming, wig styling, recently rebooted comic Captain Canuck, toy collecting, and the history of comic books in Canada over the decades, in conjunction with Canada's sesquicentennial year. Cast members from The Sean Ward Show appeared at the event, meeting guests to the convention and hosting a panel about the superhero comedy YouTube channel which has more than 600 million views.Aww, aren’t those puppies cute? Those aren’t dogs. They’re foxes, believe it or not. In the 1950s, Soviet scientist Dmitri Belyaev set out to breed a tamer fox that would be easier for their handlers in the Russian fur industry to work with. The foxes included in his breeding experiment were determined by their temperament. To select candidates to breed, Belyaev would stick out his hand in front of foxes, and rank them based on how they reacted. The foxes that snapped or bit at his hand would be disqualified from the experiment, and the foxes that cowered or exhibited curiosity without attacking his hand would be mated together. The best behaved of the selected foxes offspring would be mated again, etc. The scientists expected a long and tedious experiment with little immediate effects. Much to the their shock, however, noticeable changes in the foxes behavior emerged after just about 10 generations. Not only were the new foxes better behaved, they were also playful, smaller in size, and even had white patches of fur on on large swaths of their bodies. Many wagged their tails like dogs, and some even had blue eyes. Shocked with the results, Belyaev and his team began to investigate. Testing a hypothesis, they discovered that the new ‘Silver’ foxes, had a significantly lower level of adrenaline than their original counterparts. Adrenaline directly affected the behavior of the foxes, the size the foxes grew, and somehow, the color of the foxes. Through some more testing, the scientists discovered that the level of melanin (a chemical responsible for pigmentation) in the foxes was lower as well, explaining how the foxes emerged with colors never before heard of from their breed. Scientists theorize that the domestication of wolves to dogs probably began the same way. Generally thought to have developed their affectionate temperament over hundreds or thousands of generations, wolves could have become the dogs we know today quicker than anyone could have imagined.New York, like Rio, like Mumbai, seems to be flourishing – but who exactly is it going well for? To build a great city, a just city, we have to look at who’s included and who’s excluded, writes Suketu Mehta I’ve been spending a lot of time in New York’s Coney Island, because it’s the capital of fun, the people’s playground. If you sit on the Boardwalk in Coney Island and watch the everyday carnival of all the races of the earth strolling together without knowing much about each other – the hipsters in leather, the Bangladeshis in hijab, the Russians in bikinis – then you realise the great secret about why Coney Island
loss of hope under President Obama. That must change, and to keep the pressure on, please write to your Senators and Representatives, if you are in the U.S., and, wherever you are, please join our campaign -- just an email is required to be added to our mailing list, and to join those demanding the closure of Guantánamo -- and please also ask your family and friends to join up as well, and to tell all their contacts.What’s this? A non-Halo post? Yes, once upon a time, I did not write exclusively about Halo, which ended after September in 2014 – shortly following the one year anniversary of this blog. It’s been almost three and a half years for me now, a good two of those years have been solely focused on one particular franchise… so I thought that, with it being the new year ‘n’ all, now was the time to branch out again. This doesn’t mean that my Halo content will be decreasing at all, but sometimes there will be something else that comes along that I want to talk about. Today, it’s Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare. And, oh boy, there’s a lot to talk about! (As this is an analysis of the campaign, here’s your obvious spoiler warning – no detail is held back here.) I have a bit of an odd relationship with the Call of Duty franchise, in that my opinion of it has been all over the place since I first picked the series up in 2005 and couldn’t describe myself as anything other than ‘indifferent’ towards it – the first Modern Warfare and Black Ops came along as notable exceptions, the first Modern Warfare remains an incredible game with brilliant writing. While the games may have been kept relatively at arm’s length, I’ve kept Call of Duty somewhat in my peripheral vision over the years (but I just could not dredge up any interest in Ghosts or Advanced Warfare). Since I’m making a post about Infinite Warfare now, you can probably infer that my opinion has been swayed. While I didn’t exactly scoff, like many other people did, at the notion of Call of Duty going into space… I certainly didn’t think it would rank amongst one of the more unique entries of the genre. And then the game came out and I watched a playthrough of it. And then I felt the desire to buy this game. And now I want nothing more than to replay it. And here I am, writing a dissertation-length post about it. Honestly, nobody was more taken aback by how profoundly I enjoyed this game than I was – and not just in a ‘popcorn’ kind of way, I genuinely feel that the writing and overall campaign design was excellent. I’m going to spend this post explaining why… and I do say that with a tinge of feeling like I have to justify myself considering the general reception to this franchise these days – especially since one of the Infinite Warfare trailers managed to somehow become the second worst-rated video on Youtube. Bit of an overreaction, that. From the top, then. According to Taylor Kurosaki, the game’s narrative director: “We want to tell first and foremost a classic war story in the great tradition of the genre that Brian and I are both huge fans of. […] [The setting] afforded us a lot to do from a gameplay perspective. The setting was something we as a team were all united behind. Brian and I and Jacob Minkoff – the design director at Infinity Ward – the three of us set about looking to tell a classic story set against this more futuristic backdrop.” [Redesigning Call of Duty] The intention was less to tell a science fiction story and more to tell a classic war story, which can be done in effectively any kind of setting. From a design perspective, you want to try to make the most interesting kind of experience to play, so choosing to go into space and take advantage of the things that affords you to do – and that absolutely paid off in the final product. I was struck by the well-crafted variety of missions and how they played out as I was going through this. Similar to, say, Mass Effect, you have a ship and a crew and you choose what missions you want to do from a galaxy (or, in this game, solar system) map. You’ve got the main missions which advance the plot, but you’ve also got a host of optional side missions that are split into two categories – space combat missions and boarding operations. In the former, I felt I was treated to some of the best, most approachable (yet not ‘dumbed down’) space flight combat I’ve ever experienced. I’ve tried my hand at stuff like Elite: Dangerous and I’m absolutely bloody awful at it, the controls and the way everything handles is overly fiddly and just was not meant to be translate to consoles in my opinion. In Infinite Warfare however, the principle of how space combat works is that your Jackal (the fighter you pilot) moves the same way you do when you’re doing a boots-on-the-ground mission, only with full 3D motion. You’ve got a simple set of mechanics, you can customise the weapons and aesthetics of your vessel, and each mission takes place in visually interesting and distinct locations with a variety of objectives – all supported with some beautifully punchy sound design, ranging from the sound of your ship creaking and banging as it climbs through the atmosphere to the easily identifiable sounds that trigger when an enemy as locked on to you or launched missiles. With the latter, the boarding operations, you have a variety of different kinds of missions. One that particularly resonated with me was a Deus Ex-type stealth mission in this huge cargo bay with multi-level catwalks, lots of room for cover, and lots of enemies to get past in order to rescue a group of engineers being held hostage. You weren’t punished for breaking stealth, which would result in the engineers being executed – that was a potential outcome for the mission. But the way in which the map was laid out with clear thought put into making this more of a playground than a shooting gallery demanded that I play the way that was intended and take out every enemy through stealth – which I did, and I loved it. Other such missions will have you in space, stealthily traversing through an asteroid field with your grappling hook – which you can use to launch yourself towards enemies for a series of brutal finishing moves that includes pulling off their helmet and leaving them to asphyxiate in vacuum, setting a detonator on their suits and kicking them away so they explode into a gory mess, and using your knife to puncture their suits to deliver the double-whammy of a stab and suit rupture. This kind of focus on some of the more horrific fates that await us in the endless black ocean that is space was intentionally used to accentuate the hostility and grit of the setting. “The setting of space puts even more pressure on our characters than even a traditional battlefield would allow for […] In space, there is no gravity. In a lot of cases, most cases have no breathable atmosphere. Take the worst of the world wars and put that in an environment where you can’t breathe, and up is a relative to where you are floating.” [Redesigning Call of Duty] This then has a knock-on effect regarding the logic of how the antagonistic faction – the SDF (Settlement Defence Front) – was formed. Already, there’s a sense of continuity emerging with the marriage of how decisions about expanding the gameplay feed into the setting, which then informs the narrative and the kind of people you end up fighting. The SDF are a militaristic group of insurgents and terrorists who live a completely different way of life to the people on Earth, they view themselves as stronger because they have grown up having to struggle to survive the harshness of space – as humanity doesn’t have the technology to terraform planets in this setting. They began as martial law enforcers for off-world colonies and came to see the people of Earth as inferior, as they rely on resources that come from those off-world colonies and live in comfort while the SDF has had to struggle. Their ultimate goal is to gain total strategic control of the solar system, wiping out the UNSA (you don’t even want to know the number of times I’ve typed out ‘UNSC’ in this post) – that includes killing civilians. Additionally, they have a ‘collective rather than individual’ perspective to the point where Salen Kotch (the antagonist) just straight-up shoots one of his own men and leaves him to asphyxiate at the start of the game in order to prove a point that “care clouds judgement”. This will be a recurring theme throughout the game because it’s all about the choices Reyes makes as a leader that affect other people – more on that when we get to the main character’s arc. There’s some interesting worldbuilding done in environmental details throughout many of the missions regarding the SDF as well, such as propaganda posters like this one… It’s heavily hinted throughout the game that the SDF does not have civilians, from the frighteningly utilitarian, bare-minimum architecture (reflective of their even more frighteningly utilitarian philosophy) we see to many of the quotes brought up throughout the game which establish that military service to the SDF begins at the age of twelve and that they have “900% more soldiers than the UNSA” – because that’s all they are composed of. One of the quotes you’ll hear in the game is that “the function of a citizen and soldier are one”, and those ‘citizens’ are ranked based on loyalty to the regime. Kotch likewise has a number of quotes that reflect the SDF philosophy: “Those who want to live must wage war, and those who do not want war don’t deserve to live.” “We do not mourn the dead, we arm the living.” “Any regime without the intention to wage war is senseless and useless.” But perhaps the most telling line is the SDF proverb: “The days of individual happiness have passed away.” Now… on the one hand, it’s evident that going all out on the SDF like this (making it so they don’t have any civilians) was done to make it so we don’t really question the enemy we’re fighting – they are straight-up just evil bastards. That’s the long and short of it, and perhaps there’s a discussion to be had there about simplifying the conflict to such an extent… but at the same time, the writers and designers did put a lot of thought into ensuring that this made sense for this setting. What’s more, we see a number of really interesting mirrors and contrasts between the SDF and UNSA from the very beginning of the game – the whole opening sequence does a really great job of setting things up for the story and the characters. At the start of the game (following on from the opening mission to Europa), Nick Reyes, the protagonist, has a conversation with Admiral Raines where they lament the fact that the warriors aren’t in-charge until there’s war – all the rest of the time, everything runs on politics. Reyes: “This is a deliberate act of aggression, Admiral. We should be out there on patrol, not down here throwing confetti.” Raines: “The rules of engagement prohibit definitive action under these circumstances.” Reyes: “So we stand by with our barrels in the sand and watch a fleet week parade?” Raines: “Lieutenant Reyes, make no mistake, my instincts, which are aligned indelibly with your own, are that we need to engage.” Reyes: “Why don’t we, sir?” Raines: “They’re politicians, Reyes. They’ll wipe hell’s ass with whatever flag keeps the smokestacks burning. To these men, the idea of mounting an offensive triggers a fresh and unplanned piss. Until there’s war, the warriors aren’t in charge.“ And that single line sets up the contrast with the SDF because they are a civilisation where the warriors are in-charge, where there are nothing but warriors. They exist without the baggage of struggling with internal politics and democracy because they’re committed to a single, destructive ideal. As Reyes’ opening monologue tells us, all they required was a leader to organise and unite them in order to mobilise and take the fight to Earth. Likewise, the whole propaganda angle is interesting because we see plenty of things which are indicative of the UNSA doing it as well. The very start of the game in Geneva where everyone is celebrating Fleet Week is called out by Reyes and Salter as propaganda, and while you’re aboard the Retribution you can watch news broadcasts from Earth with members of your crew which present the situation in a way that makes it seem like the UNSA is getting ever-closer to victory. The implications of the end of the game bookends this arc beautifully (by which I mean it has some terrifying implications for the future of this setting), which we’ll get to later… This is probably a good place to talk about Nick Reyes and his character arc. Typically in the Call of Duty series you play as some kind of newcomer to serve the need in gameplay to ‘tutorialise’ the mechanics, but they deliberately changed the approach this time around and had you step into the boots of a more experienced soldier – who, in the first act of the game, becomes captain of the UNSA Retribution (one of Earth’s two remaining vessels after the inciting incident which we’ll get to in a bit). Why did they break from the norm this way? Because they wanted to tell a different kind of story with this character: The importance of leadership, the good and bad decisions you make as a leader, can only be driven home by the consequences typically felt by other characters in the game. That makes those characters and the way you feel about them all the more important in Infinite Warfare. The story and the game are designed to pull out the intricacies of character through the deadly pressures of both war and leadership. […] “This is not about double and triple crosses, and double and triple agents, and chips in your head, and being a zombie fighter. This is a story about the burden of making choices.” [Redesigning Call of Duty] Again, this is something that is set up from the game’s prologue and serves as a recurring theme throughout the story for Reyes. When discussing the opening mission to Europa, Reyes is immensely critical of the fact that only a four-man strike team was sent instead of a full strike force – frustrations he shares with his wingman and close friend Nora Salter upon leaving Raines’ office. It comes up again as a source of disagreement when the SDF launches their assault on Earth’s fleet, decimating them to the point where there are only two ships left as the SDF supercarrier Olympus Mons arrives and steamrolls its way through the ships that made it away from the AATIS guns on Earth. The UNSA Retribution’s captain (Alder) makes a risky decision to ram the Olympus Mons, a desperate bid to do enough damage to force the SDF into retreat – a gambit which succeeds, but at the cost of Alder’s own life and the lives of many of his crew. (Keep this in mind because this is an immensely critical event which circles back around to haunt Reyes in the third act of the game.) It is debatable as to whether Alder made the right decision here, particularly when you have to take into consideration the fact that it was a decision made in the moment. In the moment, where you have to respond, Alder didn’t exactly have the luxury of sitting back and weighing the alternatives the way we do by taking time to debate and consider – it was a do-or-die situation. Alder effectively had two options: keep on trying to conventionally take on the Olympus Mons, despite the fact that it had destroyed all the other ships in the fleet except two, or… do the unexpected and ram it. Jumping away in that moment wasn’t an option because the Olympus Mons was there to take the fight to Earth’s shores and there were no other defences left, so we can see the pros of ramming it – it would do enough damage to either force a retreat, or even possibly destroy it. On the other hand, the Olympus Mons wasn’t the SDF’s last ship. Their fleet is still out there, so the gambit would be destroying one of our two remaining vessels in order to destroy one of theirs when many more are elsewhere in the system. I think it was more than likely that the Olympus Mons would have destroyed Retribution and Tigris if Alder hadn’t made that tactical collision. In the moment, it was an understandable decision, but the characters themselves have a variety of different opinions which is discussed in the aftermath of this event. Reyes and Salter adamantly disapprove of the action, both of them demanding to speak with Alder because, in Reyes words: “We don’t sacrifice our crew when we’re overrun. Captain protects his men, Salt. He should’ve pulled back.” (Another thing to keep in mind here. This single line defines the arc Reyes undergoes as he steps into Alder’s shoes and inherits the mantle of responsibility over the Retribution.) This is where we meet Staff Sergeant Usef Omar, marvellously portrayed by David Harewood (the name ‘Martian Manhunter’ is definitely appropriate for his role in this setting). Omar assists Reyes and Salter in moving an obstacle that’s blocking entrance to the bridge, saying that Alder had a difficult call to make but ultimately did his duty. Only Reyes and Omar have a different perspective on exactly what that duty is. Omar says that it’s to drive the enemy into retreat, whereas Reyes believes it’s to get your crew home alive – to which Omar simply responds “not always, Lieutenant”. That line, again, is reflective of how well-plotted the writing is in the first act in setting up major events and character beats that play out across the rest of the game. It effectively encapsulates the shift in perspective that Reyes comes to have in the final act. But, as I say, more on that later… Before we move on, let’s briefly take a bit of a step back here because I’ve just gushed a whole lot about the character writing but skipped past the plot. Fleet Week has all of Earth’s fleet present at Geneva for what basically amounts to a propaganda event. The politicians in charge don’t want to escalate the situation with the SDF, but still want to give the people of Earth the illusion of power. This meets an abrupt and explosive end as the AATIS cannons, Earth’s “iron shield”, are infiltrated by an SDF sleeper operative called Akeel Min Riah – a secondary antagonist in the game who posed as a mechanical engineer for several years in order to gain privileged access to Earth’s defences. He killed the guards in the AATIS control room and use the cannons to fire on Earth’s fleet, but Reyes and his team manage to get to the control room and apprehend him – unknowingly preventing Riah from initiating the final part of the plan, which we find out later in the game. Just keep that in mind for later because this whole thing is set-up for things that happen in the third act. I’ll be talking (read: gushing) about this later as well, but if you’re familiar with how the building blocks of a narrative are formed, you can pick out so many things in the first act that seem innocuous in their presentation but are actually setting up subtle cues and beats for the plot and characters in the third act. Back to talking about the characters: Perhaps the most prominent ‘foil’ for Reyes and the overarching theme of the burden of choices is Audrey MaCallum, the chief engineer of the Retribution. When speaking with Reyes and Salter at a number of points throughout the game (as well as reviewing her personnel file in the captain’s quarters which provides a lot of lore and backstory), we learn that she was once somebody who spent years working her way up the ranks to Commander and was on the way to getting her own ship. However, she discovered that she could not handle the burden of sending men to their deaths and resigned from her position to re-enlist as a tech officer. As a side-note: Like the rest of the cast, Claudia Black’s performance as MaCallum is wonderful. As another, perhaps more relevant side note: It comes with a sting of irony that even the machines are in the process of developing some kind of sentience, as we see with E3N, or ‘Ethan’ – programmed with a personality construct to make him integrate well into a military unit and ends up being treated like any other one of the human soldiers. He provides much of the lighthearted humour of the game, as well as some of the more emotional moments. In MaCallum’s own words: Reyes: “Good work, chief. We can use every edge.” MaCallum: “Oh, I understand. I once stood in your shoes, Commander.” Reyes: “You were a captain, Mac? Why’d you give up your commission?” MaCallum: “I committed the mortal sin that can break a commander in two… I cared.” Salter: “We all care, chief.” MaCallum: “Ordering men into battle isn’t for everyone. So the machines are now in my hands and we’re all in yours, Captain.” This exchange works its way into the meat of Reyes’ character arc as we see time and again that he is also unfit to be captain because he too, like MCallum, cares too much about his crew. He is not willing to spend their lives for the sake of the mission when the situation calls for it, we’ve seen this already at two major points in the story (his criticism of the mission to Europa not being dealt with by a full strike force and then Alder’s decision to ram the Olympus Mons). To Reyes, the mission is to ensure everyone makes it back – an admirable and very relatable ideal that simply doesn’t have any place in this setting, the way in which it’s articulated. And this character beat also goes back to one of Salen Kotch’s first lines when he appears during the opening mission on Europa. Wolf: “My men need medical.” Kotch: “You are about your men?” stands and unholsters gun to aim at Sipes, pauses, then shoots his own ally Kotch: “Care clouds judgement. That is why you cannot win.” That is the same fatal flaw that defines Reyes. Caring. It gives him something to lose, and because he cares so much about the people he leads he has everything to lose. They drive this point home especially well because the first and second act of the game have you constantly succeeding – the side missions and main missions have you winning each battle, but it’s not until a certain moment of immense loss where you realise that the path Reyes is on means he’s going to lose the war. Kotch, on the other hand? He’s on the complete opposite extreme, he’s got nothing to lose – even the loss of his own life (but I get ahead of myself again). The tone in the progression of the story begins to shift at the half-way point of the game during the mission to Titan where you deploy to take out a critical SDF fuelling station. It begins with a sense of impending triumph, as Reyes, Ethan, Omar, and the marines escort a huge mech to the fuelling tower to blow it up. However, mid-way through the mission, Reyes calls in for air support, only to be met with something else… The ground begins to shake as Reyes looks up at the sky and sees the silhouette of the Olympus Mons descending upon their unit. It opens fire and wipes out a significant number of the marines you’re with, leaving only eight of you standing after you escape to continue pursuing the objective. That’s the first moment. The second moment comes at the end of the mission where Salter arrives with air support. You get into your Jackal with Ethan, destroy the fuel tower, and head back to the Retribution, having seemingly shaken off the Olympus Mons in the cloud layer… only for it to reappear as you try to escape and severely damage your Jackal, forcing Ethan to eject the two of you out of the ship as it smashes into the side of Retribution. With their objective accomplished but the battle turning against them, Reyes orders Salter to take Retribution and leave him behind – an order which Salter hesitates to follow because she cares about Reyes, saying that they’re coming back for him before the Retribution jumps away. Floating in the vacuum of space with Ethan, Reyes is quickly running out of oxygen as his suit was breached in the cockpit. This is one of the stand-out moments of the game, as Ethan grows anxious over the fact that he can’t do anything to stop it. Reyes tells him to let it go, to which Ethan responds: Ethan: “I can’t, sir. You’re my commanding officer, Captain. My mission is you.” Reyes: “Who says?” Ethan: “I’m hardware, sir. Ultimately expendable.” Reyes: No no. You’re my brother, Ethan.” Ethan: “Your talking robot brother?” Reyes: “Affirmative.” Ethan: “Yes, well, I am the handsome one, sir.” Reyes: chuckles “No doubt. Looks like this is the end, partner.” Ethan: “I think I’m scared, sir.” Reyes: “Me too.” It’s funny, isn’t it, how our species designs robots to serve as “expendable” hardware… yet we just can’t help but give them sentience. We can’t help but come to value them as a friend or comrade-in-arms. We can’t help but care for them. Am I driving the point in enough? This thematic motif is constantly coming up throughout the game to accentuate the bond between these characters, which is handled so well by the writing for a number of reasons – the most significant one for me being the face that the writers made the script malleable to the suggestions of the actors. In an interview with Gamer Hub TV (from 4:25-5:50), David Harewood said: Harewood: “You’re working with really good actors. It wasn’t just the tech and the game that was exciting, it was working with really good actors where you knew you were going to get something back – you had actors who were adlibbing, actors who were making things up on the spot. And even though it was a video game, you really felt that you were communicating with and giving-and-taking with these actors. It was a lot of fun.” Interviewer: “Speaking of adlibbing, was there room for adlibbing and leeway for interpretation with the other actors on-set?” Harewood: “Yeah, and a lot of humour. For me, Eric and Jeff – who plays Ethan, the kind of robot character – he was forever just throwing stuff in that just came up to him and he was always making us laugh. What’s great about Taylor and Brian, the writers… is that if it was good they’d say ‘yeah, go with it, let’s keep that’. They weren’t rigid with their scripts, they were always saying if you’ve got a better idea, or if you came up with something on the spot, they’d say ‘yeah, we like that, keep that, do that again, and let’s have another one of those’, and always giving you the option to add new material. That’s also really exciting because that stamps your individuality on your performance.” This is really just fantastic to hear. This is the kind of collaboration that sets good character writing apart from great character writing: Listening to the input of your actors as they add bits of dialogue and subtle motions into their performance to put their own stamp onto the characters – as opposed to just trying to inject life into a fixed script. It’s exactly why the interactions between all of these characters feels so natural, why there’s so much energy in the dynamic between them. I’ve seen and heard from a number of people who either are in the military or have family in the military praise this game’s dialogue for that reason – it’s oftentimes laced with military jargon, but it’s a strongly grounded and spirited portrayal of camaraderie in the military. Regardless of your opinion on the game or the story or the writing, I don’t think one can undervalue just how important this kind of collaborative process is. This is also, however, where we reach one of two major points of contention. Reyes doesn’t die, he’s back within a matter of seconds. There’s two sides to this argument that both have merit… Reyes dying, and then having you play as Salter for the second half of the game (given that they share such similar perspectives, having Reyes’ arc transfer to her wouldn’t have been too much of a stretch) could have been a really interesting way to progress the story rather than having a fake-out death scene which really drove home the emotion in the dialogue between him and Ethan. However… I can see why they didn’t do that. For one, ever since the first Modern Warfare, Call of Duty has practically developed its own trope of killing off characters in situations like this. It’s been impactful before (the aftermath of the nuke scene in Modern Warfare particularly comes to mind), but if you just keep doing it over and over again then you end up becoming predictably formulaic in when you’re trying to make ‘the feels’ happen for the player. Since Infinite Warfare was conceived on the principle of doing things differently, it’s understandable why they decided not to go down that already well-travelled road. I can’t begrudge them for that. Likewise, Reyes’ arc is not yet complete. Killing him off and then substituting him for Salter, who would pick up from the same spot with the same arc would be a bit of a stretch in terms being a believable decision to make for the characters. I guess Reyes’ death could trigger an exacerbation of her shared perspective with Reyes that “everyone gets home safe”, but Salter is more of a realist than Reyes so an argument could be made that her perspective would actually be pushed the other way instead. At the same time, the actual terror that comes from that scene is not just that you’re out in space – it’s the fact that Retribution jumped away… and then the Olympus Mons did as well. Reyes’ suit getting damaged comes across as a bit unnecessary because the situation as it was presented was worse than if the Olympus Mons had stuck around and picked you up. At least, in that situation, you’d know that they were just going to kill you. Instead, you are abandoned amidst the rings of Saturn. That’s the one thing I would criticise about that scene, otherwise its presentation was perfect. In any case, from the very next scene we’re servicing the whole ‘caring’ theme again, as Ferran (captain of the UNSA Tigris, the other ship that survived the massacre from Olympus Mons at the start of the game) reveals that she went out to recover him. Reyes: “Who contacted you?” Ferran: “Lieutenant Salter. She asked the Admiral for a retrieval team. Under the circumstances, he deemed the recovery too risky.” Reyes: “Raines didn’t authorise the rescue?” Ferran: “War has no friends, Reyes. Perhaps my motivations were selfish, but I have no intention of fighting out here alone.” Reyes is quite evidently hurt to learn that Admiral Raines denied Salter’s request to retrieve him. It stings him because he’s on good terms with Raines, we see from their interaction at the start of the game that they’ve had a good relationship over the years – as teacher and student, and as soldiers – and are two individuals who are very much on the same page in terms of their mindset when it comes to action. But Raines doesn’t share Reyes’ perspective that everyone gets home at all costs, that that is the mission. Raines is a little wiser to the notion of how lives sometimes have to be spent in the military. Reyes just didn’t expect that he’d be on the receiving end of that. It’s not a betrayal, it’s not something that Reyes takes as a stab in the back. Reyes may be idealistic, but he’s still a professional and has a job to do, so this serves as a minor beat in his overall arc of coming to be in a position where he understands why Raines made that call – because, at the end of the game, that is exactly the same call he has to make for himself and for various members of his crew. As Raines said in his opening conversation with Reyes, “these are the rules of war”. At the same time, this is nicely offset and contrasted by the characterisation of Ferran and Ethan here. Ferran ignored Raines’ decision not to go after Reyes because, and she says this to Reyes, she didn’t want to be the only captain around in this fight – “fifty percent attrition rate is unacceptable”. That is a very human perspective. Likewise, we learn of Ethan’s display of loyalty and care towards Reyes. Ferran informs Reyes that Ethan was still holding him when she found them, his arms had actually frozen around Reyes. Ferran: “We had to pry Ethan’s arms open. They’d frozen around you. Protecting his Captain to the end. Dauntless valour, Ethan.” Ethan: “Boundless terror, Captain.” Ferran: “You are a humble one.” It’s interesting that Ferran talks to Ethan with the kind of respect she’d show towards any other soldier, him being a robot doesn’t affect her perspective of him at all. I point this out because Ethan is a one-of-a-kind creation, he’s the first robot the UNSA has created with a personality construct. The SDF would certainly never consider making such a thing – their robots are notably more terrifying, as we see highlighted at several points in the game, particularly in the opening sequence where Kotch has Wolf and his team executed, ordering them to spare the bullets, so the robot present with him just stamps on the UNSA soldier’s head… Indeed, when Reyes orders Ethan to go to MaCallum for some R&R (another interesting order to give a robot), the exchange that follows between them is reflective of the warmth of their relationship. Reyes: “Ethan, go to engineering, see Mac, get a clean bill.” Ethan: “What about you, sir?” Reyes: “Don’t you worry about me.” Ethan: “Try and stop me, sir.” Another thing I want to praise this game’s writing for is the fact that there was no effort to try to force a romance between Reyes and Salter. They had every opportunity to force that typical kind of romance into the main story for Drama™ and Emotions™ as you’d expect something that has the reputation of being a brainless blockbuster to do… I literally counted over a dozen times throughout the game’s cutscenes where lesser writers would have pulled that move, but these ones didn’t. I like that a lot. The relationship between these two is allowed to be complex and interesting and emotional as a wholly platonic bond, and they play that totally straight-faced from start-to-finish – both in the writing and in the performance. They’ve served together, fought together, care about each other, openly talk to each other about how they feel because they trust each other. I think it’s really important to depict long-running, close, healthy friendships between men and women without a hint of sexual or romantic interest (and there really is no indication whatsoever of romance between Reyes and Salter at any point in the game) because there’s just such a frustratingly typical tendency audiences have to expect that things are going to become romantic. I’m not saying “don’t have any romance ever”, romance is evidently present in the story through some of the audio logs and death notes you listen to from a couple of characters (Yetide’s message to her girlfriend/wife, Omar’s message to his wife, Griff reminiscing with Reyes about a sixth grade teacher he had a crush on, Kashima showing interest in Salter), but it’s important to subvert that expectation and normalise this kind of platonic relationship. That’s just another thing I wanted to praise this game’s writing for, it’s not something you’d expect from Call of Duty but it’s indicative that this game is on the right track to being ahead of the curve. Salter hugs Reyes, having very nearly lost her closest friend, and the two of them get right back to work because they both know that they don’t have the luxury of stopping right now – they have their duty to Earth and that comes above all else. The relationships between this multicultural crew are all portrayed in this rather positive and healthy fashion. All throughout the game, there’s small interactions which bring out the dynamic of these characters. Salter tells Gibson jokes when heading down to the hangar for a mission, Gator (as well as several other crew members) and Reyes get along well because Reyes makes the effort to fraternise with him and values his crew as individuals. A major character beat for Omar is how he is initially dismissive and abrasive towards Ethan, but over the course of serving together in battle he comes to respect him – he grows as a person. When setting out for a mission, he makes a point of telling Reyes not asking him) “let’s bring Ethan along”, because he values that Ethan has his back. It’s quite refreshing to see actually – and it provides a really effective contrast to just how downbeat the ending is and its implications for the future of the setting. And it all ties back to those words spoken by Kotch in the opening. “Care clouds judgement.” And we see exactly what that means in the very next mission. On the note of ‘downbeat’, this particular operation is a major turning point in Reyes’ character arc… This mission is another stand-out moment for the game, a triumph of design for the mechanics and how it just oozes atmosphere (we’re talking Alien: Isolation-tier). We begin with a simple reconnaissance mission to Vesta-3, a UNSA mining colony near Mercury which provides the raw materials needed to rebuild Earth’s fleet. The most recently scheduled shipment never left the port and the colony suddenly went dark, so Retribution is sent to investigate. What’s worse, the asteroid has been knocked off-course and is rotating at a significantly faster rate than normal. On the way down to deployment, Salter and Reyes have a moment to talk about the events of the previous mission regarding casualties sustained from the Olympus Mons attack. Salter: “How’re you felling, Raider?” Reyes: “What was the official count, Salt?” Salter: “On what?” Reyes: “The Olympus attack. How many did we lose?” Salter: “Sixteen.” Reyes exhales in frustration Salter: “You heard what Mac said. This shit ain’t easy. Let’s get to work, slick.” This is another subtle-yet-telling character moment for Salter because she has the answer to Reyes’ question of how many people they lost immediately. There is no delay in her response because she already asked the same question before we got back to the Retribution – again, we are shown that these two
, to some old habits or to your former ways. Alternatively, the dream signifies your readiness to take action. Dreaming that someone you know is trapped implies that some aspect of yourself needs to be expressed. It may point to some unused talent or knowledge. If you don't know the person who is trapped, then it symbolizes something you have repressed and needs to be expressed. To dream that you are trapped or caught in a trap suggests that you are feeling confined and restricted in your job, career, health, or a personal relationship. You may be in a rut and are tired of the same daily monotony. Trapdoor To find or see a trapdoor in your dream represents unexpected opportunities that will come your way. Don't be afraid to explore those opportunities. Alternatively, a trapdoor symbolizes discovery of something that you have repressed or stored in the subconscious. Trapeze To see a trapeze act in your dream signifies a carefree attitude toward life. You are trying to escape from your daily responsibilities and take some time out to relax. Alternatively, the dream represents your high aspirations and ideals. To dream that you are swinging on a trapeze indicates a desire or wish for sexual variety and adventure. Alternatively, the dream symbolizes indecisiveness. You are going back and forth on some choice. Trapezoid To see a trapezoid in your dream signifies limitations or restraints. If you are drawing a trapezoid shape in your dream means that you are unable to fully express your opinion about something. You are censoring yourself or holding back. Trash Please See Garbage. Trash Can Please see Garbage Can. Trash Compactor To see or use a trash compactor suggest that you are in denial about some issue or problem. Alternatively, the dream means that you are looking at your problems from a different perspective. You are trying to look at things in a more acceptable or presentable way. Traveling To dream that you are traveling represents the path toward your life goals. It also parallels your daily routine and how you are progressing along. Alternatively, traveling signifies a desire to escape from your daily burdens. You are looking for a change in scenery, where no one has any expectations of you. Perhaps it is time to make a fresh start. If your travels come to an end, then it symbolizes successful completion of your goals. To dream that you are traveling in a car filled with people signifies new friends and exciting adventures.Beginning tonight at sundown is Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year for Jews. It is the Day of Atonement, marked by reflection, praying and fasting. And while Paul Krugman is blasting Heart to get in the mood, others are rushing to their local pharmacies to procure their sacred caffeine suppositories. In preparation for the 25-hour fast, many Jews have turned to caffeine suppositories as a means of keeping themselves attentive and engaged through the High Holy day, and keep their minds off the feast that awaits them at the end. “It helps—you know, it’s hard to concentrate when you’re fasting and also addicted to caffeine. Some take it before sundown, but most take it throughout their fasting. These guys love a good loophole,” Baruch Herzfeld, an Orthodox Jew who owns a bike store in Williamsburg, told Brooklyn Paper. Because you put it up your tuchus, you avoid breaking the fast, although some scholars debate whether putting any object inside your body is breaking the spirit of the day. “We’re supposed to do it the old fashioned way—I wouldn’t advise [suppositories]. We wanna keep Jews in the synagogue and not in the bathroom,” said Rabbi Simcha Weinstein, a Hasidic leader.Last week also marked the inauguration of America’s next president, Donald Trump. Much has been made about the importance of rural voters in Trump’s election, with many pundits, politicos, and commentators asking since November: “What does rural America want?” As someone who spends lots of time in rural Wisconsin, I would sum it up this way: Rural Americans want an end to business-as-usual politics in Washington. Seven years ago the Citizens United decision opened the floodgates on unlimited spending by SuperPACs, and now rural America is saying enough is enough. In addition to voting for Donald Trump on Nov. 8, residents in 18 Wisconsin communities voted to amend the U.S. Constitution to roll back the power of unlimited money in our elections and clarify that only human beings should have inalienable human rights, and money is not the same thing as free speech. All of these referenda passed with overwhelming majorities: Rock County (86 percent), Reedsburg (86 percent), Manitowoc (81 percent), Delafield (79 percent), Neshkoro (88 percent), New Glarus (88 percent), Spring Valley (91 percent), Osceola (86 percent), Mt. Horeb (84 percent), Monticello (86 percent), Clayton (86 percent) and the towns of New Glarus (83 percent), Harris (65 percent), Springdale (86 percent), Decatur (89 percent), Mount Pleasant (84 percent), Cadiz (87 percent) and Lake Tomahawk (91 percent). In a state where even winning political candidates rarely receive more than 65 percent of the popular vote, these resolutions are passing by 65, 75, and 85 percent. Similar referenda have passed with strong majorities in 96 other Wisconsin communities in recent years. Clearly, the desire to get big money out of politics is uniting people across party lines. For those looking to pin down the political zeitgeist of the 2016 election, this is it: Americans want fundamental reform of how politics and elections are run in this country. I’ll be the first to acknowledge that this is a tough issue for a member of Congress to embrace. “Without the big dollars,” electeds rightfully wonder, how will I finance my campaign?” A winning U.S. House campaign costs millions of dollars; a U.S. Senate campaign tens of millions. But the point is that campaigns don’t need to cost that much. Campaign spending has skyrocketed since Citizens United because each candidate needs to defend against the big money attacks of his or her opponents. End the unlimited and unaccountable spending, and costs will go down for everyone. Citizens can run for Congress without having to amass enormous sums, and members of Congress can spend their time in office doing the will of the people, rather than fundraising for the next election. This year marks the first time since the Citizens United decision that the same party has controlled the House, the Senate, and the Presidency. That means no more excuses about partisan gridlock. The same voters who went to the polls for President Trump and Republican majorities in Congress also voted overwhelmingly to say that corporations and unions are not people, and money is not speech. Rural America, you spoke in 2016. Now in the New Year, let’s make sure that Congress is listening.PREV NEXT Order Prints POTSDAM — Clarkson University junior Sam Vigneault will be leaving school a year early after signing a two-year, entry-level contract with the National Hockey League’s Columbus Blue Jackets on Thursday. According to TSN’s Bob McKenzie, Vigneault will begin his professional career with the Blue Jackets’ AHL affiliate, the Cleveland Monsters, and his contract will start at the beginning of next season. Vigneault, a 6-foot-5, 202-pound center from Baie-Comeau, Quebec, scored 12 goals with 24 assists in 39 games, leading the Golden Knights in scoring. “Coming from Quebec a lot of the kids want to play for Montreal,” Vigneault said earlier this month. “I always didn’t have a favorite team. I liked watching the games but I wasn’t really cheering for anyone. It’s just a dream playing in the NHL at some point in my career for sure. I’ve met with Craig Conroy, he was pretty impressive. Chris Clark was another big Clarkson guy who was very impressive to me.” Though Vigneault had a year of eligibility left, he is on schedule to graduate from Clarkson in May with a business degree. Vigneault, who said recently he did not come from a very strong junior league (the QCHL), started out modestly at Clarkson, but, by the middle point of his sophomore year, he emerged as one of Clarkson’s top offensive players. He compiled six goals and seven assists as a freshman and then improved to 12 goals and 14 assists in his sophomore season. Vigneault, 21, had a strong second half of the 2016-17 season, beginning with a two-goal, two-assist effort in a 6-1 win over Rensselaer at Lake Placid on Jan. 7. He picked up a hat trick in a 3-0 win over Colgate on Feb. 17, and registered a goal and two assists against Rensselaer in the opening game of the ECAC Hockey playoffs on March 3. Vigneault’s playoff performance was witnessed by Blue Jackets head coach John Tortorella, who came down from Ottawa, where Columbus was playing the next evening, to see Vigneault play in person, along with Blue Jackets general manager Jarmo Kekalainen, a native of Finland who is a Clarkson alum and former first-team All-ECAC player himself. Columbus has several ties with Clarkson, besides Kekalainen. Former Golden Knight Chris Clark attended a few Clarkson games this season, and he is the Blue Jackets development coach. Also former Golden Knight assistant coach Greg Drechsel is a scout for Columbus.Google’s Daydream platform is expanding its library with Hidden Fortune! This title, developed by Archiact, is now available for users to experience a magical journey. Take a look at the information below to jump start the adventure! Hidden Fortune currently has two chapters to play through. The first, Outcast Cove, is available for free! Explore mysterious caverns while attempting to solve puzzles. However, the second chapter, Shanty Seas, will cost $5.99 on Daydream. Here, you search islands for buried treasures and can even go fishing! Combine these two together in order to collect different wands, meet crazy characters and have fun all in VR. The game joins a list of growing titles to enjoy on the platform. Take a look at the Hidden Fortune trailer for Google Daydream and jump right into a fun world!In a suspected incident of hate crime, a 32-year-old Nadala resident was stabbed to death by unidentified persons outside a grocery store at Modesto city in California, United States, on Friday. The victim, Jagjeet Singh, was a staffer at the commercial establishment. A pall of gloom descended on Nadala on Saturday, after Jagjeet’s relatives learnt about his death. According to sources, Jagjeet – or Jagga – had been living with his sister and brother-in-law in Modesto ever since he left for the United States over a year ago. He is survived by his wife, Kuljeet Kaur, and two sons – Ishmeet Singh (9) and Dilpreet Singh (7) – who reside in Kapurthala. Jagjeet had three siblings – two younger sisters and an elder brother settled in France. Jagjeet Singh’s family mourning his death at their residence at Nadala in Kapurthala on Saturday. ( HT Photo ) “I was told by Sikander Singh, a co-worker at the store, that Jagjeet has fallen victim to a hate crime,” said Kanwarjit Singh Cheema, the victim’s brother-in-law. Sikander had witnessed Jagjeet’s stabbing, he added. According to Kanwarjit, a man – apparently a US national – came to the store around 11.30 pm and asked for a pack of cigarettes. However, Jagjeet refused to hand it over because the customer was unable to produce the mandated identity card for making the purchase. The man then reportedly left the store in a fury, mouthing racist abuses and warning Jagjeet of dire consequences. The entire sequence was captured by a CCTV camera installed in the store premises. Kanwarjit said when Jagjeet went out a few minutes later, he was attacked with a sharp-edged weapon. He succumbed en route to a local hospital. His father, Mohinder Singh, was inconsolable. “Jagjeet was a kind-hearted and hardworking person. We will miss him,” he said. “He went to the US one-and-a-half years ago to support the family. We took loans from relatives to send him there.” The family said that though police are investigating the case, the attackers are yet to be arrested. “We will decide when to cremate him after receiving his body from the hospital,” Mohinder told HT. First Published: May 06, 2017 21:10 ISTENVIRONMENTALISTS are claiming a landmark victory after the Supreme Court upheld a ban on logging of old-growth forest in hotly disputed parts of East Gippsland. Environment East Gippsland had sued VicForests, the government agency responsible for logging in state forests, over plans to log about 60 hectares at Brown Mountain, near Orbost. Justice Robert Osborn yesterday ruled that campaigners had shown that part of the proposed logging zone was home to endangered potoroo and glider species and should be protected. The rest of the area cannot be felled until the court is satisfied the government has carried out surveys that show endangered frog and quoll species are not present. The judgment effectively rules that government surveys that prompted Environment Minister Gavin Jennings to lift a moratorium on logging in the area failed to properly examine whether endangered wildlife was at risk. Justice Osborn ruled VicForests was obliged to take a precautionary approach if warned that endangered animal species were in proposed logging areas.An Amazon fulfillment center in Koblenz, Germany. (Martin Leissl/Bloomberg) Amazon.com rang up strong sales during the crucial holiday season, with the e-commerce giant reporting Thursday that sales in the quarter surged to $43.7 billion, a 22 percent increase over the previous year. For the seventh consecutive quarter, the company managed to deliver a profit, recording $749 million in net income. But investors weren’t exactly celebrating the news: The Seattle company’s stock was down more than 4 percent in after-hours trading, likely because Wall Street had been expecting an even bigger revenue haul. As has often been the case in recent quarters, Amazon’s cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services, accounted for a sizable portion of its profits. AWS was responsible for $926 million in operating income this quarter, compared to $816 million for the North America division, which includes its U.S. retailing business. Its international division continued to lose money, with an operating loss of $487 million. One of the cornerstones of Amazon’s e-commerce success has been its Prime membership program, in which shoppers pay $99 per year for unlimited two-day shipping on many purchases. Amazon does not disclose how many people have Prime memberships, but analysts estimate that the number is about 50 million. In a Thursday news release, chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos said that “tens of millions of new paid members” joined Prime in the past year, a figure that suggests the program is still growing at a fast pace. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) The company also said that it now has 50 million items that are eligible for Prime shipping, up 73 percent over the previous year. And yet that kind of growth comes with serious challenges: The company once again saw its fulfillment costs swell in the quarter, eating into its profit. Earnings per share for the period were $1.54. Amazon has long been pouring money into its logistics network to try to make its supply chain costs more manageable over the long-term. Just this week, it announced it is building an air cargo hub in northern Kentucky to support the fleet of Prime Air jets it has leased for ferrying goods. Amazon’s healthy sales increase helps complete a portrait of where the retail industry stands in the wake of the holidays. Several weeks earlier, many traditional brick-and-mortar retailers, such as Macy’s, Target, JCPenney and Barnes & Noble, reported bleak results that they chalked up to waning mall foot traffic and other issues. And yet, the National Retail Federation, a key industry trade group, reported that things actually shaped up pretty well in November and December for the wider retailing universe. Sales were up 4 percent industry-wide, suggesting that Amazon, along with small and medium-sized retailers, captured plenty of dollars from shoppers even as the old guard struggled. A recent analysis illustrates just how dominant a force Amazon is in online shopping: Slice Intelligence, an e-commerce research firm, found that Amazon drew some 43 percent of all online sales in 2016. And, more important, it accounted for some 53 percent of all the growth in e-commerce last year, suggesting that other merchants are seriously struggling to match its momentum. Slice found that a hefty share of that growth has been fueled by Amazon’s own products, such as its voice-activated assistant gadget, the Echo. Indeed, Amazon reported Thursday that devices relying on its Alexa voice-assistant software were the top-selling products overall on Amazon’s website during the holiday rush.Diabetes is the seventh leading cause of death in the US, raising risks for heart attack, blindness, kidney disease and limb amputation. But researchers who have shown that a common blood pressure drug totally reverses diabetes in mice are about to begin a new clinical trial to see if it can do the same for humans. The beta cells that produce insulin are attacked by the body's immune system in type 1 diabetes. The beta cells that produce insulin are attacked by the body's immune system in type 1 diabetes. If the trial is successful, it could herald the first "cure" for an incurable disease that affects 12.3% of Americans over the age of 20 and costs the nation $245 billion each year. The key to the groundbreaking approach that has been proven effective in mice are beta cells, which the researchers explain are "critical" in type 1 and type 2 diabetes. These cells are progressively lost in the wake of the disease due to programmed cell death, though the precise triggers for the deaths were previously unknown. The researchers, from the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) and led by Dr. Anath Shalev, have been working on this research for over a decade in UAB's Comprehensive Diabetes Center. They explain that their previous research has shown that high blood sugar causes an overproduction of a protein called TXNIP - which is increased within beta cells in response to diabetes. Too much TXNIP in pancreatic beta cells leads to their deaths, stopping the body's efforts to produce insulin and further promoting diabetes. However, in animal models, the team has found that verapamil - used to treat high blood pressure, irregular heartbeat and migraine headaches - lowers TXNIP levels in beta cells. In fact, in mice with established diabetes and blood sugars over 300 mg/dL, verapamil "eradicated" the disease. The video below describes how verapamil works in the wake of diabetes: Trial will not include immunosuppressive medications Now, the UAB researchers have received a 3-year, $2.1 million grant from JDRF - the largest charitable supporter of type 1 diabetes research - to conduct a clinical trial in 2015 in humans. Commenting on the upcoming trial, Dr. Shalev says: "That is a proof-of-concept that, by lowering TXNIP, even in the context of the worst diabetes, we have beneficial effects. And all of this addresses the main underlying cause of the disease - beta cell loss. Our current approach attempts to target this loss by promoting the patient's own beta cell mass and insulin production. There is currently no treatment available that targets diabetes in this way." The trial, which will begin recruitment processes early next year, will include 52 people aged 19-45 within 3 months of receiving a type 1 diabetes diagnosis. They will then be randomized to receive either verapamil or a placebo for 1 year while continuing insulin pump therapy. The participants will also be equipped with a continuous glucose monitoring system so they can measure their blood sugar continuously throughout the day. A unique feature of this trial is that it will not include the use of any immunosuppressive or immune modulatory medications, which carry severe side effects and are used in most type 1 diabetes trials. "This trial is based on a well-known blood pressure medication that has been used for more than 30 years and is unlikely to have any severe side effects," adds Dr. Shalev, who also notes that their study is backed by a wealth of data in different mouse models and human islets. 'We are on the right track' Dr. Fernando Ovalle, director of UAB's Comprehensive Diabetes Clinic and co-principal investigator of the study, will oversee all clinical aspects of the trial. Fast facts about diabetes in the US 37% of people over the age of 20 have pre-diabetes, up from 27% a decade ago 29.1 million people - 9.3% of the population - have diabetes 8.1 million people - 27.8% of those with diabetes - are undiagnosed. Learn more about diabetes "Currently, we can prescribe external insulin and other medications to lower blood sugar," he says, "but we have no way to stop the destruction of beta cells, and the disease continues to get worse." He adds that if verapamil works in humans, "it would be a truly revolutionary development in a disease affecting more people each year to the tune of billions of dollars annually." JDRF say they are funding this trial as part of their beta cell restoration research program, whose goal is to essentially find a biological cure for type 1 diabetes by restoring a person's ability to produce their own insulin. "We want to find new drugs - different from any current diabetes treatments - that can help halt the growing, worldwide epidemic of diabetes and improve the lives of those affected by this disease," says Dr. Shalev. "Finally, we have reason to believe that we are on the right track," he concludes. For more information or to enroll in the trial, contact Kentress Davison at UAB at 205-934-4112 or 205-975-9308. In June of this year, Medical News Today reported on a study from the University of Cincinnati in Ohio that demonstrated how a new therapy reversed new onset type 1 diabetes in mice. They did this by tackling a receptor on dendritic cells called TLR4.Via Richard Preston‘s fantastic and alarming New Yorker article on the genesis and spread of Ebola, we learn that a major early vector of the current epidemic was an unidentified faith-healing fraudster. Preston tells of a Sierra Leone woman who … had been at the funeral of a faith healer who had recently been to Guinea and had died after attempting to heal a number of people sick with Ebola. … Teams of epidemiologists and health workers spread out from Kenema and identified twelve more women who were sick with Ebola. All of them had been at the funeral of the faith healer. From there, the disease spread and claimed thousands more lives, including that of Humarr Khan, an amazing doctor who was Sierra Leone’s foremost expert in filoviruses like Lassa and Ebola, and the country’s best hope for combatting the disease. Notwithstanding the fact that the first documented Ebola outbreak, in 1976, was due in large part to nuns at a Catholic hospital giving pregnant women vitamin injections with dirty, unsterilized needles, Preston’s story reminds us that there’s a lot of good medical work being done by Christians in the affected areas. Samaritan’s Purse, an organization that has a hospital near Monrovia, Liberia, is singled out for (ha!) praise — and so is the secular-minded Doctors Without Borders treatment center at Kailahun, in eastern Sierra Leone. For some reason, neither of those places employ faith healers. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= P.S.: Still the local faith-healing lunacy continues. The Los Angeles Times has a portrait of Liberian faith healer Dorothy Sawer. Sawer is sure Ebola is a spiritual disease, she says, not merely a physical sickness. Despite her most powerful prayers, her own pastor died of Ebola, along with most other people upon whom she beseeched God’s intervention. it’s God’s will,” says Sawer, puzzling over why so many died and wondering why all that healing prayer didn’t save a good man like Pastor Garpou. “Maybe some people never had the faith that they could make it and some people lose hope.” Then she fell ill herself. She tells this story: The first thing she asked for at the treatment center wasn’t water or medicine. She wanted a Bible. At the treatment center. When it came to her own life, she apparently elected to get expert medical help pronto, instead of relying strictly on the Lord’s awesome powers to make her well. Then, she recalls, “One night I felt a hand patting me on my shoulder.” A nurse checking she was still alive? “I don’t know who touched me. I think it was the spirit of God.” The next morning, she left her bed. She recovered, as swiftly as she had gotten ill. The roll of the dice or the medical treatment she received had nothing to do with that. It was God, wouldn’t you know it, and Sawer believes it despite the miserable, painful Ebola deaths of other hard-praying Christians all around her. And so: She began religious devotion sessions, morning and night, with prayer and songs. Even the nurses, clad head to toe in protective suits, sometimes joined in, clapping and singing. As you do, of course, when you’re a medical professional. (Image via Wikipedia)DUBLIN, Ohio -- The true media star of the first day of the Presidents Cup wasn't Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson or Adam Scott. World, meet Sammy. Sammy, this is the world. U.S. captain's assistant Davis Love III started feeding a stray squirrel he found at the second hole at Muirfield Village, and the two more or less became friends. 'Sammy' the squirrel climbed onto the shoulder of Tiger Woods on Thursday with a little help from girlfriend Lindsey Vonn. Matt Sullivan/Getty Images "He rode around with me today," Love said later, after the U.S. had taken a 3½ to 2½ lead following the opening day of the competition. An avid hunter and outdoorsman, the 49-year-old Love, a 20-time PGA Tour winner, kept the squirrel rested on his wrist as he carried out his duties during the matches. He even took the animal into the Americans' team meeting room, and all of the players took a liking to it. "My dad always picked up sticks for good luck, and he told me I had to keep it as long as were winning holes," Love said. Steve Stricker's wife, Nicki, named him, "Sammy." As Love drove in an electric cart watching the four-ball matches, he had the squirrel riding along, sitting in his lap. It provided a surreal scene as the matches ground to dramatic conclusions and the score inched closer and closer. He/she (no one knows for certain) became an unofficial mascot. As the day came down to the final match, with Ernie Els and Brendon de Jonge fighting on the final hole but falling short in a 1-down loss to Stricker and Jordan Spieth, the squirrel was in the middle of the American players and their wives and girlfriends, who were watching the tense finish. That's when Lindsey Vonn -- you may know her as a world-class skier or for her commercials and posters or for being Woods' girlfriend -- provided one of the most memorable images of the day. While Woods stared from the hill near the 18th green, watching the action, Vonn playfully took the squirrel out of Love's right front pocket. She leaned behind Woods and carefully put the squirrel on his neck.HKBN bundles Premier League package with LeTV for HK$272/month HKBN Ltd. (01310.HK) has partnered with LeTV to offer some subscribers broadcasts of English Premier League soccer matches for an average HK$272 per month. The first 5,000 users of the Hong Kong broadband internet provider’s 100MB household service who register for the package on a 24-month contract can watch the games using the Chinese online video giant’s set-top boxes. The Premier League coverage will start in August next year, the Hong Kong Economic Journal reported Friday. The registration for the promotional package is scheduled to start at midnight Friday. LeTV Holdings Co. Ltd. vice president Mo Cuitian said he is confident users will be able to enjoy smooth 4K-resolution video streaming through HKBN’s 100MB broadband network. The 24-month package also includes HKBN’s broadband service and the rental of the LeTV receiver. Excluding those costs, HKBN says, the subscription to the soccer broadcasts works out to a theoretical HK$230 a month. By comparison, nowTV, operated by PCCW Ltd. (00008.HK), charges an average monthly fee of HK$264 to subscribers who want to watch the league in the coming three years. NowTV, however, also broadcasts Spain’s Primera Liga and news and drama programs. HKBN’s chief executive, William Yeung, said he expects the company to achieve early its goal of hosting one million users by 2019. The firm now has 700,000 registered users. PCCW is controlled by Richard Li Tzar-kai, who owns EJ Insight’s parent company, the Hong Kong Economic Journal Co. Ltd. [Chinese version中文版] – Contact us at [email protected] VW/JP/FLGiven that Half-Life 3 may just be the most highly requested video game sequel of all time, it’s no surprise that fans around the world get worked up when the illusive title is hinted at. The most recent culprit is a curious Twitter combination, with both IGN and Steam Support tweeting in tandem about what may be an upcoming announcement – and it certainly sounds like Half-Life 3 may be involved. Fans have been waiting for a sequel (Half-Life 2: Episode Three OR Half-Life 3) for eight years now, so it should come as no surprise that they’re getting antsy about one of the most beloved series of all time. The Steam community has already organized online events to garner attention from Valve, and Gabe Newell himself has recently touched on the subject, confirming that the development team for Half-Life 3 was still fully-staffed and hard at work on the game. Yesterday, however, all eyes were on Twitter as IGN and Steam released the following tweets: The infamous quote from IGN comes straight from the beginning of Half-Life 2, when G-Man stutters his way into a chilling introduction for the player. Then, the Steam Support Twitter simply tweeted that people should check out all of Valve’s feeds, perhaps implying a large announcement was on the way. Both IGN And Valve haven’t clarified what their tweets were about, which is exactly the kind of inaction a company would take if it were teasing something. And believe us, we’re hoping they are. While it could just be a massive coincidence, nothing can be written out as E3 2012 approaches. Gabe has been known to make surprising announcements, having shocked fans around the world at E3 Expo two years ago, where he proclaimed his support for the PlayStation 3 and showed the world premiere of Portal 2. We certainly wouldn’t mind if he did the same thing this year with a certain game from the Half-Life series, assuming Valve shows up – last year the enigmatic company opted to stay quiet. What do you think about the well-timed tweets? Do you think something big is afoot as we approach E3 2012? – Feel free to follow me on Twitter @Makelevi. Source: XBigyGamesBiblioArchives / LibraryArchives, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 For Canadian’s the monarchy costs each person as little as $1.53 a year(94p), which is about as expensive as a small cup of coffee at the Canadian coffee chain Tim Hortons. The $1.53 doesn’t just cover the Canadian Governor General, who is their representative for the monarchy in Canada. The $1.53 also covers all official residences, staff, administration, travel, security and on top of all of that, office supplies. This $1.53 is a lot less than the Senate’s $2.38 per person, or the House of Commons $11.78. In fact, the cost of the Monarchy costs just a little bit more than the Canadian Library of Parliament, which comes in at $1.16 per person. The $1.53 doesn’t just cover the Canadian Governor General, who is their representative for the monarchy in Canada. The $1.53 also covers all official residences, staff, administration, travel, security and on top of all of that, office supplies. This $1.53 is a lot less than the Senate’s $2.38 per person, or the House of Commons $11.78. In fact, the cost of the Monarchy costs just a little bit more than the Canadian Library of Parliament, which comes in at $1.16 per person. The cost does not cover any operations in other countries. For example, Buckingham Palace and the work of The Queen in the UK is not covered under the cost, a fact that the Monarchist League says comes as a surprise to many people. The data on the cost of the monarchy comes from the Monarchist League of Canada who sought out to counter the claims that the monarchy was an expensive burden. Robert Finch, the Monarchist League’s Dominion Chairman said that “Usually, I get comments such as ‘Wow, that’s pretty cheap,’ or, ‘ I thought the monarchy cost so much more'”. The majority of the $55 million total goes to the Office of the Governor General and Lieutenant-Governors. Who, all together, undertook over 4000 official engagements last year. Personally, I feel paying $1.53 for the crown is more than worth it. In fact, if it was necessary, I’d happily pay more. The Royal Family provides a sense of history, culture and in a time where politics is seen as being turbulent, a sense of stability. You might hate the current government, or the past one, or a future one; the Royal Family provides us with an unopinionated and unpoliticized head of state that everyone can gather round and support.0 of 8 With roughly 50 games to go across Major League Baseball before the regular season wraps up, there is still a lot of baseball to be played. But the races for MLB awards have already begun to take shape. What follows are my rankings of the top 10 candidates for each major award as things stand right now. I've also included what I feel are the odds of each candidate winning the award when all is said and done. As a result, the candidates are not ranked by who has the best odds, but instead by where their stock stands as of today. I've taken a look at the Comeback Player of the Year, Rookie of the Year, Cy Young and MVP races in both leagues.The Bible became an exhibit in a Regina human rights hearing examining the Leader-Post’s rejection of an anti-gay advertisement containing scripture verses. For about a dozen years, Hugh Owens — who describes himself as “a Bible-believing Christian” — had placed the paid advertisement in the local newspaper during Gay Pride Week. But in June 2013, the paper turned him down. Testifying Wednesday in Court of Queen’s Bench, Owens said he used the yearly advertisement “to get the message out how God looks at this behaviour.” He felt it was his duty, as a Christian. “It’s a difficult thing, I know, but it has to be done,” Owens said. In cross-examination, the Regina corrections worker agreed he wouldn’t have been content with running an ad that contained such a biblical verse as “love thy neighbour.” “I chose the four (verses) that were the most condemning,” he replied. At the request of the newspaper’s publisher in 1999, he agreed to cut back to three passages, since the fourth one dealt with the death penalty for “this behaviour.” When he went to place the ad in 2013, he was told, “They weren’t going to print it — and that was that.” Pressing for an explanation, Owens got a letter from the paper indicating the publisher has the right to reject ads, and “the newspaper has simply decided to exercise its discretion with respect to your advertisement submission.” Owens filed a complaint with the Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission, alleging Postmedia, which owns the Leader-Post, had discriminated against him on the basis of religion. Robert McLaughlin, Postmedia’s regional vice president, editorial, for Western Canada, said Owens’ faith didn’t enter into the decision. “It was the view of the Leader-Post (the ad) was offensive,” McLaughlin testified. “It was intentionally targeting a certain group of people based on their sexual orientation,” he added, briefly becoming emotional. After Owens’ ad ran in 2012, a Leader-Post employee complained internally. In forwarding the concern to other senior managers, the human resources manager noted the employee felt “distraught” by the ad, describing it as “offensive and malicious.” McLaughlin testified about a discussion by senior managers, including then-publisher Marty Klyne, who took the position the ad didn’t represent the paper’s values. A decision was made to “flag” Owens in the computer system and reject the advertisement should he try to run it again. In email correspondence — part of an agreed statement of facts submitted to the court — Klyne wrote, “I think we should have a moral or values stand on this and take the flack for not running it as opposed to running it (to) avoid the flack.” Owens told the court he anticipated a time would come when the ad would be rejected — “I just didn’t think it would come this soon.” Owens traced his long-running history of human rights battles — both as a complainant and respondent. He decided to take a stand in 1993 after the provincial government opted to make sexual orientation a protected human right. He launched a human rights complaint, but it was rejected by the investigating officer. He also tried to sue the government — to no avail. Then in 1997, during Gay Pride Week, he placed an ad in the Saskatoon StarPhoenix. It depicted two male stick figures holding hands with a universal “not allowed” symbol superimposed over them, along with Bible references. Around the same time three men filed human rights complaints about the ad, Owens made a complaint that the StarPhoenix and the Prairie Dog newspapers had rejected another of his ads, about a book condemning homosexuality. While Owens’ complaint was rejected at the investigation stage, a human rights board of inquiry found in favour of the three men. The decision was ultimately overturned in 2006 when the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal ruled Owens’ ad
80% -> 100% [Items] The “weight capacity -25LT” item effect has been removed from all Elsh Weapons. The descriptions for Elsh Weapons have been edited also. The icon for [Guild] Galley Plan has changed. Fixed an issue where the preview for [Jukebox] A Quintet for Spring did not work. Fixed an issue where the dye for [Maehwa] Kibelius Kerispear was not displayed properly. You can now collect the samples for Marni’s Stone even though the Stone is in a locked inventory space. ▶You cannot exchange the Stone that is in a locked inventory space with EXP. [Content] You can now choose one of the following options for your daily exp boost. ▶Mercenary’s Experience (60 min): combat exp +200% ▶Mercenary’s Experience (120 min): combat exp +100% ▶Mercenary’s Skill (60 min): skill exp +30% ▶Mercenary’s Skill (120 min): skill exp +15% The level restriction for “Combat Reputation Rewards - one for faster growth” has changed. ▶Level 15 to 55 -> Level 15 to 56 New personal ship, the Epheria Convoy has been added. (Click here for details) ▶You can build the ship in Tier3 Shipyard, 3-5 Epheria Port. ▶The Epheria Convoy comes with 4 cannons, which makes it stronger than the Epheria Sailbot in ocean battles. New Processing patterns have been added. ▶Plated Pine Plywood: 10 Coconuts + Pine Playwood (Heating) ▶Jade Coral Ingot: 5 Melted Titanium Shards + Prairie Green Coral (Heating) ▶Enhanced Flax Fabric: Flax Fabric + Shining Powder (Drying) ▶The new Processing patterns require Skilled level in order to be processed. New Titles are available to get by killing Hunting monsters. ▶Graceful Figure ▶Just Hit! ▶Roaaaar! ▶Sneaky One ▶Lone Wolf The victory conditions for Calpheon/Mediah/Valencia Conquest Wars and the war procedures have changed. ▶The defending guild will win if the outer Fortress Gate is not destroyed after 2 hours. ▶The defending guild must defend the castle for 30 more minutes every time one gate is destroyed. ▶For example, if the outer Fortress Gate is destroyed at 9pm, the defending guild must defend the castle until 10:30pm, instead of 10pm. The conditions to enter the Militia has changed. ▶All guilds can participate in the Militia. ▶However, only the guilds that have a Node in the associated area can participate as the defending side. ▶The attacking guild and the attacking Militia are considered as they are on the same team, thus unable to attack each other. Same rules apply for the defending guild and the defending Militia. ▶However, the guild members who are participating in the Conquest War are able to attack the other players and the Militia when they activate PK first. ▶The Militia cannot attack the participating guilds even if they activate PK. ▶Karma will not drop during Conquest War, even if you PK another player. The respawn spot for the defending Militia has changed to a spot outside the castle. Fixed an issue where the players in the Militia and the players in the Conquest War could not attack each other. You can no longer remove an item from your inventory by dragging & dropping it outside of your inventory. ▶You must drag & drop the item you want to remove to the “trash can”. Fixed an issue where some furniture could not be selected in placement mode when the resolution was below certain value. [Monsters] The monsters in the following Mediah regions will now give more EXP, and the Elite monsters’ HP has decreased. ▶Abandoned Iron Mine ▶Manes Hideout ▶Wandering Rogue Den ▶Helms Post ▶Elric Shrine “Green” rarity Magic Crystals will not be dropped in the following Media regions anymore, and the drop rates for Black Stone(Armor) and Hercules’s Might Armors have increased. ▶Abandoned Iron Mine ▶Manes Hideout ▶Wandering Rogue Den ▶Helms Post ▶Elric Shrine The monsters at Sausan Garrison have been relocated. New monsters, Shultz’s Guardians, will appear in the shore area of Sausan Garrison. (Click here for details) The name of the monster you have to kill to complete the [Boss Subjugation] Mirumok Watcher Offin quest has changed to Mirumok Destroyer Offin. [Quest and Knowledge] Design: Epheria Convoy has been added to the reward choices for the Falasi Family’s Kindness quest. The icon for the Fishing Trip? Try Mackerel Pike! quest has changed to a mackerel icon. Life skill advancement will no longer appear in the recommended quests section when your character is below level 20. You can now arrive at the well in the Biraghi Den by auto pathing during the Bandits’ Treasure Chamber quest. Fixed an issue where you could not deliver Worker’s Elixir to Sugarsh during the “For tired Workers” quest. The following quests have been added. New quests related to Sausan Garrison have been added to the Sarma Outpost. You can receive the quests from NPC Narava Rakum when you are over level 58. (Click here for details) ▶The recon party defeated by Sausan people ▶Strange movement ▶Shultz’s Guardians are back ▶Shultz’s coffin ▶Mission Report: Sausan people’s whereabouts ▶Adish witnesses something ▶Shultz the Gladiator, the secret behind his death ▶Gongklad’s suggestion ▶Gongklad declares war ▶[Repeat] Besiege Shult’z Guardians The following Knowledges have been added in the Mediah Ecology - Sausan Garrison category. ▶Shultz’s Guardian Gladiator ▶Shultz’s Guardian Sniper ▶Shultz’s Guardian Heavy Armor Warrior The below Knowledge has been added in the Mediah Journal - Mediah Adventure Journal II category. ▶Corpse of Shultz the Gladiator ▶Obtainable during the “Shultz’s coffin” quest. Mirumok Destroyer Offin Knowledge has been added. ▶Obtainable from Anbelif, the NPC at Kamasylvia. Build Amity with her and engage in a conversation to obtain the Knowledge. The Black Spirit will now show the path guide for obtaining Skilled Processing Knowledge. [NPC] The name for the NPC Yan’s Assistant in Valencia has changed to Shahin. [UI] The description in the Militia window has been edited. Fixed an issue where the texts for some quests were not properly displayed in the quest window. The scroll bar for a new dialogue window will now move more naturally. Fixed an issue where the cooldown for changing servera was not displayed properly. [System] A new menu called “Monster Ranking” has been added in the main menu. ▶You can check for the guilds who rapidly defeated Mirumok Watcher Offin and Mirumok Destroyer Offin. ▶Time Attack starts as soon as the guild interacts with Offin, and the guild will make it to the ranks when the members defeat Offin within a limited time. ▶The rank will not be updated real time. The rank will be updated in the Ranking menu after a certain time. ▶Only the best record will be on the page, even if the same guild is successful in the time attack multiple times. Fixed an issue where no changes were saved when you click the go back button or the go forward button in the customization menu. Fixed an issue where the go back button did not work when customizing the character’s body part. Fixed an issue where the keyboard shortcuts for the back button and the forward button worked while entering customization file name.TORONTO (AP) — Canadian actor Tony Rosato has died at age 62. He was a veteran of comedy shows including "Saturday Night Live" and Canada's homegrown "SCTV." Rosato's former agent Larry Goldhar has confirmed that Rosato died Tuesday. Goldhar says an autopsy is being done. The Italian-born actor joined Martin Short and Robin Duke as the only three performers to have been cast members of "Saturday Night Live" and "SCTV," which was spun out of Second City shortly after "SNL" launched in the mid-1970s. In 2005, Rosato was charged with criminally harassing his wife. He spent two years in prison awaiting trial before he was diagnosed with Capgras syndrome, a condition that made him believe his wife and daughter had been replaced by impostors. He was committed to a mental institution.WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. judge on Tuesday ordered a rural Mississippi school district to comply with a nearly 40-year-old order and halt long-disputed practices that led to racial segregation in its schools. The Justice Department accused the Walthall County School District in rural Mississippi of annually permitting more than 300 students, most of them white, to transfer to a school outside of their residential area, shifting its racial makeup. Further, administrators at three other schools grouped most of the white students into their own classrooms “resulting in significant numbers of segregated all-black classrooms at each grade level,” the U.S. government said in a court filing. The case comes in a state that was at the heart of the U.S. civil rights movement in the 1960s. In 1964, three civil rights workers were murdered in Mississippi, an incident that helped prompt Congress to pass a law banning racial segregation in schools, work and public places. The school district was ordered in 1970 to stop segregating its schools. But in the late 1980s officials were confronted by the Justice Department with concerns about student transfers to other schools that undermined the desegregation efforts. While the district made some changes in the early 1990s, the Justice Department said the practices continued and the schools became “significantly more segregated.” The district did not respond to the government’s lawsuit seeking reforms. In fact, the county school board in 2009 rejected a tentative settlement with the government that would have overhauled the district’s transfer policy and prevented students being assigned to classrooms based on race. LIMIT TRANSFERS On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Tom Lee, in Jackson, Mississippi, ordered the school district to significantly limit transfers. Lee also ordered the district to stop assigning students to classrooms that resulted in segregation, demanding that it use a software program to randomly assign them. “It is unacceptable for school districts to act in a way that encourages or tolerates the resegregation of public schools,” said Thomas Perez, assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. In 2008, the Walthall district had about 2,550 students — of whom about 64 percent were black and 35 percent were white. At four schools, less than a quarter of the students were white while at least 73 percent of the students were black in 2008, according to the government court filing. In 1992, the racial makeup of those schools was between 59 percent and 70 percent black and at least 30 percent white. Meanwhile at another school, Salem Attendance Center, 66 percent of the students were white while a third were black students in 2008. That was a dramatic shift from 1992 when a majority, 58 percent, were black and 42 percent were white. The change in the school racial makeup was not because of population shifts, but rather “the product of unlawful district transfer policies that permit hundreds of white students” to transfer each year, the Justice Department said. The superintendent for the district declined to comment on the judge’s ruling.So this won’t be a super-long post, but it’s something that I need to say here because I’m tired of having the same arguments with people about the paleo way of life. This is something that people seem to not be able to grasp, and I’m not sure why this is such a difficult concept, BUT: PALEO NUTRITION IS NOT ABOUT EATING THE EXACT SAME FOODS AS OUR PALEOLITHIC ANCESTORS. Shocking, right? If this IS shocking to you, then you’ve missed the point of this completely. Let me explain what’s going on here, and why we do what we do. First off, eating “paleo” is not a one-way, carved in stone type of eating. There is no single “Paleo Diet”. There are many general things that you can say about paleo, such as “no grains”, or “eat meat”, but there are many gray areas, and those gray areas depend a lot on who you are, and what your goals are. We’ll leave those for now, but I may address them in another post. Eating “paleo” simply means that we are using the diet of our ancestors as a template to generate hypotheses to figure out what we should be eating now. We are using the fact that they were almost always healthy, lean, fit, disease-free, strong people to help us make the same healthy choices. I’m not going to even address the shoddy arguments of “but they only lived like 20 years, so it’s not helpful”, but if you want, read THIS. The plain and simple fact is that if the goal was to literally mirror what our ancestors ate, we would fail on the first day. None of the animals or plants that we lived on 15,000 years ago exist anymore, or at least don’t exist in the same form that they once did. The basis of paleo nutrition is completely founded in science. Most people miss this fact. We don’t avoid grains just because we didn’t have them around. We didn’t have olive oil either, if you must know. But when we look at the effects of grains on our system, specifically the gut, we know that they are toxic and contain a lot of anti-nutrients that have many negative effects on us. We know this from study after study. Most of us also know this from personal experience. Remove the grains, and suddenly we don’t feel bloated anymore. We lose weight instantly. We figured all this out because we followed a scientific method. We used our ancestors to generate a hypothesis. We tested it and tested it again and again. The results were the same every time. Coming back to olive oil, we did the same thing, and it turns out that we do process olive oil in a favorable way. I’m not trying to convince anyone here of switching to a paleo way of life. Well, I am in general, but not with this specific post. I mostly just wanted to have a page that I could reference my non-believers to, without having to type this argument again and again. If you’re going to argue against this way of life, FINE, but at least understand what you’re arguing against in the first place. And if you ARE going to argue that grains are GOOD for us, then at least do your research and tell me how gluten and lectins are having a positive effect on us. Thanks, and now back to your regularly scheduled programming. AdvertisementsIn a stinging attack on Arvind Kejriwal, Sheila Dikshit said people of the city were the "real sufferers" in AAP government's fight with the Centre. AAP government's confrontationist attitude towards the Lieutenant Governor and Centre has virtually stalled administration and Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal is trying to revive the issue of full statehood to Delhi to divert attention from his failures, former chief minister Sheila Dikshit said today.In a stinging attack on Mr Kejriwal, Ms Dikshit said people of the city were the "real sufferers" in AAP government's fight with the Centre and Lieutenant Governor Najeeb Jung on a series of issues."You cannot run a government adopting a confrontationist attitude. They have been fighting with the LG, they have been fighting with the Centre on virtually every issue. People of Delhi are suffering because of it," Ms Dikshit told news agency PTI.The 78-year-old Congress veteran said Mr Kejriwal recently released a draft bill on full statehood to Delhi with an aim to revive the issue to "hide his failures" in fulfillng the election promises."Delhi has a unique administrative set up. You must respect the constitutional provisions. We have ensured Delhi's development under the same set up. We had differences with the Centre but they were sorted out amicably," said Ms Dikshit, whose party was handed a crushing defeat by AAP in 2014 polls.The former chief minister said there was virtually no administration and that Delhi's development can be ensured through cooperation and not confrontation."I have a feeling that whenever Kejriwal faces criticism, he tries to divert attention. He has brought this statehood bill to divert attention from his failures. Delhi can be granted statehood only by Parliament," said Ms Dikshit.She said the AAP government has "totally failed" to take Delhi forward on the path of development."They have done nothing in the last one year. The city is suffering because of their inefficiency," she said.Asked about the electoral drubbing Congress suffered in the Assembly polls, Ms Dikshit said the party had faced bigger crises but emerged stronger from electoral reverses. "The party will come out of it strongly. I do not have any doubt about it," she said.The head of the Federal Communications Commission will push ahead with a vote on controversial net-neutrality regulations despite an outpouring of public anger and calls for delay. All of the FCC commissioners aside from Chairman Tom Wheeler have criticized the proposal and two of them have said the commission should delay the vote scheduled for next Thursday. The rules would allow Internet service providers to charge websites for faster service in some cases. Thousands of people have filed comments opposing the rules, and the world’s largest tech companies sent a letter this week warning that the proposal is a threat to the Internet. But Wheeler included his net-neutrality proposal on the commission’s formal agenda for next week’s meeting. Recognizing the controversy over the issue, Wheeler waived the commission’s “sunshine” rule, which typically cuts off public comments one week before votes. In a statement Thursday, the FCC said members of the public “should have full opportunity to express their views” and that the commission will consider all comments submitted by next Wednesday at 11:59 p.m. The FCC first enacted net-neutrality rules in 2010, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit struck them down in January. Wheeler is trying to rework the rules in a way that can survive future court challenges. His proposal would ban Internet service providers from blocking websites but would allow them to charge for special “fast lanes” as long as the arrangements are “commercially reasonable.” Wheeler argues that his proposal is on strong legal ground and would prevent abuses. But liberal critics fear that any “fast lanes” will tilt the Internet in favor of the largest corporations and stifle free speech. Wheeler will need the support of two of the other four commissioners to advance the proposal at Thursday’s meeting. The two Republicans, who are skeptical of any net-neutrality rules, are almost-certain “no” votes. Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, a Democrat, said Wednesday she has “real concerns” with the proposal. She urged Wheeler to delay the vote by at least a month to give the agency more time to review the feedback from the public. “I believe that rushing headlong into a rule-making next week fails to respect the public response to his proposal,” Rosenworcel said. She has not clarified whether she would vote against the proposal. Rep. Anna Eshoo, the top Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Communications and Technology Subcommittee, which oversees the FCC, said Wednesday that Rosenworcel had “a very good point.” Republican Commissioner Ajit Pai issued a statement Thursday echoing Rosenworcel’s call for a delay. “I have grave concerns about the Chairman’s proposal on Internet regulation and do not believe that it should be considered at the Commission’s May meeting,” he said. The vote next Thursday will only decide whether the FCC will move ahead with the proposal. The FCC will have to hold a separate vote to finalize the regulations.Paddlesteamer Gondola on its way to Cremorne Gardens 1855 near the original Princes Bridge, Melbourne Lithograph of Cremorne Gardens in 1862 Cremorne Gardens was a pleasure garden (now referred to as amusement parks) established in 1853 on the banks of the Yarra River at Richmond in Melbourne, Australia. The gardens were established by James Ellis who had earlier managed and leased similar gardens of the same name on the banks of the River Thames at Chelsea in London. He had been declared bankrupt and emigrated to Australia to take advantage of the business opportunities made possible by the Victorian gold rush and its accompanying population explosion. His first venture in the entertainment world in Melbourne was Astley's Amphitheatre, but his experiences in catering in London inclined him to a profit making business with a wider basis. Because of previous experience he had established contacts in the theatrical world of London. he took advantage of them to create a venue with viable entertainments to divert the population of the rapidly expanding capital of the new Australian state where entertainment was demanded by a predominantly male society. The wowser element in Melbourne did not approve of the pleasure gardens. Ellis had invested a lot of money in them and they were very popular, but criticism of the availability of liquor and the use of the venue by prostitutes went against him. Ellis had tried to gain social favour by donating percentages of profits to charity but that did not help him. The disapproval was an attitude which had frequently been taken against the large pleasure gardens in London on which Ellis had based his colonial duplicate. It would not, however, have been beneath Ellis to take advantage of the needs of diggers holidaying in Melbourne and on the hunt for a bit of fun. His detractors forced his sale of Cremorne Gardens but they survived in the hands of someone who had the skill and experience to administer and develop them. Ellis went on to own a hotel in Fitzroy. The gardens were acquired by the popular theatrical entrepreneur and local identity George Coppin who expanded them significantly using even better contacts in the world of English theatre than Ellis enjoyed. Cremorne was Coppin's indulgence and hobby and he poured money into them without applying business acumen. For a time he lived on site. The residence had been built by the Colonial Architect, Henry Ginn, who had originally established the gardens as part of his up-river retreat in the mid-1840s. Entertainment provided included a Cyclorama, bowling alley, menagerie, dancers and nightly fireworks. Coppin continued the presentation of the annual panoramas introduced by Ellis. Patrons arrived by riverboat or by train at the purpose built railway station. The gardens were notable as being the location of the first balloon flight in Australia when in 1858 Englishman William Dean floated seven miles (11 km) north to Brunswick. In 1859 Coppin imported six camels from Aden as exhibits for the Cremorne Gardens menagerie and in 1860 he sold them to the Exploration Committee of the Royal Society of Victoria who used them on the Burke and Wills expedition. George Coppin went bankrupt in 1863 and the gardens were closed. The land was sold and became an asylum which itself closed in the 1880s. The land was then subdivided for housing by Thomas Bent. With the turn of the century much of the housing gave way to small and large industrial establishments but a lot of the small working class housing remains today and has been progressively gentrified. A small park is at the southern end of the area previously occupied by the gardens and a plaque marks their location and the place from which the hot air balloons were launched. The site of the gardens no longer fronts the river because of the construction of the South Eastern Freeway in 1961. The area of Richmond in which the gardens were located was formally renamed Cremorne in 1999 and is used by locals as much out of historical respect as to avoid the old working class implications of the name Richmond. A view of Cremorne from South Yarra can be found in the works of S. T. Gill[1] and the site is described in Louisa Ann Meredith's description of her stay in Melbourne with her husband and son in Over the straits: a visit to Victoria.[2] References [ edit ] Coordinates:Pictured: The 20st sumo girl... aged just 14 At the age of 14 and weighing in at 20 stone, Samantha-Jane Stacey is born to be a sumo wrestler. She will be aiming for sporting glory as the youngest Australian to participate in the world wrestling sumo championships this month in Estonia. Much focus will be on the championships after the sport, plagued with recent scandals, was hit with yet another controversy as three wrestlers admitted beating up a junior trainee who later died. Born to wrestle: Samantha-Jane will represent Australia at the world sumo championships in Estonia this month The sport has also been hit with drugs and match-fixing scandals recently. But none of that bothers Samantha-Jane. Affectionately known as 'Sammy Sumo', she trains on a diet of Weetbix and lasagne. Samantha-Jane says she is'really proud to represent' her country but at the moment is more worried about getting through the 32-hour flight. It is perhaps no surprise that Samantha-Jane was introduced to the sport by brother Blake. 'We watched bouts on video and researched the sport on the internet. You don't have to be big to take part. Bout: Samantha-Jane wrestles Aaron Stapleton above, and below, takes on a female opponent at the 18th Annual Cherry Blossom Festival in New South Wales 'I was training with Blake and his coach saw me and asked if I wanted to take part in a competition. I've really been into it ever since.' Samantha-Jane says she does not try to put on weight but concentrates on a balanced diet to keep her fit for the fight. 'I'm naturally a big girl. I don't have to eat anything extra. 'I have a medical condition that does not allow me to lose the weight. A side effect of that means I look obese. But I do have a healthy diet.' Samantha-Jane's favourite food is Weetbix, which she eats with banana and strawberries for breakfast. She will typically have a chicken sandwich for lunch and a chicken salad for dinner. Her vice is her father Warren's speciality, lasagne. Samantha-Jane trains every day on the beach. Aussie team: Samantha-Jane with fellow Australian wrestlers Kelsie Homer, 18, and Vanessa Homer, 14 'We practice our moves and undergo training to learn how to break your fall without hurting yourself,' she said. Samantha-Jane's father Warren Stacey says his daughter was born for sumo. 'Her uncles were close to seven feet tall and weighed 180 to 200 kilograms, so that sort of thing runs in the family.' Today the three wrestlers accused of beating up a junior trainee who later died admitted their guilt in court, according to reports. The death of the trainee in June 2007 sent shockwaves across the country as the boy's father spoke of his son's battered body and prompted the Japanese government to order the tradition-bound game to clean up its act. The three wrestlers, all in their 20s, were accused of beating the trainee with a metal bat during sparring practice, a day after clobbering him for hours with a beer bottle and a wooden stick, Kyodo news agency said. The trainee died that day. The defence argued in the court in Nagoya, central Japan, that the wrestlers had acted on the instructions of their sumo gym leader, or stablemaster, Kyodo reported. A court official, who declined to comment on details, said a date for a verdict had not been set. Worth her weight: Despite her size Samantha-Jane says she has a healthy diet The stablemaster, according to local media, has denied instructing the three wrestlers to beat up the trainee, but has been fired by the sumo association and is awaiting trial in the case. "I want them to tell the truth without hiding anything," Masato Saito, the trainee's father, told a group of reporters outside the courtroom as he held a photo of his son in his arms. A Japan Sumo Association spokeswoman declined comment on the case, which has highlighted sumo's harsh training practices and the closed, rigid society of the male-only sport in which wrestlers wearing loincloths tussle in a rope-lined dirt ring. The sport retains many traditional Shinto religious overtones and still makes much of its pageantry and rituals, but fans have been dismayed by a long list of recent scandals ranging from drugs to match-fixing. Two Russian wrestlers tested positive for marijuana and were expelled from the sport last month, shortly after another Russian wrestler, Wakanoho, was arrested for suspected marijuana possession. The JSA chairman resigned over the drug scandal. Sumo authorities, long accused of being a clique of former wrestlers, brought in outsiders to its board to improve management. Last week, Wakanoho told a news conference he was bullied into taking cash to throw matches, intensifying media focus on a court case in which the JSA is suing a publisher for a magazine article on match-fixing.JERUSALEM (Reuters) - A far-right member of the Israeli government said on Monday the idea of establishing a Palestinian state in the West Bank had reached a “dead end”. Naftali Bennett, smiles during a Jewish Home party meeting, at the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, in Jerusalem March 4, 2013. REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu distanced himself from the comments, but the Palestinian chief negotiator said they were “part of Israel’s plan to destroy any possibility for a Palestinian state.” Industry and Trade Minister Naftali Bennett, a leader of Jewish settlers living in occupied territory, has long opposed a Palestinian state, and his latest remarks underscored deep divisions over the issue inside Netanyahu’s coalition. “The idea that a Palestinian state will be formed in the land of Israel has come to a dead end,” Bennett told a settlers’ conference. “Never in the annals of Israel have so many people expended so much energy on something so futile,” said Bennett, who heads the ultranationalist Jewish Home party. Efforts by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry to revive Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, which collapsed in 2010 in a dispute over settlement expansion in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, have shown little sign of progress. Israel captured those areas, along with the Gaza Strip, in a 1967 Middle East war. When asked by Reuters about the comments, Netanyahu said: “Foreign policy is shaped by the prime minister and my view is clear. I will seek a negotiated settlement where you’d have a demilitarized Palestinian state that recognizes the Jewish state.” Palestinians have resisted Netanyahu’s call for such recognition, fearing it would be tantamount to waiving any right of return for Palestinian refugees. Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat said Bennett’s remarks were, along with policies such as settlement expansion and demolishing Palestinian homes, part of a strategy to destroy any possibility for a future state. He urged Western leaders to “hold Israel accountable for destroying the prospects of justice and peace.” Divisions in the Israeli cabinet over Palestinian statehood could cause the coalition to unravel should U.S. peace efforts gain speed. The leader of the main opposition Labour Party has already pledged to support Netanyahu to offset any defections by hardliners if he clinches a deal with the Palestinians."Flame warfare" redirects here. For the online term, see Flame war Japanese flamethrower (American design from World War II) Type 93. A U.S. soldier firing a flamethrower during the Vietnam War United States Marines demonstrating flamethrower usage (2012) A flamethrower is a mechanical incendiary device designed to project a long, controllable stream of fire. They were first used by the Greeks in the 1st century AD. In modern times, they were used during World War I, and more widely in World War II. Most military flamethrowers use flammable liquid thickened into a substance similar to napalm, but commercial flamethrowers tend to use high-pressure propane and gasoline, which is considered safer, as they both die out faster and are easier to put out. Note that napalm was never used with flamethrowers. In comparison, a liquid flamethrower's fuel sticks to its targets and is harder to put out with water, while also allowing for a more specific burn effect. Napalm specifically also quickly deoxygenates the surrounding air, making smoke inhalation or asphyxiation a real threat. They are used by the military and by people needing controlled burning capacity, such as in agriculture (e.g., sugar cane plantations) or other such land management tasks. They can be designed to be either carried by the operator or mounted on a vehicle. Military flamethrowers [ edit ] Modern flamethrowers were first used during the trench warfare conditions of World War I and their use greatly increased in World War II. They can be vehicle-mounted, as on a tank, or man-portable. The man-portable flamethrower consists of two elements — the backpack and the gun. The backpack element usually consists of two or three cylinders. In a two-cylinder system, one cylinder holds compressed, inert propellant gas (usually nitrogen), and the other holds flammable liquid, typically petrol, with some form of fuel thickener added to it. A three-cylinder system often has two outer cylinders of flammable liquid and a central cylinder of propellant gas to maintain the balance of the soldier carrying it. The gas propels the liquid fuel out of the cylinder through a flexible pipe and then into the gun element of the flamethrower system. The gun consists of a small reservoir, a spring-loaded valve, and an ignition system; depressing a trigger opens the valve, allowing pressurized flammable liquid to flow and pass over the igniter and out of the gun nozzle. The igniter can be one of several ignition systems: A simple type is an electrically-heated wire coil; another used a small pilot flame, fueled with pressurized gas from the system. The flamethrower is a potent weapon with great psychological impact, inflicting a particularly horrific death. This has led to some calls for the weapon to be banned. It is primarily used against battlefield fortifications, bunkers, and other protected emplacements. A flamethrower projects a stream of flammable liquid, rather than flame, which allows bouncing the stream off walls and ceilings to project the fire into unseen spaces, such as inside bunkers or pillboxes. Typically, popular visual media depict the flamethrower as short-ranged and only effective for a few meters (due to the common use of propane gas as the fuel in flamethrowers in movies, for the safety of the actors). Contemporary flamethrowers can incinerate a target some 50–80 meters (160–260 ft) from the gunner; moreover, an unignited stream of flammable liquid can be fired and afterwards ignited, possibly by a lamp or other flame inside the bunker. Flamethrowers pose many risks to the operator. The first disadvantage was the weapon's weight and length, which impairs the soldier's mobility The weapon is limited to only a few seconds of burn time, since it uses fuel very quickly, requiring the operator to be precise and conservative The weapon was very visible on the battlefield, which caused operators to become immediately singled out as prominent targets, especially for snipers Flamethrower operators were rarely taken prisoner, especially when their target survived an attack by the weapon; captured flamethrower users were in some cases summarily executed [1] The flamethrower's effective range is short in comparison with that of other battlefield weapons of similar size. To be effective, flamethrower soldiers must approach their target, risking exposure to enemy fire. Vehicular flamethrowers also have this problem; they may have considerably greater range than a man-portable flamethrower, but their range is still short compared with that of other infantry weapons. Army War Show November 27, 1942 The risk of a flamethrower
of tears.” Harald Stanghelle, the political editor of the newspaper Aftenposten, said that “coming here is a way to participate.” Norway, he said, “is a country of grief and sorrow, trying to overcome a great shock. There’s a hope to participate and be together.” At one point, there was clapping in the crowd. From the front of the courthouse came a newlywed couple. “It was a glimpse of normal life in this film of horror,” Mr. Stanghelle said.The outrage of all outrages in the last 18 months is the complete protection of bank and corporate bondholders at taxpayer expense. These bondholders lent money to reckless banks and corporations who bet the farm on the premise that house prices would always go up. And they lost. Now, thanks to bailout nation, taxpayers are on the hook for trillions. Bondholders, meanwhile--the folks who loaned the banks the trillions they have since vaporized--have lost next to nothing. Today's Treasury plan is just more of the same: A byzantine public-private partnership that will put $1 trillion of taxpayer money on the line so bondholders won't lose a dime. Fund manager (and PhD) John Hussman explains the end game of this current policy: [T]he U.S. currently has a private debt to GDP ratio of about 3.5, which is nearly double the historical norm, at a time when the underlying collateral is being marked down easily by 20-30%. That implies total collateral losses of 70-100% of GDP; a figure that includes not only mortgage debt in the banking system, but consumer credit, corporate debt and so on. The holders [of this debt] are not just banks, but insurance companies, pension funds, foreign lenders, and others. Even so, there is no way to prevent huge, ongoing losses, because the cash flows off of these assets are not sufficient to service the debt. The only question is whether the bondholders appropriately bear those losses, or whether the public bears them inappropriately. A continued policy of protecting all of these bondholders would eventually require U.S. citizens to be put on the hook for something on the order of $10-14 trillion. We are nowhere near the end of this process. We simply cannot make these bad investments whole unless we are willing to hand the next 10-20 years of U.S. private savings over to the bondholders who financed reckless lending. Those bondholders should, and ultimately must, take a portion of these losses, and debt obligations will have to be restructured. Wall Street has become a bunch of Tooter Turtles crying "Help, Mr. Wizard!" because it got so used to Greenspan bailing everybody out. But that constant attempt to avoid inevitable private market losses is what allowed this problem to become so noxious. It will continue to do so until we collectively scream loud enough for Congress to say on our behalf, "Enough." The sideshow about bonuses at AIG simply underscores how little these bailouts have altered the fundamental behavior of people throwing around other people's money with nothing at risk themselves. The bondholders of poorly run financial companies should lose because they deserve to lose. The American public does not. Well said. Will someone please tell Obama and the Treasury Department?Free agent defensive end Olivier Vernon followed the money this offseason, and the money steered him to New York. It's no secret that the Jacksonville Jaguars coveted Vernon early on in free agency, and it's no secret that the team fell short in securing the high profile edge rusher. And now, I'm writing to expose another secret -- Olivier Vernon was the only edge rusher targeted by the Jaguars in free agency. The majority of local media shifted their attention to veteran free agent Robert Ayers when the Jaguars failed to seduce Vernon. And by now, we all know that Jaguars general manager Dave Caldwell did the same. The Jaguars invited Ayers to Jacksonville a day after losing out on Vernon, but Ayers ultimately decided to take his talents to Tampa. Dave Caldwell, as it turns out, viewed Ayers in a very different light than many local media personalities. Based on information recently presented to me, I have learned that the Jaguars sought to bring Ayers to Jacksonville in an inside rusher role. Ayers was never going to be an edge rusher for the Jaguars. Period. He would have been positioned somewhere into the inside rusher rotation -- a unit loaded with Sen'Derrick Marks, Abry Jones, and Malik Jackson. This newfound information isn't necessarily momentous, but boy, is it loaded. For starters, the Jaguars went Vernon or bust -- contrary to what we originally thought, the front office did not have a "Plan B" free agent edge in mind after losing the Vernon contest. Also, the fact that the Jaguars looked to plug Ayers into the interior (a densely occupied unit) rather than utilize his edge rushing ability in a position group that is gasping for quality depth is thought-provoking as well. It says a lot about the interior rushers already in the Jaguars' possession, as well as the direction the defensive line may be heading in scheme-wise. Finally, this information may go quite a long way in explaining why Robert Ayers ultimately found the Tampa Bay Buccaneers to be a more suitable fit than the Jaguars. According to Jordan Ranaan of NJ Advanced Media, Ayers had just two sacks last season from interior pressure with the remaining 7.5 coming as an edge rusher. What benefit could he possibly see in switching roles? Of everything that has occurred this free agency cycle, the Ayers episode is by far the most... interesting.Sanctions creating great economic difficulties, says finance minister in a further indication that military action may be on hold Sanctions against the Iranian regime are pushing the Islamic Republic's economy into deep crisis, according to key Israeli officials in comments seen as a further indication unilateral military action may have been put on hold. The Iranian rial fell 5% to an all-time low against the US dollar on Saturday, according to financial websites. The value of the rial has fallen by almost 57% since June last year, leading to big price increases for imported goods. Israel's finance minister, Yuval Steinitz, said Iran's economy "is not collapsing, but it is on the verge of collapse". The loss of oil revenue would approach $45bn-$50bn (£28bn-£31bn) by the end of the year, he told Israel Radio. "The Iranians are in great economic difficulties as a result of the sanctions." His comments followed the leak last week of an internal foreign ministry report, which said international sanctions were having a profound effect on Iran's economy and could be destabilising the government. But the measures had yet to persuade the regime to abandon its nuclear programme and, therefore, additional sanctions were needed. According to an anonymous Israeli official quoted in Haaretz, Israel had stepped up efforts to persuade the EU to impose a fresh round of sanctions. The move suggests a distancing by Israel from the military option, at least for the next few months. In his address at the UN general assembly last week, Binyamin Netanyahu, said Iran was likely to cross the "red line" he set for its uranium enrichment process by next spring or summer. That was widely interpreted as the Israeli prime minister backing away from the immediate threat of a military strike, although he sought to keep his options open in subsequent interviews. "I haven't conceded Israel's right to defend itself at any point," Netanyahuh told reporters. Ävigdor Lieberman, his hardline foreign minister, who has never expressed full-throated support for a military strike‚ suggested that Iran could face an Egyptian-style people's revolution. "The opposition demonstrations that took place in Iran in June 2009 will come back in even greater force," he told Haaretz. "The situation in Iran and the feelings of the man on the street is one of economic catastrophe … There's a shortage of basic goods, a rise in crime, and people are trying to flee the country, sending money abroad."(Leaders meet in the Big House on ‘Namgis Territory in northern B.C. with prmier John Horgan and his ministers. Photo: Alexandra Morton) Laurie Hamelin APTN News On a trip to northern B.C., Premier John Horgan met Kwakwakā’wakw Nation leaders to talk about fish farms Tuesday but would not commit to abolishing the open-net cages. “Any strategy for aquaculture must put a priority on the protection of wild salmon, collaborate with First Nations and acknowledge their interests,” read a statement from Horgan’s office posted online. While in opposition, B.C. NDP campaigned against the net-pen industry. Now Horgan is faced with 40 leaders from eight Kwakwakā’wakw Nations that are in an unprecedented united stance against net-pen salmon farms in the Broughton Archipelago. “Remove open-net fish farms from our collective territories,” Hereditary Chief Ernest Alfred said he told Horgan at the meeting. Alfred is from the ‘Nagmis, Lawit’sis and Mamalilikala Nations and has been occupying the Swanson Island Salmon Farm, owned by Marine Harvest, since August 25. Read More: BC Fish Farms He and many First Nations say that salmon farms are harming wild salmon stocks and the environment. They believe that Atlantic salmon sent to fish farms in B.C. carry parasites and diseases. (Horgan, right, with his ministers in the Big House on ‘Namgis territory in northern B.C. Photo: Alexandra Morton) The premier, accompanied by Indigenous Relations Minister Scott Fraser, Agriculture Minister Lana Popham, and Transportation Minister Claire Trevena, flew to Alert Bay, B.C. to hear discussions about the overlapping of territories, salmon security, and fish farms. “Minister Popham will share the concerns we heard from the people we met with, with the federal minister for the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, and press the federal government to work with us, Indigenous communities and industry to map out a sustainable future.” The leaders at the meeting, both hereditary and elected, of the Mamalilikala, ‘Namgis, Tlowitsis, Mamtagila, and Musgamagw Dzawada’enuxw gathered in the Big house on ‘Namgis Territory to present Horgan with their mandate. The leaders also argued that their demand for the removal of open-net fish farms from their territory is compliant with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). They repeatedly stated in that the fish farms continue to operate within their territory without consent. “The issue of rights and title are clearly being violated here,” said Alfred. Horgan’s failure to take specific action did not go over well with the leaders. Many felt his answer was a typical government response. “We are making history right now and we need the NDP to choose which side of history they want to stand on,” he said. “The NDP has been given our clear mandate and we expect to hear back from them soon.” Alfred and his people are worried. “We don’t have fish and we don’t have food for the winter so were are panicked,” said Alfred. “It’s time for our government to stand with First Nations and the people of BC, if they don’t, then we’ll go speak with a lawyer.” The united voice of all 40 leaders are committed to their collective goal to evict the net-pen fish farming industry and say the farm occupations will continue. Contact Laurie here: lhamelin@aptn.caInterview on anarchist radio show gives overview of undercover infiltration of political groups since 1968 Anarchists infiltrated by at least four undercover police officers Anarchists are of course no strangers to being infiltrated by the state. Their ranks have been penetrated by informers and agent provocateurs for more than a century. They have been one of the most common targets of the infiltration operation by undercover police officers that has been running since 1968. We have written about four of the undercover police officers in our book, Undercover. The most recent known undercover officer worked under the fake name of Mark Jacobs, and pretended to be a member of a small group of anarchists in Cardiff from 2005 to 2009. Two police officers from the Special Demonstration Squad posed as activists in Class War in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Another spy from the SDS is recorded as "successfully" infiltrating another anarchist group, the Direct Action Movement, between 1990 and 1993, according to an internal Special Branch document. I am interested to hear of any more information about this infiltration if you wish to get in touch. A little while ago, I was interviewed by an anarchist radio show. I thought I would post a link here to the interview as it gives an overview of the story of how the police have sent undercover officers into political groups over the last four decades. Turn On, Tune in and Kick off is the motto of the Circled A show. This here gives you an idea of what the show is about. The show is broadcast weekly (and can also be downloaded afterwards) on Resonance FM, which describes itself as "the world's first radio art station, established by London Musicians' Collective...to provide a radical alternative to the universal formulae of mainstream broadcasting." The interview with Yodet and Janey from the show lasts nearly an hour. I appreciate that it is quite long, so here's a guide to the order of the topics discussed to give you a flavour of it. * how activists unmasked Mark Kennedy, the police spy who infiltrated environmentalists for seven years; * Peter Francis, the only undercover officer who has blown the whistle on the infiltration operation; * how police are alleged to have passed on information about campaigners to a secretive agency which blacklisted workers; * the calls for a proper public inquiry into the undercover spies and the question of whether the police should be allowed to investigate themselves; * the range of political groups infiltrated by the undercover spies since 1968; * how the spies such as Kennedy and Bob Lambert duped women into having long-term relationships with them; * The theft of dead children's identities by the spies to use as the basis of their fake personas; * the police's use of informants in political groups; * the deployment of corporate spies such as Rebecca Todd in political campaigns. The song at the start of the interview is particularly worth catching. The second part of the interview is to be broadcast tomorrow.This story has all the makings of a Hollywood blockbuster. A bunch of average ordinary Americans who formed a coalition of social-justice and environmental activism, including civil rights leaders, workers and students, in a large midwestern city, just scored a massive victory over the takeover of their water department and the privatization of their resources by an international corporate behemoth deeply embedded in human rights violations. Huge BDS win, and massive victory for the people of St. Louis, Missouri. St. Louis Palestine Solidarity Committee (STL-PSC): In a dramatic conclusion to nearly one year of effort and vigilance by the St. Louis Palestine Solidarity Committee (PSC) and coalition partners, the St. Louis mayor’s office announced on October 29, 2013 that Veolia Water North America was withdrawing itself from consideration for a contract to consult with the St. Louis Water Division. Veolia is a major, global target of the Boycott, Sanctions and Divestment (BDS) movement because of its complicity in Israeli violations of Palestinian human rights. Veolia profits from Israel’s occupation of the West Bank by providing services, such as trash collection, water services and, until recently, bus lines, to illegal Israeli settlements built on Palestinian land. When the contract came to light, the PSC helped form a local coalition to “Dump Veolia.” The Coalition included a wide spectrum of the St. Louis community, as well as national organizations. The broad based opposition caused Veolia to withdraw from our city, reportedly deciding St. Louis “is not worth it. It is not worth the damage to [Veolia’s] business.” The St. Louis Dump Veolia campaign shows the effectiveness of local BDS campaigns. The efforts against the Veolia contract brought Palestine to the St. Louis mayoral campaign last spring as the two leading candidates — the incumbent, Mayor Francis Slay, and his challenger and the head of the Board of Alderman (St. Louis’ equivalent to a city council), Lewis Reed — staked out opposite sides in the Veolia debate. Mayor Slay, a proponent of the Veolia contract, was forced to admit in a press release in February that Palestinians find Veolia’s involvement with Israel’s occupation objectionable. The issue of the proposed Veolia water contract was the top requested question at the second mayoral debate. St. Louis Public Radio and the St. Louis Beacon covered the issue as part of their debate coverage. Palestine activists bird-dogged Mayor Slay during a fundraising event demanding answers on why he supported human rights violations in Palestine through his advocacy for Veolia. Anti-Veolia flyers sponsored by candidate Reed and his supporters in the St. Louis Carpenters’ Union were mailed to every household in St. Louis during the campaign. Global Water Intelligence credited BDS in St. Louis with thwarting Veolia’s ambitions for securing public sector work in the United States. While Mayor Slay handily won the mayoral election, the Dump Veolia campaign put his office and Veolia on the defensive and forced both to expend considerable political clout and resources. In June, a public hearing on the Veolia contract was called by the Board of Alderman Public Utilities Committee. Over two sessions, the hearing lasted six hours. At the second session, well over 150 concerned citizens attended to voice their opposition to the proposed contract. The only testimonies in support of the contract were from either Veolia representatives or others who would directly benefit as a subcontractor from the proposed deal. The only pro-Israel opposition to our efforts came in the form of a statement from the St. Louis Jewish Community Relations Council that did not support Veolia — a seemingly untenable position — but asked the City to not factor BDS demands into their decision-making process. At the hearing, several PSC members made statements focusing on Veolia’s operation of bus lines on segregated roads in the West Bank, drawing comparisons to St. Louis’ racist practices and to the Board of Aldermen’s strong stance against Apartheid South Africa in the 1980s. Veolia representatives were flustered by the testimony about the segregated buses and attempted to deny the allegations. However, PSC testimony had been heard, and it was members of the Board of Aldermen who refuted the Veolia spokesperson’s inadequate defense. In September, Veolia Transdev sold off all bus lines operating in Palestine/Israel, showing the power of BDS. For more than three years, Veolia attempted to secure a contract with St. Louis, defying the will of the local community through aggressive lobbying, bullying, political interference, back-door deals, and outright contempt for democratic involvement. When public opposition denied Veolia the necessary votes to pass the contract through normal channels, the mayor attempted to circumvent the democratic checks and balances by claiming the contract did not need approval through traditional means and threatened to sue the city comptroller if she did not sign it. However, public outrage overwhelmed the St. Louis Board of Aldermen who introduced a resolution to remove funds allocated for Veolia in the city’s budget — the straw that finally broke the camel’s back, prompting Veolia to withdraw. The proposed Board Bill 216 may be the first city resolution in North America targeting Veolia in response to a BDS campaign. As the St. Louis Palestine Solidarity Committee celebrates this victory over occupation profiteer Veolia, we wish to thank the many coalition partners and St. Louis citizens who supported the Dump Veolia campaign. While we came to this issue because of Palestine, we soon learned of the many troubling aspects of Veolia’s business practices including privatization of public resources, labor abuses, corruption, environmental degradation and interference in democratic processes. This is a huge win for BDS in North America and a triumph for the people of St. Louis.Win an Ultra Slim Sleeper Memory Foam Pillow - Perfect for Stomach and Back Sleepers! This contest has ended. The Ultra Slim Sleeper Memory Foam Pillow is one of the top selling thin pillows on Amazon. Designed for stomach and back sleepers who like a low profile pillow with just a slight elevation. One happy customer described it this way: "The lightest and thinnest memory foam pillow I've ever seen. I've bought many memory foam pillows in the past and my biggest complaint with most of them is that they are too big. It's hard to find the right perfect size. I didn't realize a size like this existed, but it just might be what I've been looking for." If you've had trouble finding a pillow that is thin enough for you to sleep comfortably, then today is your chance to win your own Ultra Slim Sleeper pillow! This contest is absolutely free to enter!Getty Images Keeping bones strong may take more than popping a few pills, according to the latest research. Scientists from the University of Auckland in Auckland, New Zealand reviewed 23 studies involving 4,082 healthy volunteers with an average age of 59 and report that those who took vitamin D supplements for about two years did not have significantly greater bone density or lower risk of osteoporosis than those who didn’t take them. That confirms what the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force found earlier this year in its review of the data — that adding 400 IU of vitamin D and 1000 mg of calcium to a healthy diet did not lower the risk of fractures for post menopausal women. Because vitamin D pulls calcium, a building block of bone, from the intestines, doctors have long assumed that urging the elderly to take supplements would help them to maintain healthy levels of vitamin D, which tend wane with age. And data suggesting that about 57% of American adults are deficient in the vitamin only gave the advice more urgency. But all of that additional D doesn’t seem to be making bones any stronger, say the researchers, who published their findings in the Lancet. For healthy individuals, at least, who are not suffering from osteoporosis, adding more vitamin D to what they are getting from their daily diet — or from sunlight, which the skin transforms into active forms of D — isn’t necessary. Recent studies have also suggested that estimates of vitamin D deficiency may have been misleading, since scientists measured different forms of the vitamin in the body. “Our data suggest that targeting low-dose vitamin D supplements only to individuals who are likely to be deficient could free up substantial resources that could be better used elsewhere in health care,” study author Ian Reid said in a statement. To maintain strong bones, for most adults it’s enough t to take in at least 600 IU of vitamin D daily, from foods such as fatty fish and dairy products. and for the elderly to consume around 800 IU of vitamin D a day.With games like Killzone 3 and SOCOM 4 specifically being built with the PlayStation Move in mind, there may be some hardcore gamers out there who want to try out motion gaming. Fret not gamers, your prayers have been answered. Launching simultaneously with the retail edition of SOCOM 4: US Navy Seals will be the just announced Full Deployment Edition of the tactical squad-based shooter. Now this edition of the game won’t come with any in-game unlocks or collectible items, but something a lot more useful. This version of SOCOM 4 will not only come with the game, but a PlayStation Move, Navigation controller, PlayStation Eye, AND the PlayStation Move Sharpshooter attachment. That’s right, the entire PlayStation Move setup specifically for your SOCOM needs. How much would you expect to pay for this whole package? It comes to you at the value price of $149.99. John Koller, Director of Hardware Marketing at Sony Computer Entertainment of America, is very excited about the PlayStation 3’s hardcore motion lineup. Given the high level of anticipation for SOCOM 4: U.S. Navy SEALs, we wanted to provide the most immersive offering to fans of the franchise, who seek to experience the next evolution of motion gaming. With the precision of the motion controller and the intuitive design of the sharp shooter, PlayStation Move delivers on that promise. When used in tandem with the stereoscopic 3D support for games like SOCOM 4 and Killzone 3, it results in an experience only possible on the PlayStation 3 system. The PlayStation Move retails at $50, with the Navigation Controller and PlayStation Eye both selling for $30 in stores. The Sharpshooter is $40, and SOCOM 4 will be the standard $59.99. All together this adds up to $210, a sixty dollar difference if all these items were bought separately. You could buy an entire PS3 game for all the money you saved! Why not Killzone 3? Or any of the newly announced Greatest Hits titles? What it comes down to though, is that the PlayStation 3 offers you an unbelievable bang for your buck.On New 17 Vasu Street in the Kilpauk area of Chennai lies an almost fully self-sufficient house. Completely solar-powered, the house also has its own biogas unit, water harvesting unit and kitchen garden. While the house has gained fame due to its renewable ways, so has its pioneering owner. Affectionately called Solar Suresh by his friends and family, D. Suresh believes in living a self-sufficient and comfortable life without being dependent on others. A graduate of IIT-Madras and IIM-Ahmedabad, he has worked as a marketing executive in textile companies where he rose to become the MD of a textile group. Currently the general manager of a company, he starts his mornings by brewing coffee on a stove, which runs on bio-gas, before reading a newspaper under fans powered by a solar plant. Lunch and dinner comprise of organic veggies grown in his lush roof-top kitchen garden. Asked what inspired him to source electricity from solar energy, he says that the idea came to him when he visited Germany. “I saw that people there had roof-top solar plants, which made me think if a country that has little sunshine can be successful in implementing solar plants, then why not India, especially Chennai, where solar energy is available to us in abundance,” he recounts. When he returned to India, he decided to implement this idea by designing a self-sufficient home. Initially, he met large companies for help in installing a solar plant but when they showed no interest in the small projects, he decided to get the help of a local vendor. The local vendor shared Suresh’s enthusiasm and interest in solar energy and together they managed to experiment, design and manufacture a 1 kilowatt (kW) solar power plant for home use in a little over a year. In April 2015, he upgraded the capacity of the power plant to 3 Kw. Explaining how it works, he says, “There is no separate wiring required and the installation takes just a day while the basic maintenance requires cleaning of panels once in six months only. As for utility, I charge the battery during the day which supplies power to the house right through the night. Since the solar plant depends on the UV rays of the sun and not the intensity of the heat; therefore, it works even during the rainy season. I live in an independent house with 11 fans, 25 lights, a refrigerator, computer, water pump, TV, mixer- grinder, oven, washing machine and an AC that are all powered by the solar plant. Thanks to the solar plant, I haven’t experienced any power cut even for a minute in the last 4 years and have saved electricity charges by producing around 12 to 16 units a day. During the recent cyclone, while the entire city was out of power for 3-4 days, we had solar power from the very next day after the cyclone – and all my friends and neighbours were charging their phones and filling water from our home! Suresh says that setting up solar plants is eco-friendly and economically viable for homes, businesses and public sector institutes such as hospitals, schools and colleges. “The large flat roof of a building is a great place for solar panels. Also, once installed, the process of generating electricity is free for 20 years – during the life span of the panels – there is an inbuilt insurance from increase in electricity tariff in future. Not only will these systems contribute to environmental sustainability in the region, but the cost savings will also contribute to the financial stability of these institutes. Just think what schools could do with the extra cash saved from in-house electricity bills: libraries, playgrounds, field trips or the salaries of more teachers! A great option in Tamil Nadu is the state government’s Solar Net Metering Scheme. Under the scheme, the first 10,000 consumers in the state who set up 1kW systems will get a subsidy of 20,000 from the state government in addition to the Central government subsidy of 30,000. A 1kW rooftop solar power system costs between 80,000 and 1.2 lakh, based on the quality of the solar panels. If one is worried that collecting the subsidy will be a long-drawn process, then one should take the direct route and do it himself. After all, do we worry about subsidy when we buy a TV, washing machine or a car? Just like them, a solar plant is also a device for our comfort and convenience with the bonus of being environment friendly!” he adds. Apart from this, Suresh also has a biogas plant, a rain water harvesting system and a kitchen garden. He collects the rain water from the terrace and purifies the water through an organic filtration plant, which consists of layers of pebbles, charcoal and sand, after which the water is stored in the sump and used for various purposes. “I see a lot of water stagnating in and around my place, for which I have also installed 15-inch slotted pipes into the ground. By channelling the collected rainwater into the soil, this process recharges the ground water,” he adds. You May Like: From Growing Its Own Forest to Selling Organic Fruits, This Village Funds Its Own Development Suresh also collects organic waste and leftover food from his own kitchen, neighbourhood households and a vegetable market nearby as raw material for his biogas plant. The gas produced from the plant is used to cook food at his home. “It’s a very simple and low-maintenance method of resource optimisation. To produce gas, the biogas plant requires organic waste, i.e. cooked, uncooked, leftover food and vegetable peels, which provide 20 kg of gas. No odour is generated and no manual intervention is needed, except feeding the plant with organic waste twice or thrice a week. The one I have at home is 1 cu. mtr in capacity and processes about 10 kg waste per day to produce about 35 to 40 kg of gas per month, which is equivalent to approximately 25 to 30 kg of LPG. The slurry leftover from the biogas plant acts as organic manure for the kitchen garden,” he explains. Suresh likes to spend his mornings pottering about his garden where he organically grows about 20 types of vegetables. Most of his home cooking needs are now taken care of from the kitchen garden. “It’s a phenomenal sight and experience to spend a few moments daily in the garden watching these vegetables grow right under my nose! A few days ago, my wife needed green chillies at 10 pm, and I could pluck them myself from the terrace garden!,” he says enthusiastically. Suresh has also tried to create a verdant forest-inspired vegetation cover around his home. Other than reducing the average real-feel temperature around the home, the lush garden of bamboo, fruit trees, creepers, shrubs and more is an oasis of natural beauty in the urban surroundings. “When on the terrace, I get the wonderful feeling of being in a forest and not in Kilpauk, the heart of a hustling-bustling urban city. I love the fact that I can’t see any neighbouring buildings and chaotic traffic – only greenery!” Encouraged by the benefits he has seen in this sustainable way of life, Suresh has taken it upon himself to take this revolution to as many households, organizations and institutions as possible through education and persuasion, on a pro-bono basis. So far, he has succeeded in setting up solar power plants, biogas plants and kitchen gardens in several households, schools, and offices. He has also given presentations in over 20 institutions, associations, schools, colleges, and apartment societies over the past 2 years. Thanks to his tireless efforts, his home on New 17 Vasu Street has become the new destination for annual study tours for local school students from classes 5-12. “These are old concepts which people have now forgotten; people just need to be aware that they can live a comfortable life without being dependent on others or on methods that harm the environment. I am trying to just that,” he concludes. To contact D. Suresh, click here. Also Read: This Man Left the Chaos of City Life Behind to Build an Organic Village in Kerala Like this story? Have something to share? Email: contact@thebetterindia. com, or join us on Facebook and Twitter (@thebetterindia). NEW! Log into www.gettbi.com to get positive news on WhatsApp.And the 26-year-old forward could be available for around £12m. The Italian boss has reportedly ruled out paying bumper sums for strikers this summer. The Sun claim the Ghana international is viewed as a a player to boost Antonio Conte's squad. WAG Ludivina Kadri Sagna seen showing off her stunning curves in a tight white swimsuit while on the beach in Miami Do Real Madrid football players have the hottest WAGs ever? Gareth Bale's missus has competition on her hands with this lot... “He bagged 12 goals in 34 games during his debut season in south Wales” It's suggested Sunderland were keeping tabs on Ayew last season but a move did not materialise. The Swans snapped up the influential ace on a free transfer from Marseille last June. He bagged 12 goals in 34 games during his debut season in south Wales.After more than two months in office, America’s new president, Republican Donald Trump, got a grade of F from 1 in 3 voters, according to a new McClatchy-Marist Poll. By contrast, the same number graded predecessor Democrat Barack Obama’s performance a B as he approached his 100th day in office. “Every time he speaks... it is so negative,” said Whitni Milton, 31, a professional singer from Atlanta who participated in the poll. “I have never seen someone who has riled up so many people.” Milton, who generally votes for Democrats but was so disgusted with both candidates that she sat out the presidential election in November, said she would gladly take the last Republican president, George W. Bush, over Trump. “I am not a Bush supporter,” she said. “I will take Bush 10 times over.” By 42-36 percent, voters thought President Donald Trump is changing the country for the worse. Nineteen percent said there was no real change, while 4 percent were unsure. Only 38 percent of registered voters said they approved of the job Trump is doing as president, compared with 51 percent who disapproved. That’s down 3 percentage points since mid-February, and is considerably lower than other presidents at comparable times in their presidencies. Independents approve of the job Trump is doing by 34-52 percent, while Democrats approve by 9-84 percent. Republicans approve by 79-10 percent, which are strong numbers, though they have gone down 3 points since February. “There’s no honeymoon,” said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion in New York, which conducted the survey. “He’s spending political capital that he didn’t acquire on Election Day. And he hasn’t done anything to cultivate it.” By 38-53 percent, voters have a favorable impression of Trump. Independents have a favorable impression by 33-55 percent, Democrats by 10-85 percent and Republicans by 78-14 percent. SHARE COPY LINK Trump supporters from across the country discuss how the President is doing fulfilling campaign promises, selecting his cabinet, and coming up against hurdles. Hear from a few Americans as they share their perspective on how things are going so fa Miringoff said Trump’s eroding Republican support was a “dangerous sign” and that if it continued to go down the president would have more trouble getting his priorities through the GOP-led Congress. Last week, Trump suffered his first major legislative setback on one of the biggest promises he’d made on the campaign trail: repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare. He is now eyeing changes to the tax code, curbing illegal immigration, pumping more money into the nation’s crumbling roads and bridges, and approving a budget to keep the federal government running. Unless Congress and Trump agree on a spending plan by April 28, the government faces a partial shutdown. By 45-39 percent, voters thought President Donald Trump has strengthened the economy. Seventeen percent were unsure. Voters gave Trump the following grades: A, 15 percent; B, 22 percent; C, 15 percent; D, 15 percent; F, 32 percent. By comparison, they gave Obama: A, 23 percent; B, 35 percent; C, 20 percent; D, 11 percent; F, 11 percent. Many attribute their disapproval more to Trump’s personality, including his blunt language on Twitter, than his policies. Nearly 6 in 10 voters —59 percent — said Trump’s conduct as president embarrassed them, according to the poll. Only 31 percent said his conduct made them proud, while 9 percent were unsure. Even more — 70 percent, including 45 percent of Republicans and three-quarters of independents — found Trump’s regular use of Twitter reckless and distracting. Only 19 percent said it was effective and informative, while 11 percent were unsure. Sixty percent of voters said they did not trust Trump and his administration to deliver accurate and factual information to the public, either at all or not very much. Thirty-nine percent said they trusted them a great deal or a good amount. “When did it become acceptable to lie?” asked Steven Vereen, 52, a self-employed river logger from Murrells Inlet, South Carolina. “I can’t understand how we elected him.” EDITORS: STORY CAN END HERE Trump’s presidency has been in chaos since his first day in office. An appeals court rejected his sweeping temporary halt on immigration from six Muslim-majority countries. His national security adviser, Michael Flynn, was fired after he lied to Vice President Mike Pence. A seemingly endless stream of leaks from the White House and federal agencies has caused him one headache after another. Just last week, FBI Director James Comey confirmed that his agency is investigating possible collusion between Trump campaign advisers and Russia, an inquiry that could take years to conclude. How much do voters trust
, and allowing me to go through things with them and go through our records, and see if there are any questions that remain.” Elections Canada spokesman John Enright declined to comment on Del Mastro’s criticism of the agency’s investigative process on Monday. No charges against Del Mastro have been laid and none of the allegations in the court order has been proved in court. Del Mastro said he is thinking about complaining that his privileges as a member of Parliament have been breached. Del Mastro has served as the Conservative government’s lead spokesman on the “robocalls” file, which involves allegations of dirty-tricks phone calls intended to misdirect non-Conservative voters to the wrong polling locations in the 2011 election. Opposition MPs have called on Del Mastro to step aside until the investigation is complete, claiming he will be in a conflict of interest commenting on Elections Canada business while he is being investigated by the organization. “I’m doing my job as I am expected to do,” Del Mastro said Monday. Conservative Party spokesman Fred DeLorey said the party has no comment on documents showing Holinshed made calls for Del Mastro during the election. “Elections Canada has not asked us anything about this, nor have they told us that any such documents exist,” he said. “So I’m not going to comment on documents that I don’t even know exist, let alone haven’t seen.”“Following the logic of power, empires in their expansive phases push out their frontiers until they meet the resistance of a strong neighbour, or reach a physical barrier which makes a natural point of rest, or until the driving force is exhausted. Thus through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, British power in India expanded, filling out its control of the peninsular sub continent until it reached the great restraining arc of the Himalayas. There it came into contact with another empire, that of China. In the central sector of frontier zone, where lay petty states and feudal territories, there began a contest for dominance which continues to the present day. In the North-East and North-West where no minor independent polities existed to act as buffers, the British sought secure and settled boundaries with China, which they failed to achieve. The failure was to lead in the middle of the twentieth century to the border war between India and China”. No wonder that whenever our leaders visit China, the first thing Chinese like to hear from them is that Tibet is an integral part of China. Contrary to the popular belief, it is not the border question that has bedeviled the relations between India and China. It is the larger issue of resolution of the Tibet problem to China’s satisfaction which is the greatest impediment to normalisation of relations between the two Asian giants. Status of Tibet is the test case for China’s survival as a nation. No wonder that whenever our leaders visit China, the first thing Chinese like to hear from them is that Tibet is an integral part of China. If the Chinese had their way, they would perhaps ask it to be written on a judicial stamp paper and handed over to them at Beijing airport on arrival by the Indian VIP. Historical Perspective Historically Tibet has never been a province of China. It has been autonomous over the centuries. China had loose control over it under Manchu Tributary system similar to the one it exercised over Nepal, Sikkim and Bhutan where their rulers paid tribute to China and possessed Chinese official rank. Not many people may be aware that in AD 763, Tibet conquered large parts of Western China and the then Emperor of China was forced to marry Princess Wencheng to the Tibetan King Song Tsnen Gam Po. Around the ninth century, Tibet came under Buddhist influence and by the thirteenth century, almost entire Tibet converted to Buddhism. The hand that held the sword was now supporting a prayer wheel. A warrior nation had turned pacifist. Mongols conquered Tibet in thirteenth century and the Tibetan Lamas went into an arrangement with the Mongol rulers known as Cho Yon, meaning Patron-Priest relationship. The Lama became the spiritual and temporal head in Tibet, albeit with foreign support. The concept of the Dalai Lama, which was Mongolian in origin, also came into being during this time. Tibet’s troubles seem to have started with the Lama getting used to ruling with foreign support. The concept of national security was totally neglected with far reaching consequences in 1950-51. Under Nehru’s myopic policy of appeasement of the Chinese at any cost, there was only a mild protest at the annexation of Tibet by China, which the Chinese rudely brushed aside. The only person who foresaw a future clash was Sardar Patel… By the beginning of the twentieth century Tibet had become the Great Game pawn between China, Britain and Russia. On the pretext of sending a trade mission to Tibet, British troops entered Tibet, resulting in the conclusion of a Treaty in 1904 between Tibet and Britain. Obviously the Treaty was concluded on unequal terms. China played the role of a bystander totally ignoring her responsibility, if any. The treaty was bilateral and clearly signified the independent status of Tibet. The Manchu court refused to countersign the Treaty as it failed to recognize Chinese suzerainty over Tibet. On protracted negotiations, China concluded a treaty in 1906 with Great Britain which prevented Tibet from concluding direct negotiations with any foreign power without the consent of China. China, however, was excluded from the category of foreign powers. An Anglo-Russian Treaty signed in 1907 also accepted a measure of Chinese suzerainty over Tibet. Both London and Moscow undertook to refrain from violating Tibet’s territorial integrity and interfering in her internal affairs. Both parties were precluded from entering in direct negotiations with Tibet except through the good offices of China. Nothing can be read in these bilateral treaties among Great Britain, China and Russia. They could not legislate or decide pertaining to a third country behind its back. These were intrigues of power in the region promoting their interests or forestalling the perceived threats. Only from 1907 to 1911, has Tibet been under direct Chinese rule when the Zhao brothers – Zhao Erxen and Zhao Erfang conducted a military campaign to bring Tibet under Chinese rule. Once Manchu dynasty was overthrown by Sun Yat Sen revolution of 1911, Tibet reverted to its former status as an independent country till 1950 when it was annexed by the Communist People’s Republic of China. Chinese desire to incorporate Tibet into China stems from two reasons. First is historical. Chinese realised early on during Manchu dynasty that a defensive policy of having the Great Wall as a Maginot Line is not deterring aggression. Therefore an aggressive policy and Chinese security became interlinked. Secondly the increase in China’s population has brought about a need for “LEBENSRAUM” so urgent that occupation of a defenseless Tibet became a necessity. The Chinese annexed Tibet in 1950-51 and began a systematic campaign of Hanaisation of Tibet. In order to rule Tibet more effectively, the Chinese created a truncated version of Tibet called Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) in Sep 1965. TAR has an area of 1.23 million sq miles as against 2.5 million sq miles of greater Tibet, large parts of which were merged with Quinghai, Gansu and Schezuwan provinces of China. Under Nehru’s myopic policy of appeasement of the Chinese at any cost, there was only a mild protest at the annexation of Tibet by China, which the Chinese rudely brushed aside. The only person who foresaw a future clash was Sardar Patel who wrote a prophetic letter to Nehru on 7 Nov 1950, warning him that China is a potential enemy. Nehru ignored this letter. He considered India’s foreign policy as his personal fiefdom and kept up his efforts at befriending China. Forsaking the Tibetan cause is a classic case in point. It was forgotten that Buddhism went from India to Tibet and India has a centuries old relation with Tibet by way of religion, trade and an emotional affinity. Tibet was forsaken for an elusive Chinese friendship. Tibet acts as a launch pad for a multi pronged offensive into India. There are reports of deployment of Chinese missiles in Tibet which are targetted at Indian cities. It has been argued that, both on moral and strategic grounds, the Nehru government should have moved energetically to ensure international recognition of Tibetan independence even before the Communists consolidated their position in China. In the opinion of many international law experts, on 15 August, 1947, Tibet was more fully qualified to be treated as an independent state than a great number of countries which are members of the United Nations today. However, it was also true that no country had recognized Tibet as an independent sovereign state and that, whatever the legal position, the Chinese, both the Nationalists and the communists, were convinced that Tibet was an integral part of China. There were other reasons as well as to why India, more or less passively, accepted the ‘liberation’ of Tibet by China: While China may not have had a clear-cut case in favour of its claim to sovereignty over Tibet, it did appear to have some sort of a claim to authority over Tibet for which the British had used the term ’suzerainty’. British India had acquired, through use of force, certain extra-territorial rights in Tibet, and India did not want to be seen as seeking to inherit the mantle of British imperialism. Tibetan behaviour was erratic (including sweeping territorial claims in a message sent to Delhi soon after India became independent). India did not have adequate military capability to act on its own. Nehru was not about to invite the Americans (the only power with the capacity and, perhaps, the will) to stop the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) from moving into Tibet’. Tibet comprises an integral part of China’s nation building process. China was specifically concerned about Tibet given its ’suzerain’ status. In fact, Tibet emerged as a bone of contention among the imperialist powers in the nineteenth century. The British power in India accorded suzerain status to Tibet to keep out the Russian influence from the region. Suzerainty implied a low level of Chinese administrative and military presence and a high level of both Tibetan autonomy and British-India influence. In effect, it meant turning Tibet into a buffer zone. In the twentieth century the United States, given its commercial interests and Open Door policy, also upheld China’s suzerainty over Tibet. In 1949, when the People’s Republic of China came to power, it was determined to end the ‘century of humiliation’ and establish sovereignty over Tibet. For China, control over Tibet was important for two reasons: first, to enhance its security on the western frontier and, second, to exploit the abundant mineral resources of the region. For China, control over Tibet was important for two reasons: first, to enhance its security on the western frontier and, second, to exploit the abundant mineral resources of the region. Both these reasons were important to consolidate China’s power and to build a strong nation in order to end the ‘century of humiliation’. From this geo-political perspective, the building of a road through the Aksai Chin area gained salience. The road through Aksai Chin area comprised one of the three main routes to Tibet from the rest of China. It was also a route which was open year-round and least hazardous and in turns also least expensive. Therefore, control of Aksai Chin was perceived as essential in Chinese strategy to control the whole of Tibet. The Tibetan question in the Chinese nation building process inevitably exposed the nature of the international border it shared with India. India inherited the British policy of keeping Tibet as a buffer zone and therefore Tibet’s suzerain status suited its national interests. In the post 1949 period, India urged China to let Tibet be autonomous, as it would minimize China’s military presence in the region. However, the entry of twenty thousand PLA troops in 1951 ended Tibet’s status as a buffer zone. At the same time, it exposed the Sino-Indian border as undefined and invalidated the previous agreements between Tibet and British India on border delineation. The Military Dimension Strategic Importance of Tibet Tibet had acted as a buffer between India and China for centuries. The British fully understood this; unfortunately we did not and tamely accepted China’s military occupation of Tibet. We even dissuaded the Americans not to let Taiwan raise this issue in the UN. Tibet acts as a launch pad for a multi pronged offensive into India. There are reports of deployment of Chinese missiles in Tibet which are targetted at Indian cities. It is reported that there are 8 x ICBMs, 70 x MRBMs, 20 x IRBMs, 15 x Radar Stations in TAR. Any envisaged Indian offensive into Tibet does not hurt mainland China. Indian Air Force does not have the reach upto mainland China. Any offensive undertaken by India into Tibet will be in a void. So the importance of keeping Tibet as a buffer between India and China was understood by China, but un-fortunately not by India. Economic Potential of Tibet Tibet is rich in unexploited mineral resources, particularly the strategic materials like uranium, oil, coal, gold iron, forest and hydro potential. According to many geologists, Tibet is perhaps the last and the largest untapped oil belt in the world. The stratum is similar to the oil fields in the Persian Gulf and Karakorum. Tsaidam Basin has oil reserves of 42 billion tons and natural gas reserves of 1500 billion cubic meters. Natural gas reserves in Tibet and Tibetan ethnic areas can alone sustain China’s requirements for seven years. 200 million tons of oil has also been found in Chang Thang in Lhunpula Basin. Tibet has the world’s largest deposits of Uranium around the eastern mountainous shores of Koko Nor. Known mines Tibet and Tibetan ethnic areas are endowed with the greatest river system in the world. Its rivers supply fresh water to 85% of Asia’s population and approximately 50% of the worlds population. of Uranium include Tsaidam Basin, Thewo in Amdo, Yamdrok Tso and Damshung near Lhasa. Cesium is a rare metal used in military hi-tech application, particularly in atomic clocks and high energy solid fuels. Cesium deposits worth around $ 6.5 billion have been reported in TAR. Tibet and Tibetan ethnic areas are endowed with the greatest river system in the world. Its rivers supply fresh water to 85% of Asia’s population and approximately 50% of the world’s population. Three of the world’s major rivers (Yarlung Tsangpo or Brahmaputra, Yangtze and Mekong) have their headwaters in Tibet or in Tibetan ethnic areas. The South Asian Sub-Continent is nourished by perennial flow of four major rivers originating from different directions of the Kailash Range in western Tibet. Other mighty rivers flowing from Tibet, such as the Yangtze, Yellow, Salween and Mekong sustain the lives of millions in China, Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam. Chinese Infrastructural Development in Tibet Greater connectivity between mainlands in China has been provided by the Western, Central and Eastern Highways. It should be remembered that it was the issue of Western Highway passing through Aksai Chin which acted as the trigger for the 1962 war. The Gormo – Lhasa railway has been completed. Together with the three Highways, it greatly enhances Chinese capability for induction of forces in Tibet. The Gormo – Lhasa pipeline has a capacity of half a million tones of fuel annually. All the airfields in Tibet have been lengthened and upgraded. Road communications to the border have been greatly improved. Military Implications It may be noted that China uses the Tibetan plateau for the development of its nuclear bombs. The Chinese military arsenal on the plateau is believed to include 17 top secret radar stations, eight missile bases with at least eight inter-continental ballistic missiles, 70 medium-range and 20 intermediate-range missiles, and 25 airfield and airstrips. Some of the missiles have a range of a nearly 13,000 Kms, which could reach many parts of Asia. However, so far lack of transport facilities had greatly restricted China’s military maneuverability. With the completion of the Qinghai-Tibet railway line, China will be able to overcome this obstacle in increasing its military deployment near the India-Tibet border region. This indeed will have serious security implications for India. It is believed that it will reduce the travel time from Gormo to Lhasa from 72 hours to 16 hours. In military terms, the rail link gives China the capability to mobilize up to 12 division (12,000 men make a division) a month. Though China may not pose a direct military threat to India, its strategic infrastructure in Tibet will enhance its military capability and enable Chinese coercive diplomacy with respect to the border dispute with India. Its strategic infrastructure in Tibet will enhance its military capability and enable Chinese coercive diplomacy with respect to the border dispute with India. China also has a listening post in occupied Aksai Chin. Sources say the listening stations will monitor Indian deployments in the region, eavesdrop on forward and intelligence communications of the army, and even intercept US radio signals pertaining to anti-terrorism activities in Afghanistan. Problems Encountered by the People’s Liberation Army in Tibet. Long axes of maintenance and disruption due to weather and high altitude conditions. Need for extensive winter stocking. Requirement of regular turnover of troops and low shelf life items in high altitude. Acclimatization of troops and adverse effects on men, animals and material. A sullen population not reconciled to Chinese occupation. Long axes of maintenance and periodic disruption due to climatic conditions. Need for extensive winter stocking. Requirement for regular turnover of items for proper maintenance and due to limited shelf life. Reduced airlift capability due to high altitude conditions. Absence of railway link with the mainland, which is now being addressed. Adverse effects of high altitude on men and material. China’s Tibet Policy On 7th October 1950, the Chinese PLA invaded Tibet and forced the Tibetans to sign the Seventeen-Point Agreement. The agreement was contradictory in nature. On one hand it stated the ‘Tibetans’ right of exercising national regional autonomy’, on the other it said that the ‘Central Authorities will not alter the existing political system in Tibet’. The subsequent developments revealed that the Chinese instead would determine ‘Tibetan autonomy’ and ‘Tibet’s future’. The Country Report on Human Rights Practice – 2000 released by the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labour, the US State Department, February 2001, enumerated the impact of China’s Tibet policy and the gross Chinese violation of human rights in Tibet by pointing out the fact that, …if the Chinese agree to the Mc Mahon Line as the boundary, it will amount to a tacit admission that in 1914, Tibet was an independent country… This weakens the entire Chinese case that Tibet has always been a part of China. Large-scale transfer of Han population in the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) has sidelined Tibet’s traditional dominance. Ethnic Han Chinese holds many positions of real power and they make most key decisions in Tibet. Discrimination in employment is rampant with ethnic Han hired preferentially for many jobs and receiving higher pay for the same work. Tibetan language is neglected and Chinese language is used in most commercial and official communications. Severe restrictions have been imposed on many traditional practices of the Tibetans and public manifestations of religious belief in the TAR’s urban areas have been restricted. The government has moved to curb the proliferation of monasteries – as it regards them as the den of subversive activities. Government commits serious human rights abuses by torture, arbitrary arrest, and detention without public trial and imposes lengthy detention of Tibetan nationalists for peacefully expressing their political or religious views. The government has turned Tibet into a dumping ground for radioactive waste from nuclear power stations. In addition, large-scale deforestation in Tibet to meet China’s increasing need of timber has caused widespread ecological damage. In fact, from April 1996 Tibet is reeling under ’strike hard’ campaign, which mainly targets monks and nuns loyal to the Dalai Lama. Since the ’strike-hard’ campaign, almost 10,000 monks and nuns have been expelled from their monastic institutions. Thousands have been persecuted. The photos of the Dalai Lama were banned. Thus, China’s minority policy and regional autonomy practices has greatly affected Tibetan nationalism. ‘Han maj-oritarianism’ has been catastrophic for Tibet. It essentially implied that the Han being in the majority had the right to rule over the minority. The logical corollary to this was that Han culture became the cultural model legitimizing national integration and assimilation of the minorities. Therefore, Han nationalism threatened the “cultural identity and political autonomy of the Tibetan people”. The denial of self-determination and adoption of regional autonomy in Tibet was meant to promote Han hegemonism and Han expansionism in non-Han regions. Implications of China’s Tibet Policy for India China’s Tibet policy impacts on Indian security interests in mainly two ways. One, it exposed the border problem between India and China which led to the 1962 Sino-Indian War. As mentioned earlier, the Chinese invasion of Tibet ended the buffer zone between the two countries. Till date, Sino-Indian relations remains dotted with several rounds of protracted talks on the border issue without achieving any major break through. At the same time it increased China’s reach into South Asia. In fact, Tibet has an 870 mile border with Nepal and China has been consolidating its relationships with the Nepal government. China reached an agreement with King Gyanendra in August 2002 to cease any ‘anti-China activities (unspecified) in Nepal. The entire development strategy in Tibet is impelled by the crucial strategic location of Tibet, as well as it being a focal point of Sino-Indian rivalry. Also, recently China asked Nepal to close down the Tibetan Refugee Welfare Office in January 2005. China’s growing influence in Nepal is thus at the expense of India and other key Western players, which has grave geo-political ramifications. The role of Nepal in linking Afghanistan’s membership to China’s quest for observer status in the SAARC cannot be missed. Second, China’s Western Development Strategy, a product of China’s nationalism project, has deeper ramifications for India. A closer analysis of China’s Western Development Strategy indicates that more than removing economic backwardness from the region, gaining strategic capability is the primary objective. China’s ‘Go West’ Policy is aimed at consolidating its power over Tibet through persistent Hanization policy. Infrastructure development and Han migration forms the linchpin of the Hanization process. The grand strategy of China’s nationalism project is predicated largely on the construction of the Qinghai-Tibet railway project. Through this railway project China aims at achieving strategic capability vis-à-vis India. The entire development strategy in Tibet is impelled by the crucial strategic location of Tibet, as well as it being a focal point of Sino-Indian rivalry. There are plans to extend the Qinghai-Tibet railway line to Kathmandu. This will indeed have geopolitical ramifications for India. Another serious consequence of Chinese developmental strategy in Tibet could be in terms of environmental hazards. India’s major rivers originate from the Trans-Himalayan region. China’s Western Development programme is feared to cause major deforestation and ecological imbalance. This, in the long run, may have discernible effect on the climatic patterns of the region, including India. The recent threat of a lake burst in Tibet portending a catastrophic flood in Himachal Pradesh has exposed India’s vulnerability to environmental warfare. Some scientists point out that the denial of permission for Indians to visit the site, conflicting information from China about the lake parameters, and Chinse warning to India a month after the supposed ‘landslide’, heighten suspicion that the impending lake burst is being treated as an experiment in environmental warfare. Areas of Discord Between India and China with Tibet as The Backdrop Chinese policy towards India after its annexation of Tibet has been a mix of opportunistic mistrust. The shelving of the Tibetan plea at the UN due to India’s reluctance to support the motion did not win Chinese confidence. Grant of asylum to Dalai Lama and his followers after his flight to India in 1959 is seen as a hostile act by China. China feels that the Khampa rebellion of 1959 was aided and abetted by India in collusion with Western powers. Establishment of Tibetan government in exile in India only aggravated matters. So long as China perceives that India, however tacitly, is supporting the Tibetan movement, it will always be suspicious of Indian motives and an uneasy peace will continue to prevail between these neighbours. Efforts by the Dalai Lama to keep alive the issue of Tibetan independence/autonomy and seek world support further incensed the Chinese. Chinese must be aware of the existence of the Special Frontier Force. In the context of India going to war with Pakistan in 1971 due to the Bangladeshi refuge influx, Huang Hua’s address to the UN Security Council after 1971 war is relevant. Huang said, “At present in India, there are a large number of so called refugees from Tibet. The Indian govt is also grooming the Dalai Lama, the chieftain of Tibetan counter revolutionary rebellion. Are you going to use this for aggression against China?” Chinese cannot accept Indian claims to Aksai Chin since the strategic Western Highway passes through it and captured area provides depth to the Western Highway. The point to note here is that after the 1962 War the Chinese withdrew from Eastern Sector, but, not from Ladakh. While China has settled its border problem with all countries except India, she is not prepared to negotiate with India except on her own terms. The case of the Western Sector has already been pointed out. In the Eastern Sector, if the Chinese agree to the Mc Mahon Line as the boundary, it will amount to a tacit admission that in 1914, Tibet was an independent country which negotiated the Mc Mahon Line with the British. This weakens the entire Chinese case that Tibet has always been a part of China. China cannot afford to grant autonomy to Tibet since its Western provinces, especially the ones with Muslim majority may seek the same status. This may become the trigger for break up of China one day. There has been, since the beginning, a wide gap in Indian and Chinese perceptions on the issue of Tibet. India was convinced that given its unique history and culture, Tibet was entitled to something close to independence-if not complete independence – and that the term ’suzerainty’, though an invention of the British, was a more accurate description of the China-Tibet relationship than the term ’sovereignty’. There was also the conviction that Buddhism provided a very special link between India and Tibet. With this background, it was taken for granted that India had a right to speak about Tibet and that it was a measure of Indian friendship – some called naïve appeasement – that India acknowledged China’s ’suzerainty’ over Tibet. When it became clear that China was determined to impose its sovereign control over Tibet, India took upon itself to assure others that China would settle the issue through peaceful negotiations with Tibet and would grant it a great measure of autonomy. China believed that it was not only going to ‘liberate’ Tibet from all vestiges of imperialist intrigue, but also lead it away gradually from its feudal past into a modern, progressive society. When in subsequent years it appeared that China had not honoured its pledge to the Tibetan people – and let it be said that this perception was not merely India’s but widely shared in the non-communist world – Nehru spoke more in sorrow than in anger. India also believed that it deserved some credit for voluntarily surrendering all the privileges in Tibet which it had inherited from the British. China had an entirely different perception. It was convinced that Tibet was an integral part of China and its control over the territory was loosened only by British imperialist machinations against the previous Chinese governments, which were weak. The term ’suzerainty’ as distinct from ’sovereignty’ was seen as part of the imperialist plot. Indian hesitation in the initial stages to recognize Chinese sovereignty over Tibet was seen as an attempt to inherit the imperialist mantle. China believed that it was not only going to ‘liberate’ Tibet from all vestiges of imperialist intrigue, but also lead it away gradually from its feudal past into a modern, progressive society. The autonomy which it had promised Tibet was strictly limited, and it maintained that for India, even to refer to it was a case of gross interference in the internal affairs of China. Chinese problems in Tibet are basically of their own making. Tibetans are not reconciled to the Chinese occupation. Han chauvinism is another problem. They have scant regards for the Tibetan way of life, its religious beliefs, etc. Outwardly things may appear calm, but under the surface there is great resentment. After the 1962 war, India allowed Dalai Lama unrestrained freedom of activity. The Tibetan govt in exile was established in Dehradun. India encouraged Dalai Lama to open offices in New York and Geneva. China denounced Dalai Lama as a ‘traitor’ and removed him from the PCART. Dalai Lama should recognize that Tibet has entered a period of stability and economic change. …like any other youth, the Tibetan youth is getting restless and is convinced that non-violent means are being seen as Tibetan weakness and would not lead to any tangible results. Conclusion Tibet, irrespective of China’s tight control remains volatile. Although the Dalai Lama has relinquished his demand for total independence, his continued stay in India and the large support he enjoys in the Western World will keep the pot boiling. How this issue is finally resolved will have a major bearing on Sino-India relations. The ultimate goal of Tibetan freedom movement would be to make the people of Tibet pursue their traditional way of life in Tibet. Fundamental characteristics of Tibet as a nation have been peace, compassion, non-violence, spirituality and democracy. Tibet has devoted the last 1300 years to inner exploitations. Political freedom is only a means and not the end. The youth contends that the Tibetan struggle would neither be a political movement nor anti-Chinese. The Dalai Lama, his Government and Tibetans would endeavour to undo the obliteration of their country by peaceful means, according to Buddhist traditions. But like any other youth, the Tibetan youth is getting restless and is convinced that non-violent means are being seen as Tibetan weakness and would not lead to any tangible results. Tibetan youth may well adopt the Indian model – the combine of non-violent and violent movement. So long as China perceives that India, however tacitly, is supporting the Tibetan movement, it will always be suspicious of Indian motives and an uneasy peace will continue to prevail between these neighbours.Supreme Court Justice Salim Joubran has the right not to sing the national anthem, "Hatikva." The law doesn't oblige him to do so, and the song's lyrics don't enable him to do so. As a loyal citizen of his country, the justice did not want to betray his conscience during the new Supreme Court president's inauguration by singing a song whose words are alien to every Arab citizen of Israel. And the uproar that erupted following Joubran's refusal damaged the delicate fabric of Israeli democracy far more than his silence did. Against the background of the chorus of denunciations from the right, the position taken by Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin and Vice Prime Minister Moshe Ya'alon, both of whom came to Joubran's defense, was particularly noteworthy. They deserve high praise for this. Supreme Court Justice Salim Joubran. Tomer Appelbaum The lyrics of Israel's anthem were written in 1878 by Naphtali Herz Imber as an expression of the national sentiments of the Jewish people, and the Jewish people only. No Arab citizen who had any self-respect, political awareness or national consciousness could sing these words without commiting the sins of hypocrisy and falsehood. An Arab citizen cannot sing "a Jewish soul yearns" or "the hope of 2,000 years," words that ignore the existence of an Arab minority in the State of Israel - a minority for whom this land is also their land. In choosing not to join the choir singing "Hatikva," the justice made an important contribution to our public discourse. He adroitly reminded Israeli society of the complex situation faced by Arab citizens in the Jewish state. The right to remain silent (his own and that of every Arab citizen ) is the flip side of the right to freedom of expression, and both must be held sacred. Israel's Arab citizens, who face discrimination in almost every area, are entitled to exercise this right even when it comes to the national anthem: With its current lyrics, "Hatikva" is not their song. The time has come for Israel to consider changing the words of its anthem, so that all Israelis can identify with them. But until that happens, we need to allow anyone who chooses not to sing the anthem to do so, without becoming the target of an ugly witch hunt by the nationalist right. Read this article in Hebrew Keep updated: Sign up to our newsletter Email * Please enter a valid email address Sign up Please wait… Thank you for signing up. We've got more newsletters we think you'll find interesting. Click here Oops. Something went wrong. Please try again later. Try again Thank you, The email address you have provided is already registered. CloseYesterday marked the very first competitive encounter between Atlanta United and Orlando City SC, the soon-to-be Major League Soccer matchup in the Southeast. The U16 and U18 Atlanta United Academy teams traveled to Orlando, Florida for the weekend knowing in the back of their minds that this could be the beginning of a potential rivalry between the two clubs. The U18s kicked off first in the morning. A promising start along with some quality individual play led to a goal from defender Bryce Washington which put ATL UTD ahead at the break. The second half proved to be a competitive one, a constant back-and-forth, but the visiting side defended well, holding on to the 1-0 lead all the way until the final whistle. Notable performances included Tambadu Alhaji, Mike Ille and Machop Chol. The U16 matchup began shortly after, and the ATL UTD U16s followed suit with a strong first half of their own. Though failing to capitalize on a number of chances early on, the deadlock was finally broken when striker James Brighton found the back of the net after a rhythmic sequence of passing and movement. ATL UTD held the 1-0 advantage at the half, but the home side refused to remain down for long. Orlando City battled back after the break and equalized off a set piece opportunity, leading to a final 1-1 draw between the two sides. Notable performances included Alessandro Castro, George Bello, Kendall Edwards and James Brighton. The Academy trip to Florida also included matches against Boca FC on Saturday in which both the U16 and U18 ATL UTD sides took three points each. The U16s won 3-1, while the U18s won 4-2 with Cheick Fofana scoring two goals. Overall, another big weekend for the Atlanta United Academy as both the U16 and U18 squads continued their undefeated runs in their inaugural seasons competing in the United States Soccer Development Academy (USSDA) setup. View the photo gallery from Sunday below:MONTREAL – Receiver Eric Deslauriers retired after nine CFL seasons Thursday to join the Montreal Alouettes front office. The Calgary native becomes Montreal’s football operations assistant as well as a scout with the CFL team. The six-foot-four, 206-pound Deslauriers had 99 catches for 1,334 yards and three TDs in 115 career games, all with Montreal. He was a member of two Grey Cup-winning teams after being selected in the first round, seventh overall, in the 2007 CFL draft. "We congratulate Eric for a wonderful career and for all his dedication to the Alouettes on and off the field," Montreal coach/GM Jim Popp said in a statement. "I have said to him several times over the years that he would be a great addition to our organization once his playing days were over. "Sometimes timing is everything and we are fortunate to have him join the entourage." Deslauriers will help evaluate talent for the upcoming CFL draft and also be responsible for advance scouting once the season begins.A few months ago, a crowd of curious onlookers gathered on a newly built highway overpass in downtown Port-au-Prince. It was a humid afternoon, too hot to linger outside, but Haiti’s President, Michel Martelly, was scheduled to appear, and any appearance by Martelly was bound to be entertaining. Before being elected President, in 2011, Martelly was Sweet Micky, an extroverted singer of the ebullient dance music called konpa. A popular and bawdy showman, he appears in one typical video clip in a night club, dancing for the camera in a red bra and a yellow sarong. At one point, he feigns masturbating a giant phallus, then hoists an imaginary breast and licks it. At the overpass, jeeploads of riot police fanned out, and workmen set up a red carpet and a lectern with the Presidential seal on it. Martelly was coming to inaugurate the Delmas Viaduct, a four-lane bridge over a deep gully at the base of Delmas, a densely populated hillside neighborhood. As the crowd grew, a rara band, a squad of dreadlocked teen-agers, showed up to blow horns and beat drums. Martelly, who is fifty-four, arrived in a pink-and-white checked shirt worn untucked over black jeans. His shaved head gleaming, he cut a casually hip figure amid an entourage of plainclothes bodyguards and officials in suits. At the microphone, he spoke in guttural Creole, a French patois that is Haiti’s primary language. “This viaduct proves once again that together we can achieve great and beautiful things,” he said. “More than a dream, more than a project, this viaduct is now one of the symbols of Port-au-Prince.” Martelly’s Presidency has been predicated on rebuilding. He took office a year after the January, 2010, earthquake that devastated Port-au-Prince, killing perhaps two hundred thousand people and leaving millions homeless. The disaster drew the world’s attention to Haiti’s long struggle—and, to some extent, offered a chance for a fresh start. In a survey of American voters, more than half reported donating to help repair the country; Bill Clinton, whose family foundation is deeply involved in Haiti, announced the hope that it could “build back better.” But Delmas, like much of Port-au-Prince, has been at best partly repaired. Even as the new overpass was unveiled, tens of thousands of residents were still displaced. As Martelly finishes his term in office, Haiti remains the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Some sixty per cent of its ten million citizens live in poverty. Nearly half are illiterate, and only one in four has
’s time to start acting like it. AdvertisementsOne of the attractions to “old school” wet shaving is the variety of scents available in shaving lathers. Woods, spices, florals, etc. are some of the classics. There are also a lot of “unusual” scents, and some are becoming their own sub-category. One I discovered a few months ago was “alcoholic” scents: beer, wine, whiskey, etc. So after asking for some recommendations on a few of the wet shaving discussion groups, I collected these dozen soaps. By the way, for the most part I paid for these products though some artisans kindly offered to send samples without charge. Performance First And “YMMV” Scent Profiles I should mention that this article is mainly about scents. All these products performed well as a lathering shave product–some a little better, some not quite as well, at least in my “hard” water–but I’ll only mention a performance aspect if it’s unusual in some way. First I will list the description of the soap’s scent from the artisan’s website. I’ll be the first to admit I do not have a particularly sensitive or educated “nose” so I enlisted the help of my wife for identifying some of the scent profiles and whether they track with what the artisan says, both out of the container and lathered on the face. I will also list the soap’s ingredients when available. With those caveats out of the way, here are my impressions of these 12 “boozy” artisan shaving soaps. Ballenclaugh “Sour Mash” Artisan Description: Simply a quality whiskey scented shaving soap that would make you think your nose is sniffing a premium bottle of bourbon. An interesting comparison of the my wife’s reaction vs. my reaction. She got sour, “rotten potato,” and alcohol notes. I got more of a slightly soured cooked corn (vs. potato) plus alcohol. I would call the scent “moderate” in strength, softening slightly when lathered on the face. We both note that using the term “sour” or even “rotten” does not necessarily mean a bad thing in the context of the scent profile. If you’re expecting a “sour” note, it’s nice to actually get it. Artisan Purchase Link Meißner”Strong and Scottish” Artisan Description: Masculine, strong and incredibly intense. Plenty of genuine Scotch whisky, pure sheep wool fat with the peaty-smoky fragrance of burnt oak. We both definitely get the burnt oak, plus an alcohol component. About the same strength (moderate) out of the jar and lathered on the face. Ingredients: Stearic Acid, Cocos nucifera oil, Whisky, Potassium Hydroxide, Orbignya Oleifera oil, Aqua, Sodium Hydroxide, Lanolin, Glycerin, Red clay, Cedrus deodora oil, Talc, Citric Acid, Simmondsia chinensis oil, Juniperus oxycedrus wood tar, Maris sal, Limonene, Linalool. ) Organic quality Artisan Purchase Link, UK Purchase Link, US Purchase Link PAA “Miami Libre” Artisan Description: A sexy blend of sweet cuban cigar and mint mojito My wife and I both got mint, smoke, and rum. My first try lathering this soap was a little weird: tendrils of lather would stick out between the brush and puck. This soap needs a bit more water than usual for me to work well. Moderate scent that sticks with me lathered up through the shave. Ingredients: Saponified Stearic Acid, Aqua (Water), Saponified Ricinus Communis (Castor) Seed Oil, Saponified Cocos Nucifera (Coconut) Oil, Saponified Garcinia Indica (Kokum) Seed Butter, Saponified Butyrospermum Parkii (Shea Butter), Saponified Persea Americana (Avocado) Oil, Sodium Lactate, Glycerin, Fragrance (Essential Oils and/or Fragrance unless Unscented) Artisan Purchase Link Stirling Soap “Gin And Tonic” My wife gets alcohol and lime. I get something more than that but it’s hard to describe what–definitely a scent related to a cocktail though. Maybe something related to an essential oil has something to do with it. Ingredients: Beef Tallow, Stearic Acid, Distilled Water, Castor Oil, Potassium Hydroxide, Vegetable Glycerin, Essential Oil, Almond Oil, Shea Butter, Coconut Milk, Lanolin, Sodium Hydroxide, Sodium Lactate Artisan Purchase Link The Shaving Shop “The Savoy” Artisan Description: Imagine yourself sipping brandy at the Savoy in London with Sir Winston Churchill, discussing politics & war…. These distinguished gentleman (and of course some lady friends) wore only the finest colognes, perfumes and of course other wonderful scents that permeated through the air. The room was engulfed with the intoxicating scent of bergamot, florals, the finest brandy, cedar, old leather chairs, imported Cuban Cigars and Tonka Bean. My wife gets cherry, grass (fresh cut lawn), pipe tobacco, leather, and complex alcohol. Of all the soaps on this list The Savoy gives me the best “vibe” of some sophisticated men’s club: aromatic tobaccos (and I am usually not a fan of tobacco scents), leather, and classy colognes. Strongest off the puck it softens a bit when lathered on my face. The Shaving Shop commissioned Claude Pillon of Henri et Victoria to make this shaving soap. Artisan Purchase Link The Shaving Shop “Time Traveler” Artisan Description: The Time Traveler is made with locally brewed Alabama craft IPA in place of water, giving the soap a super thick, dense, protective lather. The scent contains a unique blend of hemp (yes HEMP!), nutmeg, hops, dark chocolate, amber, patchouli, and vanilla. My wife says “homemade strawberry sundae, cucumber, and alcohol.” A bit of explanation there: the ice cream sundaes she makes include fresh grated nutmeg, chocolate, and vanilla bean so her comment makes sense in that context. Me, I get beer and grass mostly. Strongest on the puck, the scent softens way down when lathered on my face. Artisan Purchase Link The Shaving Shop “Colonia” Several people recommended I try Colonia for this article but, frankly, I don’t understand why. I don’t think there’s an “alcohol” component at all. Even the description says nothing related to alcohol: (It) was inspired by my families heritage, our Crest, our heart and soul. My Grandfather was from Calabria, the southern tip of Italy. This shaving soap was inspired by him and the cologne he used to wear. This shaving soap is a reflection of me as well. This soap has a refined citrusy cologne scent, with a smooth Italian Barbershop accent. Artisan Description: The scent profile consists of lavender, rosemary, Bergamot, Bulgarian rose, jasmine, amber and light musk My wife and I get just a hint of lavender, rose, and rosemary. A very mild scent that pretty much disappears when lathered on the face. It performs just fine but I don’t get why it was recommended to me…. Artisan Purchase Link Tiki Bar Soap “The Kilted Tiki” Artisan Description: Kilted Tiki is scented with a blend of fragrance and essential oils including oakmoss, juniper, fir, and a unique blend of whiskey scented fragrance. Yep. Juniper and alcohol. Fairly subtle to me both from the container and lathered on the face. Indredients: Aqua, Scotch Whiskey, Potassium Sterate, Sodium Sterate, Potassium Palmate, Sodium Palmate, Potassium Cocoate, Sodium Cocoate, Potassium Pumpkinseedate, Sodium Pumpkinseedate, Potassium Shea Butterate, Sodium Shea Butterate, Irish Moss Powder, Mica, Fragrance (Essential Oil Blend) Artisan Website (currently on hiatus, link will be updated when available) Through The Fire Fine Craft (TTFFC) “Devil’s Cut” The Devil’s cut is the distilling term for the bourbon absorbed by the barrel when aging whiskey. The inside of the barrel charred and smoky wood tone is imparted in the bourbon. Artisan Description: Featuring Kentucky Bourbon Whiskey in the soap. Mango butter, Cherry kernel oil, and silk are added to our already outstanding coconut oil and tallow base. My wife gets alcohol and pepper. I get more of a “deeper” character from the scent…cherry maybe? In any case, it’s a moderate scent from the puck that softens a bit when lathered. Artisan Purchase Link TTFFC “Angel’s Share” The Angel’s Share is a distilling term for the bourbon which evaporates during the distilling process. Artisan Description: Our version is vanilla sweet, but in a dark complex way. Light citrus hints cut the sweetness, and a warm caramel coffee base keeps this scent manly. My wife says “coffee with cream caramel, sugar, and lemon.” I get more of the warm, toasted caramel vibe. Like Devil’s Cut I get a moderate scent from the puck that softens on the face. Artisan Purchase Link TTFFC “Brokker” Brokkr and his brother were blacksmiths who created the hammer of Thor in the Viking legend. Brokkr also means badger in Norse which is fitting because this shaving soap and a premium badger brush will work together to make mounds of luscious shaving lather. In keeping a Viking spirit, Brokkr has honey and ale fragrance added to the already nutty, malted scent the beer imparts to the soap base. Artisan Description: Charred oak, alcohol. Yep, we both get those notes. Unlike Devil’s Cut and Angel’s Share I find the scent pretty mild that gets even milder on the face…. Artisan Purchase Link WSP “Ol’ Kentucky” Artisan Description: We based our label colors on the Kentucky Derby, and Woodford is the official drink. We started the blend with top notes of bourbon and base notes of oak, sandalwood, & a hint of patchouli. I love WSP products (particularly their shaving brushes) but from the scent standpoint this was a disappointment. My wife and I found very little scent on the puck–perhaps just a hint of a vanilla note–that disappeared when lathered. Great performance though. Ingredients: stearic acid, water, tallow, coconut oil, potassium hydroxide, glycerin, shea butter, fragrance, sodium hydroxide. Artisan Purchase Link, Amazon Purchase Link (affiliate) with additional reviews. Related Post: The Holy Black’s Ramos Gin Fizz Do you have any of these soaps? Share your experience in the comments section!(Heart frontally PDA image by Ekko, public domain) Scientists at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania have used human stem cells to build a heart that beats. Scientists at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine may have just moved us one step further away from relying on donor organs and towards growing replacements in the lab. Using human stem cells, a team led by senior investigator Dr Lei Yang has managed to create a beating heart. The stem cells were created from fibroblast cells harvested from a human skin biopsy. These were reverse engineered into induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC), which were treated with growth factors in order to stimulate their development into multipotent cardiovascular progenitor cells (MCPs) — that is, cells that can differentiate into the three kinds of cells that make up the heart. The second stage was taking a mouse heart and stripping out all of its cells, leaving just a scaffolding — a process that takes about 10 hours. This scaffold was then seeded with the MCPs. "Nobody has tried using these MCPs for heart regeneration before," said Dr Yang. "It turns out that the heart's extracellular matrix — the material that is the substrate of heart scaffold — can send signals to guide the MCPs into becoming the specialised cells that are needed for proper heart function." A few weeks later, the mouse heart scaffolding had regrown into a new heart with human cells, and started beating again at a rate of 40 to 50 beats per minute. This is too slow and the beat too weak to pump blood. The heart's electrical conduction system also cannot effectively speed up or slow down the heart rate. More work is required in order to build a heart that can function properly. "One of our next goals is to see if it's feasible to make a patch of human heart muscle," he added. "We could use patches to replace a region damaged by a heart attack. That might be easier to achieve because it won't require as many cells as a whole human-sized organ would." Another benefit of the new technique is that it could potentially use a patient's own cells to build tissue, greatly reducing the chance of rejection. The full study, "Repopulation of decellularised mouse heart with human induced pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiovascular progenitor cells", can be read in Nature Communications. Via www.upmc.comThe International Monetary Fund (IMF) gave a presentation on its regional economic outlook for the Middle East yesterday, and there was one point that the media latched on to. The IMF announced the budgetary break-even points it had calculated for oil exporters for 2018. Saudi Arabia, the IMF asserted, will need to sell oil at $70 per barrel in order for the country to fully fund its 2018 budget. This particular assertion—and similar claims in previous years—have been responsible for a great deal of poor forecasting about the Saudi economy, Saudi oil policy and Aramco. Giving primacy to this presumption-heavy projection overlooks factual historical precedent and ignores the current situation. It would be imprudent to assume that Saudi Arabia will shape its oil policy or its economic policy around this concern. Here are the reasons why: Unlike most other countries in its region, Saudi Arabia does not take revenue from sales of its country’s oil for deposit directly into the treasury. The money first goes to Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s national oil company. As a largely independent corporation, Aramco earns money and then pays some of that money in taxes, fees and royalties to the Saudi government. For a while, these payments to the government amounted to somewhere between 85% and 93% of Aramco’s profits. Last year, the tax was lowered to 50% in preparation for an IPO. It is not clear whether the IMF’s 2018 forecast even takes the change in tax rate into consideration. Despite the lower tax rate, the “breakeven” number has actually decreased in recent years, according to the IMF, when it should have increased by their standards since a smaller percentage is now going to the government. This raises the possibility that the IMF is simply ascribing all Aramco profit to a government revenue pipeline. Regardless, Saudi Arabia has never funded its budget directly off of oil revenue and has, over the years, adjusted Aramco’s tax burden. Keep in mind, also, that the oil company, Aramco, has the lowest cost of production of any oil company in the world – between $2 and $10 per barrel. The oil in Saudi Arabia is comparatively easy to access. Since Saudi Arabia purchased the company, Aramco always has been able to fund its own budget and capital expenditures. For Aramco—not the Kingdom—the breakeven number is quite low and even lower since the tax rate was dropped. Saudi Arabia has the cash reserves to withstand its budget deficit, as is. At the end of 2016, Saudi Arabia’s cash reserves stood at $547 billion. In the first half of 2017, the Saudi deficit was cut in half, to only $19.38 billion. Even with no return on the cash reserves, Saudi Arabia could continue a deficit at that rate for more than a decade. Running a deficit is not alarming, especially compared to countries that operate in a perpetual state of severe debt Saudi Arabia is changing where its government spends money. The government is moving away from a welfare state model and is spending more on programs intended to promote economic growth. The goal is to diversify the economy so that in coming years the government and the people will rely less and less on the price of oil. Even if these plans fall short of their ambitions, new business is moving into the country and bolstering new and ignored sectors of the economy. As a stable country, Saudi Arabia has no difficulty finding parties to finance debt, including bonds and lines of credit. Thanks to global central banks and the U.S. Federal Reserve, interest rates are very low. It has proven worthwhile for Saudi Arabia to take on debt over the last few years even while maintaining large amounts of cash. This is normal for a modern country. Crucially, running a deficit is a strategy Saudi Arabia has pursued before. In the 1940s and 1950s, when Saudi Arabia first started receiving significant oil revenue, the Kingdom took on extensive debt. The finance minister at the time, Abdullah Sulaiman, was willing to face debt to build modern infrastructure and provide services for the people. He and King Abdul Aziz ibn Saud bet that Saudi Arabia’s oil revenue would rise in the future – which it did.The chairmen of the House Judiciary and Oversight committees on Tuesday announced a joint investigation into how the FBI handled last year's probe into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server as secretary of State. "Decisions made by the Department of Justice in 2016 have led to a host of outstanding questions that must be answered," House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) and House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) said in a joint statement. The two Republican leaders said they have questions about the FBI's decision to openly declare the bureau's investigation into Clinton's handling of classified information, while quietly investigating Trump campaign associates. They said they also want to know why the FBI decided to formally notify Congress of the Clinton probe on two separate occasions; why the FBI - rather than the Justice Department - recommended that Clinton not be charged after the investigation concluded; and the reasoning behind their timeline for announcing such decisions. "The Committees will review these decisions and others to better understand the reasoning behind how certain conclusions were drawn. Congress has a constitutional duty to preserve the integrity of our justice system by ensuring transparency and accountability of actions taken," their statement continued. Former FBI director James Comey apparently began drafting his statement that the FBI would not recommend charges months before his July 2016 announcement. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) first announced in late August that Comey had drafted a statement on Clinton months before making a public statement, saying the decision was drawn up "before the FBI had interviewed key witnesses." The revelation sparked a flurry of questions about why Comey waited months after beginning to draft a statement to announce the end of the investigation in the midst of a heated presidential race. President Trump fired Comey earlier this year, citing his handling of the Clinton probe. Special counsel Robert Mueller, however, is investigating whether Trump fired Comey to obstruct justice in the Russia probes. Comey was leading the inquiry at the time. The top Democrats on these panels, Oversight's Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) and Judiciary's Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), slammed the decision as an attempt to distract the public eye from the Russia meddling investigation that they said is picking up speed. "This new investigation is a massive diversion to distract from the lack of Republican oversight of the Trump Administration and the national security threat that Russia poses," the Democratic leaders said in a joint statement, pointing to "ten months of abdication of responsibility" to look into the abuses taking place at the White House. "The Russian government continues to represent a clear and present threat to the United States and our democratic system, and we are the targets of near-constant cyberattacks by foreign adversaries. Yet House Republicans have taken no concrete steps to secure our next election. Apparently, House Republicans are more concerned about Jim Comey than Vladimir Putin," they said. Comey has come under scrutiny for the decisions he made regarding the email investigation. He disclosed during his June testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee that then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch had urged him to describe the Clinton email probe as a "matter" rather than an investigation. The ousted FBI chief said her request gave him a "queasy feeling" because it matched "how the [Clinton] campaign was talking about how the FBI was doing its work."Apple Wins Injunction Against Samsung’s Galaxy Tab Apple has won its greatest victory yet in its sprawling intellectual property battle with Samsung: An injunction against U.S. sales of what was until recently the Korean company’s marquee Android tablet. U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh late Tuesday issued a ruling granting Apple’s request for a preliminary injunction banning sales of the Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet in the United States, pending further review. The Galaxy Tab 2 10.1, which Samsung uncrated last month, is not affected. “Although Samsung has a right to compete, it does not have a right to compete unfairly by flooding the market with infringing products,” Koh wrote in her order, adding that the strength of Apple’s case on the merits left her no choice but to grant the injunction. “While Samsung will certainly suffer lost sales from the issuance of an injunction, the hardship to Apple of having to directly compete with Samsung’s infringing products outweighs Samsung’s harm in light of the previous findings by the Court.” Now this is only a preliminary injunction and Samsung will certainly appeal it. But make no mistake, it’s a nasty blow to Samsung. Note that Koh issued her order a few days prior to a Friday hearing on Apple’s injunction request. Evidently, she didn’t feel the need to hear any further arguments on the matter before ruling on it. Which is interesting, as Koh denied a previous Apple request for an injunction against the Galaxy Tab 10.1 last December. Koh’s order will become effective as soon as Apple posts a $2.6 million bond to protect Samsung if it is later determined that the injunction should not have been granted. Reached for comment, Apple reiterated the same message it has been hammering at since this debacle began. “It’s no coincidence that Samsung’s latest products look a lot like the iPhone and iPad, from the shape of the hardware to the user interface and even the packaging,” spokeswoman Kristin Huguet told AllThingsD. “This kind of blatant copying is wrong and, as we’ve said many times before, we need to protect Apple’s intellectual property when companies steal our ideas.” Meanwhile, Samsung took a shot at Apple’s case as well as its patent litigation strategy. “Apple sought a preliminary injunction of Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1, based on a single design patent that addressed just one aspect of the product’s overall design,” Samsung said in a statement. “Should Apple continue to make legal claims based on such a generic design patent, design innovation and progress in the industry could be restricted.” The ruling in full below:The following is the first chapter of my new science fiction novella, EPIC FANTASY 0.9b. It’s also available as a full e-book; click the link above for more info. Enjoy! Chapter 1 Ian looked down from the outcropping of gray rock and spied on the Dracinarium nestled in the gully. To his right, the path meandered back and forth, forming an easy route to its front door, but Ian was in no mood to prolong his journey. After a quick check to make sure the leather pouch was still attached securely to his belt, he leapt forward, bounding down the rock face with a few well-timed hops to the clearing below. The Dracinarium, now less than a hundred paces away, was really nothing more than a simple thatched-roof shack with wispy smoke rising from its chimney. As he approached it, Ian kept his eyes locked on the mountain that loomed overhead, visible through the break in the tree cover. That’s where the orcs live, he thought, and beyond that, the Decay. Ian had never liked visiting the Dracinarium; it made him nervous to travel so close to the force that had laid waste to entire continents. The fact that the elders of his village considered such thinking the hallmark of a troublemaker or a dunce didn’t matter to him. In his mind, it was simply a question of logic: orcs, owing to their partial immunity, would always take up residence in the border areas between the Decay and where mankind held dominion. And having done so, they would tend to press as close to the human sides as possible, where food would be most plentiful. Then again, no one he knew had ever seen an orc. And besides, if the Decay did move south and the orcs invaded to escape from it, it wasn’t as if he’d be any safer in the village than he was here. Ian made his way around the hut, past Old Man Giesling’s vegetable garden and waste pit. He reached up and rapped three times on the metal plate affixed to the Dracinarium’s front door: an ornate bronze dragon with a curled tail, the symbolic crest of the Dracini school of magic. “I’m coming!” came a muffled shout from the other side. There was a bit of commotion; sounds of a chair scooting and earthenware dishes being hastily put aside, and then the door opened and Old Man Giesling’s ruddy, pockmarked face presented itself in its place. “Welcome to my Dracinarium, traveler, it is my pleasure to meet all of your needs that the order of the…oh, it’s you, Ian.” The old man ambled back the way he had come, leaving the door wide open as a sign of welcome. On the opposite wall of the dwelling, a hearth was busy crackling, making the room unpleasantly warm. A low table strewn with various small objects lay to the right. Most of the objects resembled locks, child’s spintops, or other such useless doodads. But here and there among them, small charcoal-gray crystals stood out, their facets catching the glimmering firelight. In the center of the table, the clutter had been cleared for Giesling to eat his lunch. “Why do you always give that long speech whenever you open the door?” Ian asked as the old man prepared to sit down again. “You know as well as I do that no travelers ever come here.” “Impertinent young man!” Giesling took up his spoon and brandished it as if it were a switch. “It’s what I’ve been instructed to say. When I was inducted into the order of the Dracini, I pledged to conduct my business in a manner befitting their traditions. When people come to a strange Dracinarium for the first time, they know what to expect; they want to be served with a certain speech and in a certain manner. Finding each Dracinarium the same throughout the region helps to put them at ease, and therefore increases sales.” “Oh, come on,” Ian said. “When was the last time you even made a sale?” “None of your business,” Giesling snapped. “Now, did you bring me my supplies, or have you come only to make light of me?” Ian nodded and unlaced the leather pouch from his belt. He placed it on the table with the opening up, so that it parted to reveal its contents: a dozen of the gray crystal gems, along with a few bundles of herbs wrapped in twine. “Excellent, I thank you for your service.” The old man smiled and showed his grayish-brown teeth. When his face relaxed again, the two jowls on either side slid back into their places beneath the tufts of gray fuzz that served as sideburns. “Oh! I almost forgot. There was something else I was supposed to give you, too. A note…” Ian withdrew a piece of folded parchment from his tunic and handed it over. The old man held the letter close to his face and angled it to catch the light from the fireplace. “Interesting. And I’m to understand that you haven’t read this?” “Me? How would I know how to read it?” “Ah, yes. Pardon my rudeness. It’s just that this note concerns you. It’s a request to take you on as my apprentice.” Ian’s eyes went wide. A magician’s apprentice? Him? It did make a certain amount of sense, he realized. The elders would consider him a good match for the strange old man’s temperament, and sending him away from the village where he would be unable to make trouble must have seemed advantageous as well. But to reveal their intentions in this way, by writing his own fate in a note that he was given to deliver? That showed a lack of courtesy that Ian found unconscionable. He would have to make a big stink out of it when he returned. “So, what of it?” The old man placed the note down and looked Ian over, as if he were a hog being sold at market. “I can see from the look on your face that this idea is new to you. Do you wish to learn my trade, or not?” Ian hesitated. “Well, I…” “Hmm? Out with it, boy! Tell me what you’re thinking.” “I’m sorry. It’s just that…you’re asking me to decide what my entire life will be like in the space of a few seconds! I can’t just say yes or no to that!” “Please.” Giesling turned his palm down and flicked his fingers in Ian’s direction. “Don’t be so melodramatic. Have you ever stopped to think that you might have an aptitude for magic?” Ian considered it. He had sometimes wondered what would happen if he became a magician, but in his fantasies the circumstances had been a bit more grand, more heroic; not leading the life of a poor old man in the woods. “Even if I do, it still seems wrong,” he said. “I don’t want my future decided by the elders. How do I even know which school of magic is the best?” “None of them are ‘best,’ Ian. Each is simply a different aspect of the same underlying principle.” “That’s not what I mean…” Ian’s tone had gone from surprised to depressed. It was beginning to dawn on him that he might not have any say in this matter. “If I explain to you what my problem is, you’ll probably think I’m crazy.” Giesling stared for a moment, then slid over on his workbench to make room for the young man to sit down. “Please, I would love to hear of this madness that seems to have overtaken you. Mental illness is one of the afflictions that can be treated by the magical arts, you know.” Ian ignored the sarcasm and sat. “I guess I just always had the idea that I could be different. Everyone in the region takes up some trade when they come of age. The woodsman chops his trees, the tanner makes his leather, the piss pot man carries his piss, and so forth. But what does it all mean? Why do all these things need to be done? Each one seems just as pointless as the next.” “Pointless? Surely the people who depend on the tradesmen for their goods and services do not think so.” “No, no…it’s hard to explain,” Ian said. “I don’t mean pointless really, just…” “Perhaps the word you’re looking for is arbitrary,” Giesling said. “Yes, exactly. Arbitrary. I always thought I could…I don’t know…cut through it. Find out what all of this really means.” “If you seek a profession with a deeper meaning, perhaps your calling is as a wanderer for Omim?” “No, no. Don’t you see? That choice is no better than any other. Sure, Omim created the world, but why? Why did he put mankind here to serve him? Why the forests, the rivers, oceans, and four schools of magic? Why is there a Decay? What good does devoting my life to spreading Omim’s teachings do if I can’t answer those questions?” The old man leaned back, grinning mildly. “I think I understand now why the village wants to send you to study with me.” He stood up and made his way back towards the fire to fetch another bowl of stew from his hanging kettle. “But perhaps the decision is more fortuitous than you think. We magicians are closely tied to the forces that underlie this plane, forces set in motion by Omim himself. The four schools were not chosen arbitrarily, you know. The Dracini’s sigil is the dragon, because the dragon’s shape was one of the four created by the embers of Lavenia’s soul as it burnt in the eternal flame of Ser.” He pointed at the fireplace with his spoon. “Her divine ashes curled and twisted as they cooled, eventually forming the dragon’s tail, and in a similar way the other four aspects were created. Together, the ashes became the elements that Omim formed into the world.” “I know the story,” Ian said. “But what I don’t understand is, why that particular shape? Perhaps there were other forms, other worlds that could have come out of the flames, but didn’t? Doesn’t that seem important to you?” Giesling smiled and nodded. “Not in the slightest.” Ian exhaled, feeling his enthusiasm for the debate rush out of him along with the air. “You’re just nervous,” the old man said. “Your problem isn’t ashes or dragons; it’s your worry that you might be missing out on something better than our humble profession.” He managed to slip in the word ‘our’ in such a subtle manner that Ian almost didn’t catch it. “But this will fade with time. You are a poor artisan’s son from the Northwestern forests. You should consider it an honor to study with a real magician. Would you rather be a piss pot man? Now, return to your village and tell them I have decided to accept you as my apprentice, provided a reasonable price can be negotiated. It will all be worked out by the next festival, I’m sure. No need to rush these sorts of things; I still have a few years left in me, Omim willing.” Ian nodded glumly, then turned and made his way out of the cabin. The skies had grown overcast, and he could see rain beginning to fall over the nearby mountainside. He took to the path at once, winding his way back out of the gully and up towards the forest. “The old man is right, I should be grateful,” he mumbled as he stepped over hollowed logs and ducked under low branches. The path began to break up, but he felt confident that he wouldn’t get lost. He had been playing in these woods since he was a child, and the slope of the hilly country made it easy to find his way by dead reckoning. Childhood. Carefree, happy, looking forward to a lifetime of possibilities. But now he was nearing the age of manhood: fifteen. Even though he was a late bloomer and still looked half a babe, the truth could not be avoided. He would have to make his way in the world somehow, and that meant his childish fantasies were through. Solemnly, he rubbed the sides of his arms and looked down as he walked, taking his time to avoid any pits or brambles on the forest floor. And that was when he noticed the shape. He had thought it was a snake at first by the way it moved, undulating and slithering beneath a carpet of dead leaves. But it was far too large; the only snakes in the forest were barely longer than a man’s forearm, whereas this one was at least three feet across. It seemed to have limbs as well, splayed out like a starfish, although the exact details were difficult to judge through the cover of the underbrush. Ian ducked behind a nearby tree as the shape came towards him. He wasn’t even sure whether or not the thing had eyes, but it seemed prudent to hide just in case. As it shuffled past, Ian peeked out for a better look. As soon as he saw the helmet, he knew what it was. Ian had never seen an actual orc before, even a dead one, but there were several bent and splintered helmets on display over the hearth in the village lodge. What had taken him by surprise was the motion; he hadn’t expected orcs to crawl along on their bellies like that, undulating in a way that would be uncomfortable or impossible for any normal creature. A wave of fear made him struggle to catch his breath, and in doing so a small yelp passed his lips. The orc stopped moving. It was less than two feet from him by then, and Ian felt his hairs stand upright as it slowly began to turn towards the tree. What he could see of its skin under the loose leaves was brownish-green and scaly, covered in some sort of transparent ooze that made it hard to determine what was flesh and what was torn, dirty clothing. It continued turning until the part that the helmet rested on—Ian could only assume that this was the thing’s head—faced him. It looked up towards him and let out a ferocious, snarling howl. Ian screamed. He lifted his right leg and delivered a straight kick directly to the orc’s nose, causing its face to crumple and cave in beneath his foot. Wide-eyed and panting, Ian stared with disbelief at what he had done: the orc still screamed with its head split open, distorted noises emanating from its mangled throat. But even worse was what the throat was made of: the inside of the orc’s head was metal. Not hard metal; it had more the consistency of parchment, all folded together and rumpled in a loose pile. But it gleamed and shimmered like a polished surface, at least in the places where a viscous black liquid was not seeping out through its crevices. Ian backed away, unable to take his eyes off the creature. The orc was still coming after him, clawing at the ground with one arm even as it reached up to tear at its now-destroyed face with the other. Ian yelled once more, then turned and ran, tearing away at top speed off into the forest. Continued in Part 2. 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Manchester City's 2-1 win at CSKA on Wednesday. A furious Touré says he was racially abused on several occasions by fans at the Khimki Arena, but CSKA flatly rejected the claims. On Thursday, the club released comments attributed to Doumbia on its official website, saying that Touré had "overreacted". "I've heard nothing of this from our fans," Doumbia supposedly said, according to the club website. "Yes, they are noisy and try to put maximum pressure on the opponent, but they make no racist chants. So my fellow Cote d'Ivoire international has obviously overreacted a little bit." However, in comments on Doumbia's Facebook fanpage on Friday, the striker insisted that he had never said anything of the sort. "I want to clarify my position after my Ivory Coast team mate and friend Yaya Touré accused CSKA fans of racism," read a statement posted in both English and French on the page, which appears genuine. "I want to insist that I did not talk to any journalist about these facts so none of the quotes you read in the press came from me." Yet the comments were still proudly displayed on the club's own website, as part of a story in which the club say they are "surprised and disappointed" at Touré's allegations. It was not possible to verify immediately that the comments posted on the Facebook page were a direct statement from Doumbia, and calls to the CSKA press office went unanswered. CSKA have been charged by Uefa in connection with the incident.The ordinance signed on April 30 caps a four-year effort by the city to address the proliferation of pot parlors, which the Los Angeles Police Department said led to an increase in crime. The ordinance, approved by the City Council in January, caps the number of dispensaries at 70, while letting 116 that registered with the city before Nov. 13, 2007, stay in business. Operators of the other dispensaries will receive letters this week telling them to close, according to Frank Mateljan, a spokesman for the city attorney’s office. The remaining operators will be required to pay registration fees of $1,595 annually, Mateljan said. Employees will be subject to background checks and facilities subject to city inspection. The ordinance also requires the dispensaries be located at least 1,000 feet from places such as schools, parks and child- care facilities. A proposition on the statewide ballot in November would allow anyone over the age of 21 to possess, cultivate or transport marijuana for personal use. It would also permit local governments to tax marijuana production and sales, an estimated $15 billion a year business in California. Editors: Rob Golum, Anthony Palazzo. Source: Bloomberg.com (USA) Author: Christopher Palmeri Published: May 3, 2010 Copyright: 2010 Bloomberg L.P. Contact: cpalmeri1@bloomberg.net Website: http://www.bloomberg.com/ URL: http://drugsense.org/url/HQWQKTxp CannabisNews Medical Marijuana Archives http://cannabisnews.com/news/list/medical.shtmlWith Kurt Angle’s deal with TNA having expired last month, there has been a lot of talk on whether the Olympian could potentially rejoin WWE or stay with TNA, but likely on a part-time basis. PWInsider.com now reports that Kurt Angle has likely signed a new deal with TNA which allow him to split his time between working for the company and taking on acting work in Hollywood. Angle is expected to be a part-time performer for TNA going forward having recently been in Hollywood working on his acting career. Dixie Carter has been teasing a big announcement on Twitter and it’s likely that this is it. The news will come as a blow to WWE fans, however WWE wanted Angle to commit to a deal on a full-time basis, which he would not agree to.A first: Obama-Romney tie in Dixville Notch A town clerk makes final adjustments to the voting station on Monday in Dixville Notch, N.H. (Photo11: Rogerio Barbosa, AFP/Getty Images) Maybe this will be a close election: President Obama and Mitt Romney tied in Dixville Notch, one of two tiny New Hampshire villages that get to cast the first votes of the presidential election on Election Day. Each candidate received five votes -- the first tie in Dixville Notch history. In 2008, Obama received 15 of the 21 votes cast. In Hart's Location, the other New Hampshire town that enjoys first-vote status, Obama won with 23 votes, Romney received 9 and Libertarian Gary Johnson received 1 vote. In 2008, Obama received 17 of the 29 votes cast. CLOSE Residents of Dixville Notch, New Hampshire kicked off Election Day by voting at midnight. The result was a tie, reflecting the close race that polls are showing around the nation. (Nov. 6) The towns have proudly held their first-vote status since 1948. Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/VwCFW8Have you ever dreamed of winning a Nobel Prize? Or at least scoring a coveted Berkeley NL (Nobel Laureate) parking space? You’re in luck. Berkeley has a brand new NL spot, and it’s open to anyone. That is, anyone who rides a bicycle to and from campus. It sits to the left of a cluster of U-shaped bike racks outside the Free Speech Movement Café entrance. Gold, instead of silver, in color, the rack is flanked by an NL sign atop a matching gold signpost. The sign honors Berkeley faculty who contributed to the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 with former Vice President Al Gore. The Nobel was given for joint efforts by Gore and the IPCC “to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.” Thousands of scientists and officials from more than 100 countries collaborated on innovative, Nobel Prize-winning research for the IPCC that led to greater certainty about the scale of global warming and sharpened the connection between warming and human activities. Berkeley’s contributors to the IPCC research included Dan Kammen, a professor of energy and founding director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory, whose tongue-in-cheek comment at a 2013 panel discussion on climate change at the Goldman School of Public Policy planted the idea for an NL bike spot. “Somewhere in the course of the discussion, Dan joked — while talking about the work he and some of our other faculty had done on reports for the IPCC, which won the Peace Prize with Al Gore — that while Nobelists get NL parking spots, maybe (the Berkeley IPPC contributors) should at least should get an NL bike rack,” says John Wilton, then-vice chancellor for administration and finance, who helped organize and introduced the 2013 panel. “Dan and I thought it would be a good, light-hearted way of both recognizing the contribution made by Berkeley to the Nobel Prize,” he adds, “and the virtues of cycling as a way to commute.” The decision to create an NL bike space “also was tied to our broader efforts to provide enough bike parking in the right places for students, staff and faculty,” says Lisa McNeilly, Berkeley director of sustainability and energy, adding that “this spot is in a high-use area.” Wording on the sign says Berkeley “is committed to being a responsible steward of the environment, promoting global thinking and local action,” and that “all cyclists are welcome” to park there. The most recent campus data on how people commute to and from campus show that bike usage continues to rise, says McNeilly. Without fanfare, the sign recently was added to the landscape and is beginning to attract curiosity and, for some, a smile of satisfaction. A joke also led to Berkeley’s first NL spot for a Nobelist with a car. According to a 2009 California magazine post, professor Czeslaw Milosz, who in 1980 won Berkeley’s only Nobel Prize in literature, at that time “jokingly requested it, after Chancellor Ira Heyman asked Milosz if the university could do something special to show its appreciation.” But it wasn’t until 1983, the story says, that the campus was ready to give its first NL parking space to Gerard Debreu for winning the Nobel Prize in Economic Science. Today, there are 10 NL parking spaces — for powered vehicles — at Berkeley, seven of them along University Drive and one each in the Genetics Structure, the Boalt lot and on South Drive, according to Seamus Wilmot, Berkeley’s director of parking and transportation. They are reserved, and an NL permit is required to park in them. Professors who win a Nobel Prize are asked where they would like their space to be, Wilmot says, but if they don’t have a preference, they are given one on University Drive. “It’s a very impressive sight, the seven NL spaces lined up in front of Campbell Hall,” says Wilmot, “and quite the tourist attraction. You’ll find many families taking pictures. I also tell my staff that there are very few places in the world where you get to work and see a sight like this.” No doubt that goes for the new NL bike space, too.Forget the pictures you've seen in adult films and the "lifelike" drawings scrawled on public bathrooms, there is now a scientific guide for the average penis size - and hopefully it will put some men at ease. British researchers have pooled the measurements of more than 15,000 men's penises to more closely determine what constitutes "normal-sized" anatomy. They found the average penis is 13.12 centimetres when erect and 9.31 centimetres when flaccid. The team, led by psychiatrist David Veale, created graphs of both length and girth, finding the vast majority of men range between 11 and 15 centimetre in length and between 10 and 13 centimetres in circumference when erect. "We believe these graphs will help doctors reassure the large majority of men that the size of their penis is in the normal range," said Dr Veale, a specialist in body dysmorphic disorders at King's College London Medical School.Harry Kramer loved explosives. He loved the danger of working with them and the thrill of watching them go off. A properly made bomb was an amazing piece of engineering, a compact device of wires, springs, and explosives all set up in a very precisely and ordered way. When the bomb went off, all that hard work evaporated in a single transformative moment. It was like taking a piece of fine crystal and hurling it against the side of a brick wall, and how could someone not feel joy at that? How could someone not see that there was something magical that only existed in that single solitary moment when the product of labor and a thoughtful mind became nothing more than garbage? Though there wasn't anything sexual about it, the best word that Harry had found for it was orgasmic. A thick letter came in the mail for him. He ran a few simple tests to see whether it might contain a bomb, sniffing at it and hefting it carefully. Letter bombs were tricky to do, because you couldn't reliably set them on a timer unless you knew for certain when they'd be opened. The letter also had to make it through the postal service without detonating or being discovered, which was a challenge in and of itself. The most common way to make a letter bomb was to fill an envelope with two chemicals that were explosive when mixed, separating them with layers of paper. Another chemical trigger was placed along the top where the paper was going to be ripped. The chemicals would mix when the letter was opened, and the bomb would explode, but that was often messy because people didn't always open their own mail. It was easier to make a larger package that would explode, because then you didn't need to worry about the bomb being bent or squeezed, but there was a very clear distinction between a "letter bomb" and a "mail bomb" owing to the restrictions on construction. Harry had a recurring fantasy about being sent a letter bomb. In the fantasy he would smell the metallic powders and carefully disarm the bomb in his workshop, pulling it apart to expose its secrets. Written inside the letter bomb would be words of congratulations for showing caution, and a coy invitation to begin using his skills in earnest. In the fantasy he and the other bomber would engage in a conversation written across the city in explosive force, needing nothing more than concussive blasts to speak to each other. There was something raw and primal about destroying the ordered world of the city. Eventually Harry would prove himself the superior of the two, and she would reveal herself to him, and declare her undying love for him. It was always a woman, of course. They would exchange hot, hungry kisses on the rooftop of his apartment as Harry's bombs leveled the city. The letter he'd received wasn't a bomb. Instead, there was an offer of employment. Beneath that, the bulk of the envelope containing crisp twenty-dollar bills, enough to pay for his apartment for two full years. The letter was concerning, because it meant that someone knew about him, but it was exciting, because it meant that he was going to get to do something that he loved. It wasn't some simple job that required only a simple demolition or death, it was finally a chance to be unchained and fully funded. No longer would he have to cobble something together from bits and pieces. He was going to make something beautiful. "What makes a person do a thing like this?" asked Clark. Lois rolled her eyes. Clark was a heavy man, thick without really seeming muscular, though you could tell from a glance that he'd never learned to buy clothes that fit. He had terrible posture, his hair was messy, and he wore glasses so thick you could hardly see his eyes through them. He seemed to get sick constantly, and he was so out of shape that whenever they had to move quickly he could be seen gasping for air afterwards. He had the desk right next to Lois's, and so she'd had time to examine each and every one of his faults - that was just a small sampling of the physical problems with Clark. Much to her consternation, he was somehow the second best reporter at The Daily Planet. They were often paired together for the big stories, since it allowed Perry to run a companion story to a front-pager. More often than not, Lois found that being around Clark tried her patience. It was made worse by the fact that he'd quite obviously developed an infatuation with her from nearly the day that he started working at the Planet. He'd asked her out during his second week, and she'd politely but firmly told him no, but he was still hung up on her. One of the only good things about Clark was that he was as transparent as glass. His crush was more sad than annoying, most days anyway. Lois and Clark were standing outside the remains of an apartment building. It had exploded earlier in the day at around noon, sending bricks, wood, and personal belongings in every direction and shattering a number of windows all around the block. Two people had died, and a lot more had been seriously injured. The apartment was still standing, but three of the upper floors were now just a gaping hole, and it was likely that there was enough structural damage that the building was a total loss. Everyone talked about how much worse it could have been. It was front page material for sure. "Some people are just evil," said Lois. "I don't think a person is born a certain way," said Clark. "People make choices, for good or evil. Free will is part of God's design. I just can't understand why someone would make this choice." Lois tried to stop herself from rolling her eyes again. "Some design," she said, as she spotted a severed arm in the rubble that no one seemed to have picked up yet. Lois and Clark had done their interviews, talking to the victims, police, firefighters, and neighbors. There was little question that the explosion had been deliberate. The police were already chasing down some promising leads, though Lois knew that half the time they only said that to keep people reassured. They'd been back at the Daily Planet Building working late when the second bomb had gone off, exactly six hours after the first. This one was at a sales office downtown. Most of the staff had gone home, but the rescue workers had pulled a few corpses from the wreckage. She overheard one of the onlookers say that it was a tragedy that people had died because they'd stayed late to work. She made sure to put that in her article. The third bomb exploded in Superman's face. He'd found it in the freezer of a grocery store, and got people out of the way before he'd tried moving it, which was when it had blown up. Lots of people reported seeing a gaping hole torn right in the center of his costume. Superman had spoken directly with the chief of police, giving him as much information as possible. Lois had come back into the office late at night in order to write about it, and found that Clark was already there in a wrinkled shirt, looking for all the world like he'd never stopped working when she'd left at eight. Though he finished his article before her, she came up with the better moniker - the Clockwork Bomber. Perry groused about them being too competitive and wasting effort writing the same story, then decided to run Lois's article in the morning edition with the headline "Clockwork Bomber Strikes Midnight!". The long hours were worth it just for the forlorn look on Clark's face. Lois set her alarm for five in the morning. The first bomb had been at noon, the second at six, and the third Superman had detonated just before midnight. The pattern was obvious to anyone with half a brain. Ten minutes before six o'clock in the morning she heard a distant rumble from across the city, and she was ready to trek off towards it in her most sensible shoes. Clark was nowhere to be seen, and despite being tired as hell, Lois felt a warm glow of satisfaction that she'd beat him to the punch. The mayor and the chief of police held a press conference, where they promised that they would find the man or men responsible. No one made any demands, and no one claimed credit. Everyone braced themselves for another bomb at noon, but it didn't come. Four bombs had claimed the lives of six people, and there didn't seem to be a point to it. The casualties had been much lower than they could have been, given the time of day that the bombs had gone off and the locations that they'd been placed, but it was anyone's guess what that said about the bomber. A few days passed, and eventually things began to settle down again. Lois was surprised when she found a second letter on her desk, addressed to Miss Lane and requesting to meet her in the same place as before. She was ready this time, and grabbed a sheet of paper with a series of questions from inside her desk. She stopped by Perry's desk to tell him where she'd be going, just in case something happened. Perry looked ecstatic, but Lois felt her nerves getting the best of her. She prided herself on being utterly fearless. She'd stood on the spire of the Emperor Building as the first airship came in, strapped in with what amounted to a thick belt. She'd hunted big game with Hemingway over a memorable summer in Kenya. She'd braved storms while sailing the North Atlantic in a yacht, the closest she'd ever come to actually dying. She found these adventures exhilarating instead of terrifying. Yet there was something about Superman that tickled some animal part of her brain. She did her best to ignore it, and made the trek up to the rooftop where the Man of Steel was waiting. "Hello Lois," he said as he turned around. His smile was gentle, but it didn't help her nerves. Luthor had said that Superman moved faster than muscles alone would dictate, but that didn't make the muscles look any less impressive. It was impossible for her to look at him and not think about the fact that he could cross the distance between them faster than she could blink. "Hello Superman," she replied. "I've got some questions for you." "I know," he said. Lois immediately imagined him staring through the walls, looking over the questions she'd prepared for him and composing answers. It felt utterly invasive - she would never allow an interview subject to look over the questions like that, not at this stage in her career. She really should have gotten one of those lead-lined drawers. Of course, maybe he'd just meant that he knew she had questions because everyone had questions. She found herself unwilling to give him the benefit of the doubt. "Go on," said Superman. "But I can't answer everything." "Where is your ship?" she asked. "It burnt up over the Atlantic on my way in," Superman replied. "Could you find the wreckage?" she asked. "There wouldn't be anything left," said Superman. "Even if there were, I wouldn't hand it over. If humanity were able to work backwards and figure out how it was made, I fear the results would be disastrous. It would be like giving a gun to a baby." Lois frowned. "And you're the final arbiter of what's good for humanity, what we can and can't handle?" "I am the arbiter of myself," said Superman. "I can only do what I think is best, and hope that humanity gives the same consideration to their own actions." "Okay," said Lois. "But are you really doing the most good? I mean, I've seen proposals for what other people would be doing with your powers, digging canals or generating power, searching out veins of ore, the amount of money-" "I don't need money," said Superman. He interrupted her so delicately that she momentarily lost her train of thought. "You don't," she replied slowly. "But the rest of us do. These are lucrative jobs that could bring in millions, and with that you could fund orphanages, women's shelters, homeless shelters, or whatever charitable organizations you wanted. We could set up a trust. It wouldn't matter that you were using your powers for a profit, because that profit would be directly translated into good works that would overwhelm positive effects of the crime fighting and general heroism you do now." Lex Luthor's words were coming out of her mouth. "And if you embraced the celebrity that you already have you could charge enormous amounts of money for the use of your image. People are already making lunchboxes and trading cards with your emblem, and I've heard that they're making two different movies about you. These things are going to happen whether you're involved with them or not, and you could at least make some money that you could use for good causes." "Saving people from violent crime is an unambiguous good," said Superman. "Bringing money into it isn't, and I don't know that I should be supplying humanity with a brawn that it doesn't and shouldn't have yet. I've tried my best to confine myself to acting only when there is a clear good to be done. I'm trying not to bend the course of human history, or force my morality on anyone else. I do that by operating within the laws of the country and avoiding controversy as much as possible. I have as few points of interference with a citizen's daily life as possible." "You think that an avoidance of controversy is part of the greater good?" asked Lois. "Do you think that the laws of this country are anywhere close to just?" She pointed across the city to the docks, and the channel where ships were streaming in and out of the harbor. "A hundred years ago there were slaves being sold here. If you'd shown up then would you have stopped slavemasters from beating their slaves? Do the laws of men mean that much to you that you'd actually let such an injustice stand?" "You're losing your cool," said Superman. Lois looked down at her notebook. She hadn't asked him a question from it for quite some time. "You're right," she said. "I'm sorry. It's just that sometimes I think about what I would do if I had your powers, and in comparison you seem so …" "Reluctant?" asked Superman. "Yes," Lois replied. "During Prohibition, as part of an effort to stop people from drinking industrial alcohol, it was denatured and methyl alcohol was added, making it toxic. They thought that people would change their behavior. The end result was that the United States government killed ten thousand of its own citizens." "I wrote an article about that," said Lois. "It never made it to print." "I know," said Superman. He looked out towards the city in quiet contemplation. "I believe that the people who poured their poisons into the vats truly believed that they were doing good. They just couldn't see what the end result would be. Even with the work I've been doing, there have been unwanted side effects." He pursed his lips. "I get the distinct impression that people are less cautious with their lives now that they have me around. People shout for me to save them instead of taking action. There was a fire in an apartment building three days ago, and half the occupants ran up to the roof and screamed for me to come pick them up. If I'd been dealing with some other more serious disaster at the time, those people would have died. These are the things that happen on even a small scale when humanity is saved from their own mistakes and steered away from forging their own path. I'm sure you could think of half a dozen other examples of the unintended consequences." She could. The budgets for the police and fire department in Metropolis were up for review, and both looked like they were going to be cut by a large percent, because the city saw no point in paying the same amount for services when Superman had taken up much of their duties. Those elements of the underworld with sufficient mobility were moving to Gotham City, causing a crime wave there the likes of which hadn't been seen in a decade. The ones that stayed in Metropolis were more organized than before, with a higher propensity towards subterfuge, trickery, and crimes which didn't make a sound. Superman didn't speak anything but English, and so there had been an explosion in language learning. That was above and beyond the general insanity that came from having a man that flew through the air, and the world's first extraterrestrial. There were many things that Lois wanted to say, but she was worried she'd get too wrapped up in argument again. A good reporter pressed their subject, but didn't get heated. If she were speaking to him outside of her role as a professional, she might have called a policy of non-intervention the definition of moral laziness. She might have told him that he had the most inconsistent moral system she'd ever had the displeasure of encountering. The truth was, she didn't like Superman. They'd both read the various proposals and the pleas for aid. There were so many things that he could do, and he simply refused to do them. It might have been one thing if he'd engaged in reasoned debate, but Superman had acted unilaterally, thinking that he knew what was best for humanity. Her thoughts returned again to when he'd scooped her up like a child. Superman was a man - an alien - of presumptions. But Lois Lane was a good reporter, and so resisted the urge to berate him. "How long were you on the planet before you began intervening?" asked Lois. "Two weeks," said Superman. "I learned English on the way over from your radio signals and spent a good deal of time watching from above and getting a more in-depth understanding of your culture and the ways of your people, as well as the relevant laws." "And did you anticipate what followed?" asked Lois. "For the most part," said Superman. "Celebrity, shock, awe, analysis - that was predictable. What I hadn't counted on was the cruelty or organization of the attempts to kill me." Lois furrowed her brow. "You're talking about the people trying to shoot you?" "No," replied Superman. "That I expected. The criminal element was bound to try. I let them sometimes, just to prove how useless it is to stand against me, but most of them attack me like it's going to do some good. I stopped a mugging three weeks ago, and the man kept stabbing my eyes. It didn't do anything more than dull his knife, and eventually he ran out of steam. Sometimes they shoot me and look at their guns like they're shocked that it didn't work. Maybe some people don't really believe the stories until they see it for themselves. No, all that I expected. I'm talking about the bombs. That's why I came to speak with you today." "The Clockwork Bomber," said Lois. "Yes," said Superman. "All the bombs were meant for me. They were encased in lead and had mechanisms inside to prevent me from doing anything with them. I think someone was making an effort to kill me." "It seems obvious that wouldn't work," said Lois. "Even on the face of it." "The bombs were special," said Superman. "They used focused blasts and a variety of different materials. I think one was an attempt to blind me. They're probing for a weakness." "But it didn't work," said Lois. "No," said Superman. "I've been looking over the city and trying to connect the dots. Whoever set the bombs up is going to try again. I need you to warn the people of Metropolis. If I'm right, next time it's going to be worse." Ninety-nine percent of the time, ripping a handful of wires out of a bomb will safely defuse it, either by removing the fuse from the detonator or the detonator from the explosive material. Most people who made bombs were unsophisticated, and most bombs were designed not to be found until after they had detonated. There wasn't much point in making them particularly hard to defuse or move, and there weren't many people with the technical skill to do it. The bombs that Harry designed were complex, above and beyond the complexity designed into them by his benefactor. They had to be, because their target was Superman. Many things could be made fail-safe. The railways used air brakes, in which a piston was held up by compressed air. To apply the brake, some air was let out of the system, causing the piston to lower and the brake to be applied. If any of the components of the system failed, the brake would be engaged by the loss of pressure, stopping the railcar and preventing it from going out of control. Fail-safe design was becoming more and more important as a method of stopping machines from self-destruction. The bombs Harry made were fail-deadly. The detonator was connected to a timer, but the timer didn't cause the bomb to explode - it prevented the explosion from happening. Removal of the timer would collapse a circuit and cause the bomb to explode. Removal of the detonator would cause a circuit to collapse and trigger a secondary hidden detonator. Several small glass tubes were filled with beads of mercury which were part of the circuit, and if the bomb was tilted too far in any direction a circuit would complete and cause the bomb to explode. No one would ever be able to see this hard work, not even Superman, because the whole thing was encased in lead shielding. Wires were affixed to the interior of the casing, and if the lead shielding was removed the bomb would detonate. Most bomb makers didn't make their bombs this complex. It was more work, and with the work came a higher risk of accidental detonation. With the amount of explosives that Harry was using, it wasn't really a concern for him. What he feared was a small explosion that left him limbless and bleeding out, but given the number of pounds of cyclonite he was working with, an accident would leave him vaporized. It didn't seem like such a bad way to go. In truth, Harry liked the heightened sense of reality that came from being one mistake away from utter destruction. The benefactor had designed the bombs to be dangerous things, and Harry had modified them to be nearly reckless. "Be careful with that," said Harry as the workmen took the first bomb out of the workshop that had been rented for him. "It's fragile." They hadn't smiled at his joke, but then they didn't know what was in the crate they were carrying out. The circuit with the mercury switches was on a separate timer to ensure that the bomb wouldn't blow up in transit, but there was still more risk than most people would want to take. Harry had no idea where the workmen had come from. Like many things, the benefactor took care of it. He also had no idea where the bomb was headed, but he couldn't help smiling as his bomb ventured off into the world. He'd headed back into his shop to make some variations on the theme. Lex had tried doing things cleanly. The Conference on Extraterrestrial Science had put out a plea to Superman, asking him to attend a meeting of minds so that they might make a cultural bridge between human and Kryptonian science. Superman could have come forward and simply spoken to them about what the true limits of his powers were, but he hadn't even responded to them. The invitation carried nearly every important name among the scientific elite, and the lack of response couldn't be seen as anything but an insult. Lex had put forward a mountain of plans and proposals that would allow him to get close to Superman, and almost all of them would allow for an advancement in what most people would consider to be the common good. Superman hadn't responded to any of it. The bombing campaign served multiple goals, as any good plan did. Superman was an extinction level event waiting to happen, and where those were concerned there were no second chances. If Superman ever decided to kill everyone, there would be no stopping him, and so it stood to reason that humanity should take every possible precaution to prevent that from happening. The most direct path would be through killing Superman. Lex had written multiple letters to the editor under various pseudonyms, but none had ever been published, and his point of view seemed entirely unpopular. It was always one that he voiced from a position of anonymity, because in public he was playing the role of Superman's champion. People were bad at estimating the risk that an extinction posed, because no one had ever lived through one. People were also quite bad at imagining a catastrophe so large. A woman might weep when you mentioned the possibility of her child dying from consumption, but the total obliteration of Earth-originating life would produce only a shrug. It was too vast for people to think about rationally. Worse, they assumed that "Superman is the greatest threat to humanity" was a shorthand for some decision on Superman's part, when in truth that was only a part of it. Many people accepted Superman's story at face value; the last son of a dying planet, the only one of his kind to exhibit such incredible powers, with little aid from technology save for the ship that had provided him with a trip through the stars. There were many parts of the story that Lex was skeptical of, but he found it most terrifying to think that the story was true, namely because of what it suggested about Kryptonian science. Huntington's disease was a hereditary degenerative disease with cognitive and psychiatric symptoms, one of which was psychosis. Huntington's was seen in perhaps one in eight thousand people, and psychosis was seen in perhaps one in ten of those. If a randomly selected human of Superman's apparent age were to obtain Superman's powers, there would be a one in eighty thousand chance that they would both have Huntington's disease and symptoms of psychosis, the result of which would probably be casualties that would dwarf the Great War by a large margin. If Superman was telling the truth about the culture that he came from, his society wasn't much further advanced than humanity, and so likely hadn't grown past degenerative diseases and hereditary defects. Even if Superman were perfectly good in some abstract sense, the onset of a mental disease might be just around the corner. Worse, if Superman's powers weren't the result of engineering and carefully controlled science (a hard pill to swallow) then no one had made sure that they were safe, and perhaps some day something internal to him would simply unravel, unleashing enough energy to destroy an entire hemisphere. If Superman was to be believed, his powers had come from seemingly nowhere, and yet everyone simply trusted them as though it were the most natural thing in the world. Estimates were difficult to make, given Superman's silence. His second interview with Lois Lane had provided little illumination. Nevertheless, numbers could be pulled from thin air in order to get a sense of things. There was the possibility that something would happen that was completely outside of Superman's control which would result in Superman destroying the Earth. There was the possibility that Superman could simply have a bad day and decide to kill a large number of people, which many people seemed to think was absurd. There were also failure modes which didn't involve the destruction of humanity but would nevertheless result in an effective end to humanity as Lex Luthor knew it, the most probable of which seemed to be that Superman would turn into a tyrant. When these probabilities were multiplied together, the final very rough estimate was that Superman had a one in ten chance of bringing about a global scale human catastrophe of some kind in the next thirty years. Even if the odds had been one in a hundred, Lex would have taken a similarly extreme course of action. The collateral damage caused by the bombs was negligible in comparison to the threat of Superman. But of course the bombs were unlikely to kill Superman. The first four had been for calibration, built with a small device which gave a series of loud chirps prior to detonation to allow Superman time to get to it before it exploded. The next series of bombs would introduce more exotic methods of harm which hadn't yet been conclusively ruled out, but the prospects looked grim. The secondary goal was to probe for a weakness. Lex had it on good authority that Superman had taken the equivalent of a direct hit from navy artillery to his chest when the third bomb exploded. He'd simply looked surprised that he'd set it off. The magnesium and phosphorus compounds had done nothing to blind him, and he'd been talking with the police soon afterwards with no ill effects. Lex had suspected as much, but perhaps something would be found that could harm him but not kill him, or otherwise give Lex an advantage. Lead had been a boon, and allowed Lex a level of freedom that was gratifying until he remembered how free he'd been before Superman's arrival. The third objective was testing Superman's limits. Lex kept a detailed log of Superman's movements in his study, as well as a large map of Metropolis which was covered in small color-coded labels that corresponded to Superman sightings or activities. Superman's patterns had been mapped against the general patterns of crime and emergency in Metropolis, and
. Getting prominent software engineer Bill Joy on board was key and helped Sun sell workstations. Sun's technology still ships worldwide, he said. "Fifty to 100 years from now, our technology is going to be there." McNealy also credited Sun with starting the now-popular trend of open source software. McNealy warned against a growing public sector taking over the private sector, calling it the one threat to all technology companies. Growth in the public sector will drive out innovation, he said. The Obama administration's stimulus spending "is just spending more than you have," McNealy said. These days, McNealy is chairman of two startup ventures, including Flogton, which is "not golf" spelled backwards and presents an alternative mode of playing golf. McNealy described the other venture as a "stealth" startup. This story, "McNealy: Sun could have won out over Linux," was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in the technology industry at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter. Read more about the industry standard in InfoWorld's The Industry Standard Channel. This story, "Sun Could've Beaten Linux, McNealy Says" was originally published by InfoWorld.How should the European Union respond to the narrow decision by voters in the United Kingdom to leave? European leaders are now focusing, rightly, on how to prevent other countries from leaving the EU or the euro. The most important country to be kept in the club is Italy, which faces a referendum in October that could pave the way for the anti-euro Five Star Movement to take power. Europe’s fear of contagion is justified, because the Brexit referendum’s outcome has transformed the politics of EU fragmentation. Before, advocates of leaving the EU or euro could be ridiculed as fantasists or denounced as fascists (or ultra-leftists). This is no longer possible. Brexit has turned “Leave” (whether the EU or the euro) into a realistic option in every European country. Once Britain gives the Union formal notice (by invoking Article 50 of the Treaty of Lisbon), that option will enter the mainstream of political debate everywhere. Research by the European Council on Foreign Relations has found 34 anti-EU referendum demands in 18 other countries. Even if each of these challenges has only a 5% chance of success, the probability of at least one succeeding is 83%. Image: The Conversation Can the genie of disintegration be put back in its bottle? The EU’s breakup may well prove unstoppable once Britain leaves; but Britain has not yet invoked Article 50. The bottle could still be sealed before the genie escapes. Unfortunately, Europe is using the wrong threats and incentives to achieve this. France is demanding that Britain accelerate its exit. Germany is playing the “good cop” by offering access to the single market, but only in exchange for immigration rules that Britain will not accept. These are exactly the wrong sticks and carrots. Instead of rushing Brexit, Europe’s leaders should be trying to avert it, by persuading British voters to change their minds. The aim should not be to negotiate the terms of departure, but to negotiate the terms on which most British voters would want to remain. An EU strategy to avoid Brexit, far from ignoring British voters, would show genuine respect for democracy. The essence of democratic politics is responding to public dissatisfaction with policies and ideas – and then trying to change the judgment of voters. That is how numerous referendum outcomes – in France, Ireland, Denmark, the Netherlands, Italy, and Greece – have been reversed, even when deeply emotional issues, such as abortion and divorce, were involved. If European leaders tried the same approach with Britain, they might be surprised by the favorable response. Many Leave voters are already having second thoughts, and Prime Minister Theresa May’s uncompromising negotiating position will paradoxically accelerate this process, because voters now face a much more extreme version of Brexit than they were promised by the Leave campaign. May has stated unequivocally that immigration control is her over-riding priority and that Norway or Switzerland can no longer be models for Britain’s relationship with the EU. Her new “Brexit Ministry” has defined Britain’s main objective as tariff-free access to Europe and free-trade agreements with the rest of the world. That means abandoning the interests of Britain’s financial and business services, because services are unaffected by tariffs and are excluded from most free-trade deals. As a result, the new government will soon be politically vulnerable. In fact, most British voters already disagree with its negotiating priorities. Post-referendum polls show voters giving priority to single-market access over immigration restrictions by a two-to-one margin or more. Making matters worse for May, her slender parliamentary majority depends on disgruntled “Remain” rivals. As the British economy sinks into recession, trade deals prove illusory, and legal and constitutional obstacles proliferate, May will find it hard to maintain the parliamentary discipline needed to deliver Brexit. A strategy to avert Brexit therefore has a good chance of success. The EU could advance this strategy by calling May’s bluff on “Brexit means Brexit.” May should be told that only two outcomes are possible: either Britain loses all single-market access and interacts with Europe solely under World Trade Organization rules, or it remains an EU member, after negotiating reforms that could persuade voters to reconsider Brexit in a general election or a second referendum. This binary approach, provided EU leaders showed genuine flexibility in their reform negotiations, could transform public attitudes in Britain and across Europe. Imagine if the EU offered constructive immigration reforms – for example, restoring national control over welfare payments to non-citizens and allowing for an “emergency brake” on sudden population movements – to all members. Such reforms would demonstrate the EU’s respect for democracy in Britain – and could turn the tide of anti-EU populism across northern Europe. The EU has a long history of adapting in response to political pressures in important member states. So why is this strategy not being considered to counter the existential threat of Brexit? The answer has nothing to do with supposed respect for democracy. The Brexit vote is no more irreversible than any other election or referendum, provided the EU is willing to adopt some modest reforms. The real obstacle to a strategy of persuading Britain to remain in the EU is the EU bureaucracy. The European Commission, once the EU’s source of visionary creativity, has become a fanatical defender of existing rules and regulations, however irrational and destructive, on the grounds that any concessions will beget more demands. Concessions to British voters on immigration would inspire the southern countries to demand fiscal and banking reforms, eastern countries would seek budget changes, and non-euro countries would demand an end to their second-class status. The Commission is right to believe that demands for EU reform would extend well beyond Britain. But is this a reason to resist all change? That type of rigidity broke up the Soviet Union and nearly destroyed the Catholic Church. It will destroy the EU if the bureaucracy remains incapable of reform.NESS CITY, Kansas (AP) A man whose girlfriend sat on a toilet for so long that the seat adhered to her body will spend six months on probation. Kory McFarren pleaded no contest last month to a misdemeanor count of mistreatment of a dependent adult. A judge sentenced him Tuesday to six months in jail but granted the probation after the victim, Pam Babcock, asked for leniency. "She didn't believe that her circumstances were his fault," Ness County Attorney Craig Crosswhite said. Babcock's plight became known in February when McFarren called the Ness County sheriff, expressing concern about his live-in girlfriend. When authorities arrived, they found Babcock physically stuck to the toilet. McFarren told police Babcock had refused to come out of the bathroom for two years. Medical personnel estimated she had been sitting on the toilet for at least a month and said the seat had adhered to sores on her body. She is now under the protection of a guardian who was appointed through the legal department at the hospital where she received treatment. Also Tuesday, McFarren was sentenced to six months in jail for an unrelated charge of lewd and lascivious behavior for exposing himself to a teenage neighbor in March. Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Guidelines: You share in the USA TODAY community, so please keep your comments smart and civil. Don't attack other readers personally, and keep your language decent. Use the "Report Abuse" button to make a difference. You share in the USA TODAY community, so please keep your comments smart and civil. Don't attack other readers personally, and keep your language decent. Use the "Report Abuse" button to make a difference. Read moreErik Finman dropped out of school at age 15 to pursue a career as an entrepreneur. Now, he's worth over $1.5 million in bitcoin holdings. Finman When Erik Finman was 12 years old, he turned a $1,000 gift from his grandmother — intended for his scholarship fund — into an investment in Bitcoin. This was in 2011, when the digital currency was still only worth $12. In 2014, when he was 15, Finman made a proposal to his parents: He would drop out of his suburban Idaho high school, where he was miserable, and sell $100,000 worth of his bitcoin to start an educational technology company called Botangle. If he was a millionaire by age 18, his parents wouldn't force him to go to college. His parents, surprisingly, agreed, and Finman moved to Silicon Valley. Botangle led him to some adventures, including a meeting with Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian and a contentious exchange with an Uber board member; in 2015, he sold the company for another 300 bitcoin, bringing his holdings up to 403 coins. This past June, bitcoin crossed $2,700 per coin, putting the value of Finman's holdings at just over $1 million. At the time of writing, bitcoin's value went up to around $4,300, putting his net worth at about $1.7 million. Now, at age 18, he's fulfilled the bargain with his parents, and he's not going back to school. This signed copy of Taylor Swift's album "1989" will go up in Finman's satellite. Erik Finman Next up for Finman, then, is a space experiment overseen by NASA: a satellite called Project Da Vinci, inspired by astronomer Carl Sagan's famed Golden Record, that will serve as a time capsule orbiting the earth. Finman teamed up with students from a charter school in his home state of Idaho to bring the project to fruition. Pop star Taylor Swift has even contributed a signed copy of her album "1989," specifically for this project. Finman says that YouTube star Logan Paul, too, has already contributed a video to be stored in the capsule's on-board memory, with more to come. Now, before the satellite launches in the first quarter of 2018, Finman needs your help to catalogue human existence circa 2017. If you want to send a video into space, fill out the form here. And yes, Finman and his team will be vetting the videos for appropriate content. Here's a video, showing what Project Da Vinci is all about: Going to space The original Golden Record went up on the Voyager 1 and 2 space probes, serving as what Sagan called a "boottle" into the cosmic "ocean." Those records contained sounds and images designed to accurately reflect life on Earth in 1977, when it was made, and intended to serve as either a message to aliens or a time capsule for humanity. An image from the original Voyager Golden Record. Wikimedia Commons Finman, a life-long space enthusiast, says he jumped at the chance to participate in NASA's ELaNa program, which allows universities to send up small satellites. And as a particular fan of Sagan's work, he knew his project proposal could be a tribute to the 40th anniversary of the Voyager missions. "I love space so much," says Finman. "I really think I'm gonna do big things in space." A new record Where Sagan hand-curated media to send with Voyager, though, Finman wanted to open it up a little bit. He reached out to Swift, "an artist that represents today," and YouTube stars like Paul. But he's opening up submssions, letting anybody place a video into the capsule, in the interest of a more complete picture of modern life. Still, where the original Golden Record was shot into deep space, the Da Vinci will stay in Earth's orbit. So while the original Golden Record had an incredibly small chance of being viewed by aliens, "they'd have to come pretty close" to the planet to see Finman's update. Concept art of what Project Da Vinci will look like when it's finished. Erik Finman Going forward, Finman says he has a strong interest in pursuing space entrepreneurship. One day, he says, maybe he'll even get to compete with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, another of his personal heroes. "I want to get to Mars," says Finman. "Maybe one day, I'll beat Elon." In the meantime, what's it like to be a millionaire high school dropout with a budding career as a space entrepreneur? Well, "that's a great pickup line," says Finman.PORTLAND, Ore. -- The 18-year-old driver of the car from which a 14-year-old passenger shot and wounded an Anti-Trump protester on November 12 pleaded not guilty to 17 charges in court on Tuesday. Shamar Xavier Hunter faces 17 total charges for two alleged crimes -- the attempted murder during the protests as well as a different gang-related shooting on Nov. 1. His next scheduled court date is January 3, 2017. Charges for the Nov. 12 shooting include one count of attempted murder, one count of first-degree attempted assault, two counts of second-degree assault, one count of third-degree assault and four counts of unlawful use of a weapon. For the Nov. 1 shooting, Hunter faces one count of attempted murder, one count of first-degree attempted assault and six counts of unlawful use of a weapon. Bail for Hunter is set at $1,095,000. The shooting occurred after occupants of a car got into a confrontation with protesters on a bridge. Hunter was driver of the car. Police have said occupants of the car are believed to be criminal gang associates. A 14-year-old is the suspected shooter of 21-year-old Luis Carlos Paredes-Luis, who was shot in the leg and expected to survive. Portland Police say Paredes was participating in the protest march and is not affiliated with any gang. The 14-year-old suspect is being held at a juvenile detention center and faces charges of attempted murder and unlawful use of a weapon. On Nov. 14, Portland police released 18-year-old Steffon Marquese Corothers from jail. He was arrested in the Nov. 12 shooting, but police later determined he was not a suspect. Protester filming as shooting happened One protester, Cameron Whitten, was filming as the shooting happened. Watch: Shooting scene on the Morrison Bridge (about 3 hours, 3 minutes into video) Day 4 - Live from Portland's Continued Protest against President-Elect Trump, Part 2 Posted by Cameron Whitten on Friday, November 11, 2016 More: Fourth night of Trump protests turns into chaosORCUS RELAY, PLUTO—Overhearing a group of newer Tenno eagerly discussing how much Endo they had saved up in order to rank up their recently obtained Primed Mods, a veteran Tenno began rambling on and on about Fusion Cores and how newer players don’t even appreciate how good they have it now. “Fusion Cores were much better.” said a jaded ArgentE, MR23, after spending the better half of five minutes listening to the eager young Tenno around him excitedly discussing how they were about to trade in their collections of Ayatan Sculptures in order to finally max out Primed Pressure Point. “Back in my day, it took hours just to select the Fusion Cores to rank up a mod. It took months to get enough Fusion Cores to max out a Serration and that’s a common mod damn it!” ArgentE was not deterred by the lack of response from the young group of Tenno as he continued to ramble on about how things were both simultaneously worse yet better when he had first started playing the game. “Xini, now there was a real loot cave.” said ArgentE to The Forma’s Senior Veteran Correspondent who quickly regretted their decision to interview the loquacious old man. “Me and the boys used to spend hours there just hoping to get Banshee. When we finally did, oh boy! You should have seen the way squad chat lit up! I bet you just copied your blueprints straight out of some stepping stone Dojo, huh kid?” “I don’t even know what any of this PBR crap you kids keep talking about is. And now we’ve got Lokis that don’t look like Lokis and little Nezhas running around everywhere… It just ain’t right, I tell ya.” ArgentE rambled on to the relieved correspondent who was grateful the salty veteran did not continue that train of thought. Still committed to scraping together at least 500 words to ensure they got paid this week, the correspondent asked why the veteran did not like the Endo system hoping to get another long-winded response. “I liked the old system better.” answered ArgentE. Realizing he was was losing the attention of the first person to take interest in his incomprehensible disdain, the veteran forced in yet another tangent: “And now the new Tenno don’t even have to pay Credits to get their Endo from the Sculptures! Can you believe that?” asked an incredulous ArgentE to the back of the correspondent. “Who do they think is going to pay that tax now? It sure as hell ain’t gonna be me! These kids think Credits grow on trees or something.” Seeing that the correspondent was not interested still, the veteran kicked things up a notch saying “The Hema is nothing compared to what we veterans had to go through.” At press time, sources report that the entire relay had joined forces in showing their outrage against the old Tenno’s claims and that the Senior Veteran Correspondent managed to meet this week’s word count quota and wants his paycheck.Okay, so let me begin with a trigger warning: I'm going to be pretty subjective here, because I really don't think there is any way to cover a game like 'Hatred'. If Polish developer Destructive Creations weren't expecting at least a small bit of uproar to occur regarding their new game 'Hatred', then they must not have paid anyone to do public relations for them. Their recently announced game is literally what the title teases, and what the in-game trailer depicts. The player inhabits the roal of a hateful, spiteful sick bastard with a disdain for the entire world, and he doesn't intend to change the system by getting into politics. It's way easier to just grab an assault rifle and a few grenades, and go on an aimless rampage against innocent civilians until the cops show up and shoot him dead. It's not like the developers aren't aware that the game is rather sick. They even explain it on their own website in case you're wondering: "Hatred is an isometric shooter with disturbing atmosphere of mass killing, where player takes the role of a cold blood antagonist, who is full of hatred for humanity. It's a horror, but here YOU are the villain. Wander the outskirts of New York State, seek for victims on seven free-roam levels. Fight against law enforcement and take a journey into the antagonist's hateful mind. Gather equipment of the dead 'human shields' to spread Armageddon upon society." Now, surely, there must be some other, deeper purpose to the game as well? Apparently, there isn't. The developer are pretty black and white about that: "These days, when a lot of games are heading to be polite, colorful, politically correct and trying to be some kind of higher art, rather than just an entertainment." While many games - like the GTA and Saints Row franchises - let you go on a rampage if you so choose, it's never the explicit goal of the games. You won't win the game by killing innocent people. In fact, more often than not, it'll lead to your own death. And another thing to consider, is the fact that going on a rampage is but a VERY small part of GTA or Saints Row. There are countless other activities you could do. GTA in particular, has activites like tennish and pool, you can eat at a restaurant, or go for a swim if you like. Or fly a helicopter, or jump a dirt bike onto a moving train. Never once are you rewarded for killing civilians. Even in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2's infamous airport sequence, killing civilians was optional. Postal 2 also let you do all kinds of crazy things with civilians. But there too, it was optional. Postal 2's goals involve things such as purchasing milk, picking up a paycheck, getting a signature from a celebrity. Crazy things happen around you, but you always have the choice of running away, and not taking part in the mayhem. And even when you do kill people, it's clearly with a comedic effect. The developers intentionally made it comedic. But with Hatred - the isometric "mass murder simulation" - the only apparent goal is to kill as many people as possible, and go out in style. And it doesn't seem very tongue-in-cheek at all. The art style, the alienating isometric perspective, the screams of the civilians as they are maimed to death. There is no social satire to be found. We gamers know that violent games don't make for violent people. And it's even been settled in court; there is NO correlation between violent games and real-world violent behaviour. So what's the problem with Hatred? Well, let's look at that quote up above again. Games are "just entertainment". And yeah, sometimes it is. Sometimes it's just pure entertainment. Games don't always need stories or loveable characters. Look at Spec Ops: The Line. It's a game that tricks you into mass-murdering civilian people. It's a game that preys on the simplistic goals of modern-day shooters. "Move through the levels, kill the bad guys who shoot at you, and win". And when you do that, the game tells you "you know those guys you shot? Yeah, turns out they weren't bad guys at all. You screwed up!". It's a harrowing experience, but it's clearly done with some sort of purpose. It's meant to make you feel. Developer Destructive Creations on the other hand, don't seem to want anything like that out of their game. It's "just entertainment". Well let me ask you; would you find this entertaining? To walk around in a game killing people who scream and beg for their lives? With absolutely no self-wareness, no tongue-in-cheek social satire or humor to be found? If you've got a slightly disturbed sense of humor, you'll have fun doing that in Grand Theft Auto. But only for a half hour or so, before you get bored and go back to doing the main missions - or one of the game's other two billion side activities. With Hatred, you're forced to do it to progress through the game's seven open-ended levels. You must kill people. Otherwise, you won't win. Where's the entertainment in killing helpless NPCs for hours on end? And where is the challenge in that? If anything, Hatred is at least an interesting piece of gaming history, and I'm frankly intrigued to hear more about the game as the development carries on. I can't say I'm all that interested in actually playing the game, but the social implications alone make it worth at least paying attention to. We'll keep you updated as we get to know more.“La BBC contra el Muro Amarillo,” ran Tuesday’s front page headline in Madrid’s football newspaper, Marca. Translated as, “the BBC (Bale, Benzema and Cristiano) against the Yellow Wall,” the paper focused on the challenge posed to Real Madrid’s superstars at Signal-Iduna Park in Westphalia, Germany. The Yellow Wall describes the 25,000 capacity grandstand behind the goal on the southern terrace of the stadium, hitherto known as the Westfalenstadion prior to its current commercial identity. The largest free-standing grandstand in Europe, and the raucous and colourful atmosphere it produces, was the least of the holders’ worries ahead of this match. Borrusia Dortmund were looking for a fourth successive home win against Los Merengues whose record in Germany is poor – they had won just four times away to German opposition in 29 attempts. As if that wasn’t enough, Dortmund were on fire in the lead-up to this clash having notched 20 goals in their last four matches as they equalled a club record 24 home league matches unbeaten. In addition, their 6-0 thrashing of Legia Warsaw on matchday one was their biggest-ever away victory in European competition. Madrid, on the other hand, had drawn back-to-back matches in La Liga, twice surrendering the lead on the island of Gran Canaria as they dropped two points against Las Palmas at the weekend. That anything less than a win here could tip Zinedine Zidane’s men into a mini-crisis – despite their current position atop the La Liga standings – speaks to the high expectation levels at the Bernabéu. It wasn’t all bad news for Los Blancos though, with plenty of stats in their favour as well. The Spaniards were on a 22-match unbeaten run in the group stages of the Champions League and were unbeaten in 19 matches in all competition, a run stretching back to 6 April. The last team to inflict defeat on Madrid was a Wolfsburg side containing André Schürrle, who signed for Dortmund this summer and started on the bench here. That was the first leg of last season’s quarter-final. Real overturned the deficit and went on to win the final in Milan, handing them La Undecima, the club’s record-breaking 11th success in Europe’s premier competition. AC Milan were the last club to win the European Cup in consecutive seasons and Madrid continue their quest to become the first club to replicate that in the Champions League era. Team news and formations Borussia Dortmund were missing Marc Bartra and Marco Reus, both out with groin injuries. Only Bartra would have been a guaranteed starter, though, and the 22-year-old Matthias Ginter has proved a reliable back-up in recent weeks and continued here. In the summer transfer window, Dortmund were of course deprived of the considerable talents of the likes of Henrikh Mkhitaryan, Mats Hummels and İlkay Gündoğan, however they have recruited well and arguably their biggest coup of the summer was retaining the services of the prolific Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang. The Gabon international is one of the hottest forwards in Europe right now and had scored six goals in his last six appearances prior to this match. In André Schürrle and two exciting teenage prospects in Emre Mor and Christian Pulisic, Dortmund also had ample reinforcements on the bench. They lined up in a 4-1-4-1 formation with Julian Weigl as the midfield anchorman. Weigl, despite being just 21, is crucial as the pivot in Thomas Tuchel’s system, which is characterised by fast and aggressive counter pressing and swift vertical passing through attacking phases. BVB: Bürki, Piszczek, Sokratis, Ginter, Schmelzer, Weigl, Dembélé, Götze, Castro, Guerreiro, Aubameyang Zinedine Zidane claimed he wasn’t worried by his side’s consecutive league draws, saying that the team was playing well and were “working” on certain aspects of their game. Casemiro missed both those matches with an ankle injury, and it’s no coincidence that Madrid dropped points without him. Zidane has described the Brazilian as “fundamental” to his team for his diligent and disciplined displays. James Rodríguez joined Toni Kroos and Luka Modrić in a midfield three as Zidane stuck to his favoured 4-3-3 formation with Danilo drafted in to replace the injured Marcelo at left-back. Sergio Ramos and Raphaël Varane continued in the centre of defence so Pepe had to be content with a place on the bench. Zidane also had a big call to make in goal with Keylor Navas returning after an Achilles problem. His deputy, Kiko Casilla, has grabbed his chance and impressed recently, but the coach chose to go with the Costa Rican. It was tough on Casilla and would prove to be a decisive decision by the Frenchman. Real Madrid: Navas, Carvajal, Varane, Ramos, Danilo, Modrić, Kroos, James, Ronaldo, Benzema, Bale Dortmund fast out of the traps The match started with almost identical free-kick opportunities for each team as both goalkeepers were called into early action to make good saves from Ronaldo and Castro. Dortmund had exploded out of the traps and started very much on the offensive with Mario Götze and Castro, pictured below, taking up dangerous positions between Madrid’s midfield and defensive lines. The match was being played at breakneck speed as Tuchel’s game plan to pressure Madrid in their defensive third was clear. There were early warning signs for Dortmund, however. You can see from this image the high counter-press as Madrid cleared a cross into the box. Cristiano Ronaldo is very deep collecting possession, facing his own goal, and was forced to pass back the way. But with five Dortmund attackers involved with the press, Toni Kroos, circled, was free centrally to receive a pass and spring a counter-attack. On this occasion, Ronaldo rolled the ball back to Danilo who went direct with a first-time long ball towards Karim Benzema. The Frenchman, with support from Modrić, had begun his run inside his own half and was therefore onside. Had the pass been better, Benzema would have been through on the goalkeeper. As it As it was, Sokratis was able to cover and contest the ball. Madrid’s number 9 had to halt his forward momentum, as seen below, rather than continuing on for a clear run at goal. It was typically high intensity pressing from Dortmund, but the indications at this early stage were that Madrid were more than capable of outmanoeuvring the traps and punishing the Germans on the counter. Tuchel’s troops were not deterred, however, and kept looking for pressing triggers. When Ronaldo, this time only five yards ahead of his left-back, miscontrolled, that was the signal for two Dortmund players to converge and win the ball back. The reason for Ronaldo’s uncharacteristic indecision was the presence of a third yellow-shirted attacker blocking the only two available passing options that would have allowed the Portuguese to escape the press. This passage illustrated an effective Dortmund counter press as shown below. Madrid were able to clear the danger, but this sequence was repeated twice more in quick succession, ending only when Aubameyang fouled goalkeeper Navas whilst chasing down a back pass from Real Madrid’s under pressure defence. There was nothing malicious in the challenge but Navas stayed down, more to take the heat out of Dortmund’s intensity and give his defence a break, rather than any injury. Real effective counter-attacks After a further three turnovers as Dortmund attacked were rebuffed and they won back possession to try again, Ousmane Dembélé found himself in a fantastic crossing position. The youngster had been kept quiet by Danilo until then and lacked the necessary composure to make the most of the opportunity. Dortmund were overloading in attack throughout these phases and, with so many men committed to the counter-press, they were left exposed at the back. They would have got away with it on most occasions, but not against Madrid. The outstanding Modrić managed to fashion a genius pass with the outside of his boot from the edge of his own box to Benzema on the halfway line. The image below shows how Madrid were able to capitalise on the space as they had the freedom of Dortmund’s half to exploit. Sokratis should have left Piszczek to close Benzema down while the Greek filtered back towards goal, but instead, both the right-back and centre-back were drawn to the ball. After strong hold up play, Benzema was able to play an easy pass to the oncoming Toni Kroos. From there on it was effectively 4v2 in favour of the attacking side. Kroos passed to James, who played in Bale, and the Welshman’s clever backheel set Ronaldo up for a clinical finish. Determined Dortmund It was a sensational counter-attack by Madrid and could easily have been a hammer blow to the Germans, but they showed great determination to stick to their plan and continue to play positive and progressive football. Zidane, happy with a lead to protect, had asked Bale and Ronaldo to sit a lot deeper than they are accustomed to, as Madrid dropped back to a 4-5-1 formation. The heat maps (left), courtesy of marca.com, illustrate how much time both spent in their own half, with Bale in particular having an extremely quiet and ineffective match on the whole. The image below shows this midfield line, although Toni Kroos (highlighted) was out of position here as he pushed on to pressure the ball. Julian Weigl was consequently able to play a vertical pass to Götze through the channel that Kroos had vacated. This was a typical position for Weigl to take up and shows just how important he is as the conduit between Dortmund’s defence and attack. He was ably assisted throughout the match by Matthias Ginter who frequently stepped out of his defensive position to add another body in midfield. Digging slightly deeper into the passing figures, however, shows a failing in Dortmund’s play on the night. It was Ginter, not Weigl, who received the most passes from team-mates – 87 in total – and most of his link up play was with his defensive partner Sokratis or the left-back Schmelzer. Weigl, on the ball, directed 26 passes to his more advanced central midfield colleagues Castro and Götze, but only managed nine to Gueirrero and five to Dembélé in the wide areas. These two have been an integral part of Dortmund’s good form so far this season, so this telling statistic shows how much the home side struggled to bring them into play – therefore losing vital attacking outlets on the flanks. Dortmund’s persistence did pay off when they won a free-kick 25 yards from goal as half time approached. Raphaël Guerreiro took the kick, which should have been easily dealt with by Keylor Navas. Not for the first time in the match, however, Navas elected to punch the ball rather than catching it or palming it away to safety. He only managed to knock it against Raphaël Varane, and it looked like being an own goal until Aubemayang made sure it ended up in the back of the net. Kiko Casilla would have been on the bench wondering why it wasn’t him between the sticks. The second half continued in the same vein as the first with Dortmund having the lion’s share of possession. Poor decision-making and a lack of penetration in the final third cost them as Guerreiro, Dembele and Aubameyang’s link up play was next to non-existent. Raphaël Varane had the pace to thwart Aubameyang on the occasions he threatened to get free, and Dembélé got very little change out of Danilo, a right-footed player asked to fill in at left-back due to the absence of Marcelo. The game swung from end to end as Madrid also wasted several opportunities on the break, but it was the holders who took the lead again through Varane. Dortmund’s defence switched off at a corner, and Benzema’s volleyed effort cannoned off first the post then the crossbar before falling to Varane to prod home from inside the six-yard box. Tuchel turns to youth André Schürrle had replaced the ineffectual Götze by now, and with Dembélé and Guerreiro struggling to impose themselves, Pulisic and Emre Mor were also sent on to see if they could have any more of an impact. Dortmund pushed forward in a more conventional 4-3-3 with Pulisic and Schürrle now flanking Aubemayang. Schürrle was having some joy down the left as gaps appeared in Madrid’s shape. The introduction of Mateo Kovačić, who replaced James, signalled Zidane’s intent to once again retreat and protect their lead. However, some of his players didn’t seem to get the memo and continued to operate a high press. In the image below, Madrid’s midfield line is far too high. The four along the curved line should be nearer to Toni Kroos (circled), keeping a compact shape and packing the midfield as I’m sure Zidane intended. When Modrić attempted to rush Weigl, who cleverly turned into space, Bale, recognising the danger, points at the gaping space in the midfield but doesn’t bother to track back into it. It was a strange, disjointed passage from the Madrid midfield and Toni Kroos was helpless as Weigl played a great ball through the vertical passing channel. The lack of midfield cover forced Dani Carvajal out of position to press the ball, as shown below, but the Dortmund forward was aware enough to flick the ball round the corner into the space the Madrid man had left vacant and Schürrle was away. The ex-Chelsea man’s touch wasn’t great and he forced himself wide before Navas pushed his shot behind for a corner. Schürrle wasn’t to be denied for long, though. Pulisic was extremely lively when he came on, and when he picked the ball up on the right touchline and skipped past a couple of defenders to cross, Schürrle was once again free at the back post. He took one touch to get the ball out of his feet and this time there was no mistake as he smashed the ball high into the net past Navas. Conclusion This was a match that lacked the expected quality but was high on entertainment. Zidane almost executed a perfect smash-and-grab away European performance but was yet again forced to rue his side’s inability to close out a match from a winning position. The reason they found themselves in a winning position was their more efficient use of the ball. Compared with the passing statistics of Dortmund that we looked at earlier, Toni Kroos was the main man for Madrid.
they believed he was saying "cooker bomb" when he was asked about the drawing, and discussed referring the case to the Home Office’s ‘Prevent’ deradicalisation scheme. However, the case was eventually referred to police and social services panel instead, who decided not to take further action, the BBC Asian Network reported. The boy's mother, who has not been named, said: "[The member of nursery staff] kept saying it was this one picture of the man cutting the cucumber, which she said to me is a 'cooker bomb'. “I was baffled. It was a horrible day.” She added that she feared her children would be taken away from her. In January it was claimed a 10-year-old Muslim boy was visited by police after he wrote "terrorist house" - instead of "terraced house" during a school lesson. His father, from Accrington, Lancashire, branded it a "joke" although council sources later claimed action was taken because it was not an isolated incident. Since July teachers and other workers have been obliged to report any suspicious activity ever since the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act became law. Just under 2,000 under-15s were referred between January 2012 and December 2015. Teaching unions say there is confusion over the government's counter-terrorism strategy in schools. Alex Kenny from the National Union of Teachers said: "Teachers are scared of getting it wrong. "They think Ofsted is going to criticise them if they haven't reported these things, and you end up [with] the boy making the spelling mistake, or the boy saying something in Arabic - that then gets reported on." Telegraph.co.ukWhale-Fishing. Facsimile of a Woodcut in the "Cosmographie Universelle" of Thevet, in folio: Paris, 1574. Photo of a working whaling station in Spitzbergen, Norway, 1907 This article discusses the history of whaling from prehistoric times up to the commencement of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) moratorium on commercial whaling in 1986. Prehistoric to medieval times [ edit ] Humans have engaged in whaling since prehistoric times. The earliest depictions of whaling have been discovered in Korea at the Neolithic Bangudae site, which may date back to 6000 BCE.[1] Bangudae is the earliest evidence for whaling.[2] Archaeological evidence acquired by the University of Alaska Fairbanks demonstrates whaling began at least circa 1000 BCE.[3] The oldest known method of catching cetaceans is dolphin drive hunting, in which a number of small boats are positioned between the animal and the open sea, after which the animals are herded towards shore in an attempt to beach them. This was — and still is — used for smaller species such as pilot whales, beluga whales, porpoises and narwhals. This technique is described in A Pattern of Islands, a memoir published by British administrator Arthur Grimble in 1952. The next step was to employ a drogue (a semi-floating object) such as a wooden drum or an inflated sealskin which was tied to an arrow or a harpoon. Once the missile had been shot into a whale's body, the buoyancy and drag from the drogue would eventually cause the whale to fatigue, allowing it to be approached and killed. Several cultures around the world practiced whaling with drogues, including the Ainu, Inuit, Native Americans, and the Basque people of the Bay of Biscay. The Bangudae petroglyphs, an archaeological site in South Korea, suggests that drogues, harpoons and lines were being used to kill small whales as early as 6000 BCE.[4] Petroglyphs unearthed by researchers from Kyungpook National University show sperm whales, humpback whales and North Pacific right whales surrounded by boats. Similarly-aged cetacean bones were also found in the area, reflecting the importance of whales in the prehistoric diet of coastal people. Whale bones recovered near the Strait of Gibraltar raised the possibility that whales were hunted in the Mediterranean Sea by ancient Rome[5][6] Whaling on the Pacific Northwest Coast [ edit ] Whaling on the Pacific Northwest Coast encompasses both aboriginal and commercial whaling along the coast from Washington State through British Columbia to Alaska. The indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast have whaling traditions dating back millennia, and the hunting of cetaceans continues by Alaska Natives (mainly beluga and narwhal, but also the subsistence hunting of the bowhead whale) and to a lesser extent by the Makah people (gray whale). In the twentieth century there was a commercial whaling industry, small by global standards, in British Columbia and southeast Alaska, as evidenced by place names such as Blubber Bay. When Coal Harbour closed its whaling station in the late 1960s, the industrial killing of whales in Pacific Canada was over. By that point, marine entrepreneurs had moved on to hunting orcas (killer whales) for live capture, to be displayed in aquaria. That lasted about a decade, till public pressure put an end to it in the mid 1970s. As the twentieth century whaling stations existed in British Columbia and Alaska, they are covered in more detail in the articles Whaling in Canada and Whaling in the United States respectively. Some of the pre-contact hunting - and, for that matter, some of the orca captures too - took place across the waters of the two countries, hence this grouping of the two countries. A description of the assistance that European technology brought to skilled indigenous whale hunters is given in the memoir of John R. Jewitt, an English blacksmith who spent three years as a captive of the Nuu-chah-nulth people from 1802-1805. Jewitt also mentions the importance of whale meat and oil to the diet. Whaling was integral to the cultures and economies of other indigenous people as well, notably the Makah and Klallam. For other groups, especially the Haida, whales appear prominently as totems. Basque whaling, 1059-1756 [ edit ] The first mention of Basque whaling was made in 1059,[7] when it was said to have been practiced at the Basque town of Bayonne. The fishery spread to what is now the Spanish Basque Country in 1150, when King Sancho the Wise of Navarre granted petitions for the warehousing of such commodities as whalebone (baleen).[7] At first, they only hunted the whale they called sarda, or the North Atlantic right whale, using watchtowers (known as vigias) to look for their distinctive twin vapour spouts. By the 14th century they were making "seasonal trips" to the English Channel and southern Ireland. The fishery spread to Terranova (Labrador and Newfoundland) in the second quarter of the 16th century,[8] and to Iceland at least by the early 17th century.[9] They established whaling stations at the former, mainly in Red Bay,[10] and probably established some in the latter as well. In Terranova they hunted bowheads and right whales, while in Iceland they appear to have only hunted the latter. The fishery in Terranova declined for a variety of reasons. Principal among them the conflicts between Spain and other European powers during the late 16th and early 17th centuries, attacks by hostile Inuit, declining whale populations, and perhaps the opening up of the Spitsbergen fishery in 1611. The first voyages to Spitsbergen by the English, Dutch, and Danish relied on Basque specialists, with the Basque provinces sending out their own whaler in 1612. The following season San Sebastián and Saint-Jean-de-Luz sent out a combined eleven or twelve whalers to the Spitsbergen fishery, but most were driven off by the Dutch and English.[11] Two more ships were sent by a merchant in San Sebastián in 1615, but both were driven away by the Dutch. They continued whale fishing in Iceland and Spitsbergen at least into the 18th century, but Basque whaling in those regions appears to have ended with the commencement of the Seven Years' War (1756–63).[12] Greenland whaling 1611-1915 [ edit ] Dangers of the Whale Fishery, by W. Scoresby, 1820, by W. Scoresby, 1820 Whaling off the Coast of Spitsbergen, by Abraham Storck, by Abraham Storck Encouraged by reports of whales off the coast of Spitsbergen, Norway, in 1610, the English Muscovy Company (also known as the Russian Company) sent a whaling expedition there the following year. The expedition was a disaster, with both ships sent being lost. The crews returned to England in a ship from Hull.[13] The following year two more ships were sent. Other countries followed suit, with Amsterdam and San Sebastian each sending a ship north. The latter ship returned to Spain with a full cargo of oil. Such a fabulous return resulted in a fleet of whaleships being sent to Spitsbergen in 1613. The Muscovy Company sent seven, backed by a monopoly charter granted by King James I. They met with twenty other whaleships (eleven or twelve Basque, five French, and three Dutch), as well as a London interloper, which were either ordered away or forced to pay a fine of some sort.[14] The United Provinces, France, and Spain all protested against this treatment, but James I held fast to his claim of sovereignty over Spitsbergen. The following three and a half decades witnessed numerous clashes between the various nations (as well as infighting among the English), often merely posturing, but sometimes resulting in bloodshed. This jealousy stemmed as much from the mechanics of early whaling as from straightforward international animosities. In the first years of the fishery England, France, the United Provinces and later Denmark-Norway shipped expert Basque whalemen for their expeditions. At the time Basque whaling relied on the utilization of stations ashore where blubber could be processed into oil. In order to allow a rapid transference of this technique to Spitsbergen, suitable anchorages had to be selected, of which there were only a limited number, in particular on the west coast of the island.[15] Early in 1614 the Dutch formed the Noordsche Compagnie (Northern Company), a cartel composed of several independent chambers (each representing a particular port). The company sent fourteen ships supported by three or four men-of-war this year, while the English sent a fleet of thirteen ships and pinnaces. Equally matched, they agreed to split the coast between themselves, to the exclusion of third parties. The English received the four principal harbors in the middle of the west coast, while the Dutch could settle anywhere to the south or north. The agreement explicitly stated that it was only meant to last for this season.[16] In 1615 the Dutch arrived with a fleet of eleven ships and three men-of-war under Adriaen Block, occupied Fairhaven, Bell Sound, and Horn Sound by force, and built the first permanent structure on Spitsbergen: a wooden hut to store their equipment in. The ten ships sent by the Muscovy Company were relegated to the south side of Fairhaven, Sir Thomas Smith's Bay, and Ice Sound.[17] The Danes meanwhile sent a fleet of five sail under Gabriel Kruse to demand a toll from the foreign whalers and in doing so assert Christian IV's claim of sovereignty over the region, but both the English and Dutch rebuffed his efforts—two ships from Bordeaux chartered by a merchant in San Sebastian were also sent away by the Dutch.[18] The following year, 1616, the English, with a fleet of ten ships, occupied all the major harbors, appropriated the Dutch hut, and made a rich haul, while the Dutch, preoccupied with Jan Mayen, only sent four ships to Spitsbergen, which "kept together in odd places... and made a poor voyage."[19] In 1617 a ship from Vlissingen whaling in Horn Sound had its cargo seized by the English vice-admiral.[20] Angry, the following season the Dutch sent nearly two dozen ships to Spitsbergen. Five of the fleet attacked two English ships, killing three men in the process, and also burned down the English station in Horn Sound.[21] Negotiations between the two nations followed in 1619, with James I, while still claiming sovereignty, would not enforce it for the following three seasons.[22] When this concession expired, the English twice (in 1623[23] and 1624[24]) tried to expel the Dutch from Spitsbergen, failing both times. In 1619 the Dutch and Danes, who had sent their first whaling expedition to Spitsbergen in 1617, firmly settled themselves on Amsterdam Island, a small island on the northwestern tip of Spitsbergen; while the English did the same in the fjords to the south. The Danish-Dutch settlement came to be called Smeerenburg, which would become the centre of operations for the latter in the first decades of the fishery. Numerous place names attest to the various nations' presence, including Copenhagen Bay (Kobbefjorden) and Danes Island (Danskøya), where the Danes established a station from 1631–58; Port Louis or Refuge Français (Hamburgbukta), where the French had a station from 1633–38, until they were driven away by the Danes (see below); and finally English Bay (Engelskbukta), as well as the number of features named by English whalemen and explorers—for example, Isfjorden, Bellsund, and Hornsund, to name a few. Hostilities continued after 1619. In 1626 nine ships from Hull and York destroyed the Muscovy Company's fort and station in Bell Sound, and sailed to their own in Midterhukhamna.[25] Here they were found by the heavily armed flagship of the London whaling fleet; a two-hour battle ensued, resulting in defeat for the Hull and York fleet and their expulsion from Spitsbergen.[26] In 1630 both the ships of Hull and Great Yarmouth, who had recently joined the trade, were driven away clean (empty) by the ships from London. From 1631-33 the Danes, French, and Dutch quarreled with each other, resulting in the expulsion of the Danes from Smeerenburg and the French from Copenhagen Bay. In 1634 the Dutch burned down one of the Danes' huts.[27] There were also two battles this season, one between the English and French (the latter won)[28] and the other between London and Yarmouth (the latter won, as well).[29] In 1637[30] and again in 1638 the Danes drove the French out of Port Louis and seized their cargoes. In the former year they also seized a French ship in the open sea and detained it in Copenhagen Bay,[31] while in the latter year they also held two Dutch ships captive in the same bay for over a month, which led to protests from the Dutch.[32] Following the events of 1638 hostilities for the most part ceased, with the exception of a few minor incidents in the 1640s between the French and Danes, as well as between Copenhagen and Hamburg and London and Yarmouth, respectively. The species hunted was the bowhead whale, a baleen whale that yielded large quantities of oil and baleen. The whales entered the fjords in the spring following the breakup of the ice. They were spotted by the whalemen from suitable vantage points, and pursued by shallops, chaloupes or chalupas, which were manned by six men. (These terms derive from the Basque word "txalupa", used to name the whaling boats that were widely utilized during the golden era of Basque whaling in Labrador in the 16th century.) The whale was harpooned and lanced to death and either towed to the stern of the ship or to the shore at low tide, where men with long knives would flense (cut up) the blubber. The blubber was boiled in large copper kettles and cooled in large wooden vessels, after which it was funneled into casks. The stations at first only consisted of tents of sail and crude furnaces, but were soon replaced by more permanent structures of wood and brick, such as Smeerenburg for the Dutch, Lægerneset for the English, and Copenhagen Bay for the Danes. Beginning in the 1630s, for the Dutch at least, whaling expanded into the open sea. Gradually whaling in the open sea and along the ice floes to the west of Spitsbergen replaced bay whaling. At first the blubber was tried out at the end of the season at Smeerenburg or elsewhere along the coast, but after mid-century the stations were abandoned entirely in favor of processing the blubber upon the return of the ship to port. The English meanwhile stuck resolutely to bay whaling, and didn't make the transfer to pelagic (offshore) whaling until long after. Early 18th century gravestone of whaling captain Matthias Petersen on the island of Föhr In 1719, the Dutch began "regular and intensive whaling" in the Davis Strait.[33] Nevertheless, encouraged by import duty exemptions, the South Sea Company financed 172 unprofitable whaling voyages from London's Howland Dock between 1725-32. In 1733 the Government introduced a 'bounty' of £1.00 per ship ton, increasing to £2.00 per ton in 1749. These subsidies along with high oil and whalebone prices encouraged expansion. London sent out six whalers in 1749; 45 in 1777 and 91 in 1788. However, reductions in the bounty, and wars with America and France saw London's Greenland fleet fall to 19 in 1796. During the 17th and 18th century the people from the North Frisian Islands enjoyed a reputation of being very skilled mariners, and most Dutch and English whaling ships bound for Greenland and Svalbard would have a crew of North Frisian islanders.[34] The German island Föhr was known as a stronghold of whaling personnel. Around the year 1700, Föhr had a total population of roughly 6,000, 1,600 of whom were whalers.[34] At the height of Dutch whaling in the year 1762, 1,186 seamen from Föhr were serving on Dutch whaling vessels alone and 25% of all shipmasters on Dutch whaling vessels were people from Föhr.[35] Another example is the London-based South Sea Company whose commanding officers and harpooners were exclusively from Föhr.[34] Also Sylt island just north of Föhr and Borkum in East Frisia were notable homes of whaling personnel.[36] The British would continue to send out whalers to the Arctic fishery into the 20th century, sending their last on the eve of the First World War. Japanese open-boat whaling 600-1853 [ edit ] Whaling Scene on the Coast of Gotō, an, an ukiyo-e print by Hokusai, c. 1830 The oldest written mention of whaling in Japanese records is from Kojiki, the oldest Japanese historical book written in the 7th century ce. In this book, whale meat was eaten by Emperor Jimmu. In Man'yōshū, the oldest anthology of poems in the 8th century, the word "Whaling" (いさなとり) was frequently used in depicting the ocean or beaches. One of the first records of whaling by the use of harpoons are from the 1570s at Morosaki, a bay attached to Ise Bay. This method of whaling, known as the harpoon method (tsukitori-ho) spread to Kii (before 1606), Shikoku (1624), northern Kyushu (1630s), and Nagato (around 1672). Kakuemon Wada, later known as Kakuemon Taiji, was said to have invented net whaling, or the net method (amitori-ho) sometime between 1675 and 1677. This method soon spread to Shikoku (1681) and northern Kyushu (1684) Using the techniques developed by Taiji, the Japanese mainly hunted four species of whale, the North Pacific right (Semi-Kujira), the humpback (Zato-Kujira), the fin (Nagasu-Kujira), and the gray whale (Ko-Kujira or Koku-Kujira). They also caught the occasional blue (Shiro Nagasu-Kujira), sperm (Makko-Kujira), or sei/Bryde's whale (Iwashi-Kujira). Whaling has been frequently mentioned in Japanese historical texts.[37] Whaling history (鯨史稿), Seijun Ohtsuki, 1808. [38] (鯨史稿), Seijun Ohtsuki, 1808. Whaling Picture Scroll (鯨絵巻), Jinemon Ikushima, 1665. [39] (鯨絵巻), Jinemon Ikushima, 1665. Whale Hunt Picture Scroll (捕鯨絵巻), Eikin Hangaya, 1666. [40] (捕鯨絵巻), Eikin Hangaya, 1666. Ogawajima Whaling Wars (小川島鯨鯢合戦), Unknown, 1667.[41] In 1853, the US naval officer Matthew Perry forced open Japan's doors to the world. One of the purposes of this was to gain access to ports for the American whaling fleet in the north-west Pacific Ocean. The traditional whaling was eventually replaced in the late 19th century and early 20th century with modern methods. Yankee whaling 1690-1915 [ edit ] Whale Fishery -- Attacking a Right Whale, New England whaling ca. 1860, New England whaling ca. 1860 Assortment of whaling harpoons, 1887 Matthew Fontaine Maury (U.S.N.) Whale Chart-1851 Beginning in the late colonial period, the United States, with a strong seafaring tradition in New England, an advanced shipbuilding industry, and access to the oceans grew to become the pre-eminent whaling nation in the world by the 1830s. American whaling's origins were in New York and New England, including Cape Cod, Massachusetts and nearby cities. The oil was in demand chiefly for lamps. Hunters in small watercraft pursued right whales from shore. By the 18th century, whaling in Nantucket had become a highly lucrative deep-sea industry, with voyages extending for years at a time and with vessels traveling as far as South Pacific waters. During the American Revolution, the British navy targeted American whaling ships as legitimate prizes, while in turn many whalers fitted out as privateers against the British. Whaling recovered after the war ended in 1783 and the industry began to prosper, using bases at Nantucket and then New Bedford. Whalers took greater economic risks to turn major profits: expanding their hunting grounds and securing foreign and domestic workforces for the Pacific. Investment decisions and financing arrangements were set up so that managers of whaling ventures shared their risks by selling some equity claims but retained a substantial portion due to moral hazard considerations. As a result, they had little incentive to consider the correlation between their own returns and those of others in planning their voyages. This stifled diversity in whaling voyages and increased industry-wide risk.[42] Ten thousand seamen manned the ships. More than three thousand African American seamen shipped out on whaleships from New Bedford between 1800 and 1860, about 20% of the entire whaling force.[43] In port the most successful of the whaling merchants was Jonathan Bourne, who opened offices in New Bedford in 1848. Chandlery shops and storage rooms for whaling outfits occupied the first floor. Lofts and rigging lofts occupied the upper stories; the counting-rooms were on the second floor, with counters and iron railings fencing off the tall mahogany desks at which the bookkeepers stood up, or sat on high stools; about the walls were models of whaleships and whaling prints. Early whaling efforts were concentrated on right whales and humpbacks, which were found near the American coast. As these populations declined and the market for whale products (especially whale oil) grew, American whalers began hunting the sperm whale. The sperm whale was particularly prized for the reservoir of spermaceti (a dense waxy substance that burns with an exceedingly bright flame) housed in the spermaceti organ, located forward and above the skull. Hunting for the sperm whale forced whalers to sail farther from home in search of their quarry, eventually covering the globe. Whale oil was vital in illuminating homes and businesses throughout the world in the 19th century, and served as a dependable lubricant for the machines powering the Industrial Revolution. Baleen (the long keratin strips that hang from the top of whales' mouths) was used by manufacturers in the United States and Europe to make consumer goods such as buggy whips, fishing poles, corset stays and dress hoops. New England ships began to explore and hunt in the southern oceans after being driven out of the North Atlantic by British competition and import duties. Ultimately, American entrepreneurs created a mid-19th-century version of a global economic enterprise. This was the golden age of American whaling. An early winter in the North Pacific in September 1871 forced the captains of an American whaling fleet in the Arctic to abandon their ships, in what became known as the Whaling Disaster of 1871. With 32 vessels trapped in the ice and provisions insufficient to weather the nine-month winter, the captains ordered the abandonment of the ships and the three million dollars' worth of property carried on board but in the process saved the lives of over 1,200 men, women, and children.[44] From the Civil War, when Confederate raiders targeted American whalers, through the early 20th century, the American whaling industry was overwhelmed by new, crippling economic competition, especially from kerosene, which was a superior fuel for lighting. New Bedford, once the fourth busiest port in the United States, gave up whaling.[45] Localities [ edit ] The Whale and Its Products, circa 1900 Whaling became important for a number of New England towns, particularly Nantucket and New Bedford. Vast fortunes were made, and culture of these communities was greatly affected; the results can be seen today in the buildings surviving from the era. Nantucket joined in on the trade in 1690 when they sent for one Ichabod Paddock to instruct them in the methods of whaling.[46] The south side of the island was divided into three and a half mile sections, each one with a mast erected to look for the spouts of right whales. Each section had a temporary hut for the five men assigned to that area, with a sixth man standing watch at the mast. Once a whale was sighted, rowing boats were sent from the shore, and if the whale was successfully harpooned and lanced to death, it was towed ashore, flensed (that is, its blubber was cut off), and the blubber boiled in cauldrons known as "trypots." Even when Nantucket sent out vessels to fish for whales offshore, they would still come to the shore to boil the blubber, doing this well into the 18th century. New Bedford whaling was established when prominent Nantucket whaling families relocated their operations near the Acushnet River and then New Bedford to avoid economic strangulation due to the Revolution and Boston/Newport entities that controlled the market for the whale oil once harvested. This relocation would begin New Bedford's ascension to American whaling dominance. Larger cultural influence is evidenced by former whaler Herman Melville's novel Moby-Dick,[47] which is often cited as the Great American Novel. Currently, the town of New Bedford is experiencing a revival since the 1996 establishment of the New Bedford Whaling National Historic Site.[48] This site, along with the Whaling Museum, capitalizes on the rich culture of whaling and the immigrant and free black populations that made up the "City that Lit the World." In 1877, John Nelson Fletcher, a pyrotechnist, and the former Confederate soldier from North Carolina, Robert L. Suits, modified Roys's rocket, marketing it as the "California Whaling Rocket". They used the small five in a half ton steam launch Rocket of San Francisco in 1878, killing 35 humpback, fin, and blue whales with their rocket outside the harbour and north to Point Reyes.[49] In 1880, Thomas P. H. Whitelaw fitted out the 44-ton steamer Daisy Whitelaw of San Francisco. With the California Whaling Rocket she "very successfully" hunted fin whales though the Farallon Islands to Drakes Bay.[50] That same year, some of the rockets were purchased by the Northwest Whaling Company, or Northwest Trading Company, of Killisnoo Island, on the west coast of Admiralty Island, Southeast Alaska. They hunted fins and humpbacks, firing rockets from the deck of the company's small steamer Favorite, as well as from whaleboats. They established a whaling and trading station on Killisnoo Island, giving a few jobs at the whale processing plant to both Killisnoo and Angoon residents. After a few years of whaling, the station was turned into a herring processing plant, going out of business in 1885. In the late 1870s schooners began hunting humpbacks in the Gulf of Maine. In 1880, with the decline of the menhaden fishery, steamers began to switch to hunting fin and humpback whales using bomb lances in what has been called a "shoot-and-salvage" fishery because of the high-rate of loss due to whales sinking, lines breaking, etc. The first was the steamer Mabel Bird, which towed whale carcasses to an oil processing plant at the head of Linekin Bay in Boothbay Harbor. Soon there were five such factories in Boothbay Harbour processing whales. At its height in 1885 four or five steamers were engaged in the Menhaden whale fishery, but it dwindled to one by the end of the decade. Fin whales accounted for about half the catch, with over 100 whales being killed in some years. The fishery ended in the late 1890s. Explosive technology [ edit ] By the 1850s, the Euro-American whalemen made a serious attempt at catching such rorquals as the blue whale and fin whale. Thomas Welcome Roys gradually developed explosive lances shot from a cannon. Roys found imitators in Iceland, in the form of the Danish naval officer Cap. Otto C. Hammer and the Dutchman Cap. C. J. Bottemanne. The former formed the Danish Fishing Company in 1865, and wound up operations in 1871; while the latter formed the Netherlands Whaling Company in 1869, closing down operations a year after Hammer.[51] In 1868 James Dawson, a Victorian emigrant from Clackmannanshire, Scotland, caught eight whales using bomb lances in British Columbia, despite thick fog.[52] Britain 1611-1960 [ edit ] A View of Whale Fishery, 1790, from, 1790, from Captain Cook's voyages Britain's involvement in whaling extended from 1611 to the 1960s and had three phases. The Northern (or Arctic) whale fishery lasted from 1611 to 1914 and involved whaling primarily off Greenland, and particularly Davis Strait. The Southern (or south Seas) whale fishery was active from 1775 to 1859 and involved whale hunting first to the South Atlantic, then the Indian and Pacific Oceans. British law defined and differentiated the two trades. Modern British involvement in whaling extended from 1904 to 1963. Each of these three trades involved different species of whales as the targets, and hence the methods used and even the design of the whalers.[53] Northern whale fishery [ edit ] Since 1753 whalers from Whitby had been whaling in Davis Strait, though by the 1830s the business had almost died out. In 1832 Phoenix was the sole vessel to go out, and she returned with 234 tons of oil (195 Imperial measure), the largest amount ever to have been brought back. The Chapmans therefore sent out Camden in 1833, as well as Phoenix.[54] Both vessels were successful in volume terms: Phoenix returned with 227 tons, and Camden returned with 230 tons.[55] However, whaling became unprofitable as the price of whale oil had fallen. Between 1833 and 1837 it varied between £23 and over £50 per ton. Whalebone prices varied between £30 and £150 per ton. Phoenix and Camden left in 1837, but Phoenix grounded on her way out and came back to port. Camden's voyage proved a failure. The Chapmans withdrew both ships from whaling, and with that whaling from Whitby ended.[55][56] Southern whale fishery [ edit ] Samuel Enderby, along with Alexander Champion and John St Barbe, using American vessels and crews, fitted out twelve whaleships for the southern fishery in 1776. More were sent in 1777 and 1778 before political and economic troubles hampered the trade for some time.[57] In 1786, Alexander Champion, with his brother Benjamin, sent the first British whaler east of the Cape of Good Hope. She was the Triumph, Daniel Coffin, master. On 1 September 1788, the whaler Emilia, owned by Samuel Enderby & Sons and commanded by Captain James Shields, departed London. The ship went west around Cape Horn into the Pacific Ocean to become the first ship of any nation to conduct whaling operations in the Southern Ocean. A crewman, Archelus Hammond of Nantucket, killed the first sperm whale there off the coast of Chile on 3 March 1789. Emilia returned to London on 12 March 1790 with a cargo of 139 tons of whale oil.[58] The Enderby ship Friendship captained by Thomas Melvill was second collecting the 600 pounds. In 1784 the British had fifteen whaleships in the southern fishery, all from London. By 1790 this port alone had sixty vessels employed in the trade. Between 1793 and 1799 there was an average of sixty vessels in the trade. The average increased to seventy-two in the years between 1800 and 1809.[59] The first sperm whale off the coast of New South Wales, Australia, was taken by the ship Britannia (Commander Thomas Melvill) in October 1791.[60] In 1819 the British whaler Syren, under Frederick Coffin of Nantucket, sailed to the coastal waters of Japan, where she began whaling on 5 April 1820. She returned to London on 21 April 1822 with 346 tons of whale oil. The following year at least nine British whalers were cruising on this ground, and by 1825 the British had twenty-four vessels there.[61] Despite this discovery, the number of vessels being fitted out annually for the southern fishery declined from sixty-eight in 1820 to thirty-one in 1824. In 1825 there were ninety ships in the southern fishery, but by 1835 it had dwindled to sixty-one. Fewer and fewer vessels were being fitted out, so that by 1843 only nine vessels were clearing for the southern fishery. In 1859 the last cargoes of whale oil from British vessels were landed in London. British whaling in the Antarctic [ edit ] The shore stations on the island of South Georgia were at the center of the Antarctic whaling industry, from its beginnings in 1904 until the late 1920s when pelagic whaling increased. The activity on the island remained substantial until around 1960, when Norwegian-British Antarctic whaling came to an end.[62] France 1786-1868 [ edit ] Having failed in an attempt to establish a colony of Nantucket whalemen in England, William Rotch, Sr. went to France in 1786 and was able to establish his colony in Dunkirk. The first two vessels to be fitted out were the Canton and the Mary. By 1789 Dunkirk had fourteen vessels in the trade sailing to Brazil, Walvis Bay, and other areas of the South Atlantic to hunt sperm and right whales. Just a year later Rotch sent the first French whalers into the Pacific. There were twenty-four vessels sailing out of France for the southern fishery by 1791, but the majority of these ships were lost during the Anglo-French War that broke out two years later. Rotch fled France, keeping subordinates there should war tensions ease and allow them to fit out ships for the southern fishery again. The trade began to revive after hostilities, but when Napoleon came to power Rotch's holdings in Dunkirk were seized. After the Napoleonic Wars the government issued subsidies in an attempt to revive the trade once more, but it wasn't until 1832, with a further increase in bounties, that several whalers were sent by C. A. Gaudin on sperm whaling voyages. In 1835 the first French whaleship, the Gange (573 tons), Narcisse Chaudiere, master, reached the Gulf of Alaska and discovered an abundance of right whales. Within a decade a large number of American and French vessels would be cruising on this ground. The following year, 1836, the first French whaler had reached New Zealand, but by the 1840s, with the decline of bay whaling, very few French vessels would make their way here. In 1851 a law was passed to encourage the trade, at which point the French had seventeen vessels employed in it. It wasn't successful. The last whalers returned in 1868. Sc
man in Saudi Arabia". New foreign minister Under Salman, Saudi Arabia has adopted a more assertive foreign policy, leading the Arab-dominated coalition targeting Houthis in neighbouring Yemen since late March. In another major change, Saudi Arabia's envoy to the US, Adel al-Jubeir, was appointed foreign minister, a royal decree said. He replaces Prince Saud al-Faisal who "asked to be relieved from his duties due to his health condition," said the decree carried by the SPA. Prince Saud had held the post since 1975, making him the world's longest-serving foreign minister. Born in 1940, he was in the US for back surgery when Salman acceded to the throne. The decree said Prince Saud has been appointed as an adviser and a special envoy of the king, as well as a supervisor on foreign affairs. But Khashoggi denied his appointment heralded anything more significant. “Adel is a career diplomat, he will implement the policy that is being created by the seniors in Riyadh and he will be part of the policy making process," he told MEE. "Therefore, I do not anticipate any changes.” “It's plain what Saudi Arabia is up to and Adel will have to implement the view of this policy," he added. Jubeir came to attention answering reporters' questions in the US in defence of his country's decision to participate in an aerial campaign in Yemen. His appointment is a rarity as the position of foreign minister is usually held by a member of the ruling family. Salman also named a new health minister in Wednesday's reshuffle, the second major government shakeup since he took office.Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings. July 7, 2017, 7:29 PM GMT / Updated July 7, 2017, 7:29 PM GMT By Corky Siemaszko The sheriff of one opioid-ravaged Ohio county is refusing to equip his deputies with Narcan, the drug that has saved the lives of countless overdosing addicts. Butler County Sheriff Richard K. Jones insists he is not heartless but says requiring deputies to administer the remedy puts them in danger and the cost of repeatedly treating people with Narcan is “sucking the taxpayers dry.” "All we're doing is reviving them, we’re not curing them," Jones told NBC News on Friday. "One person we know has been revived 20 separate times." But, Jones hastened to add, "We don’t go there and let people die." "Here in Ohio, the live squads (paramedics) get in there about the same time and they’re more equipped to use Narcan," he said. "The people who use drugs don’t usually like the police and they turn violent once they're revived." "Some police departments that use Narcan won’t even allow police to use it unless there’s two officers on the scene," he added. "The police feel unsafe using this Narcan because they have to get down on their knees, squirt it into their nose, and the people they are saving are not happy to see them. They’re angry as hell." Jones conceded that he is not in step with the sheriffs of neighboring counties who equip their deputies with Narcan, one dose of which costs $37.50 for first responders. He says he doesn't care. "There's no law that say police officers have to carry Narcan," he said. "Until there is, we're not going to use it." The sheriff spoke out a week after City Councilman Dan Picard in nearby Middletown, Ohio touched off a firestorm of outrage when he asked his town’s legal department to look into whether they are legally required to dispatch ambulances to rescue drug addicts who repeatedly overdose. And just as it does for Jones, the bottom line for taxpayers figured into Picard's reasoning. Asked when Picard’s query is likely to come before the city council for discussion, Middletown city manager Doug Adkins responded in an email, “No idea whatsoever.” Adkins also said Middletown police officers don’t carry Narcan. "Middletown is a small enough city that our paramedics are usually on the scene ahead of or simultaneously with police,” he added. “We let the medical professionals handle administration of Narcan. We have never run out of Narcan, and have no intention of allowing that to happen." As for the sheriff, Adkins wrote they have “a great working relationship with the Butler County Sheriff’s office and we understand Sheriff Jones’ concerns.” Richard K. Jones, Sheriff of Butler County, Ohio. Butler County Sheriff's Office If Jones decided to equip his deputies with Narcan, whose generic name is naloxone, Butler County wouldn't be shouldering the financial burden alone, a spokesman for the state Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services said. "Local law enforcement in Ohio can decide whether to carry naloxone, and many are choosing to do so," the spokesman said. "The state helps fund the purchase of naloxone for first responders — including law enforcement."Ohio is one of several Rust Belt states that has been hit especially hard by the opioid epidemic raging across the nation. And Butler County, which has a population of 368,100, recorded 210 fatal drug overdose deaths last year, according to the state Department of Health. To combat the scourge, Gov. John Kasich signed an order that would limit opioid prescription painkillers — which experts say have led many drug abusers to heroin — to no more than seven days for adults. And the state’s attorney general, Mike DeWine, has filed a lawsuit against five of the biggest prescription painkiller manufacturers accusing them of getting Ohioans hooked on opioids. Narcan Naloxone Spray. Matthew Rakola / Ohio Attorney General's Office Jones, who readily admits he is a “controversial person,” said he does not have a solution to the drug crisis. “I just know what we are doing is not working,” he said. “My brother died of cirrhosis of the liver and early in his life he had a drug problem. There isn’t somebody out there who doesn’t know somebody who has a drug issue. I am trying to get the point across that we’re just frustrated.” The debate over whether Narcan should be given to people who repeatedly overdose is likely to be addressed at the upcoming “America’s Opioid Crisis: A National Town Hall” on July 12 at George Washington University in the nation’s capital. “Naloxone — the opioid overdose reversal medication — is saving many lives, thankfully,” Nick Motu, vice president of the Hazelden Betty Ford Institute for Recovery Advocacy said in a statement. “But sadly, even after surviving near-death overdoses, many will return to using, some will overdose again and too many will be lost.” CORRECTION (July 7, 2017, 7 p.m. ET): An earlier version of this article misidentified the city official who said Middletown police officers don’t carry Narcan. It was Middletown city manager Doug Adkins, not City Councilman Dan Picard.Next time you find yourself sitting next to an anthropologist at a bar, ask him or her if moving away from traditional roles tends to make a society spend a lot of time talking about the status of women. PunditFact tackled claims this year about women and domestic violence, equal pay, the cost of their health care, how many women go to medical school, and whether pregnancy drives them into poverty. Here are our top six fact-checks tied to gender. Which is deadlier, war or domestic violence? Feminist icon Gloria Steinem said more women have been killed by their husbands or boyfriends since Sept. 11 than "all the Americans who were killed by 9/11 or in Afghanistan and Iraq." You can argue about the significance of such a comparison, but on the numbers, she is accurate. James A. Fox, a Northeastern University criminology professor, found that from 2002 to 2012, the number of women killed by intimate partners was 15,462. Fewer than 3,000 Americans died in the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. (There were 2,978 victims, but that includes people from 90 countries.) American deaths tied to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq total 6,838, according the Pentagon. Together, there were about 9,838 deaths, which is below the lowest estimate of women killed by their partners. We rated the claim True. Newborns and poverty risk Advocacy group Moms Rising tweeted, "Having a baby is a leading cause of poverty spells in the United States." In fact, the numbers show losing a job is the biggest factor. Based on 1998 government data, about a quarter of all spells of poverty begin with the birth of a child. But that information indicated three-quarters of poverty spells stemmed from losing work hours. Drilling deeper, we found an Urban Institute study that teased out the relative impact of different life events, which took into account that events can overlap, such as when having a child leads to the loss of a job. However, out of the seven events the study assessed, having a child ranked in the bottom three, and it was about a third as potent a factor as job loss. We rated the claim False. Women in advanced fields Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., was talking about how far the country had come in terms of gender equality when he claimed "over half" of medical, dental and law school students are women. If Paul had just talked about how many men and women are getting advanced degrees of any sort, he would have been right. But for medical, dental and law school students, the percentages for women are a hair under 47 percent in every case. To state the obvious, this is less than half. The claim rates False. Paying more for health care In the dissenting opinion of the Hobby Lobby case, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote, "Women of childbearing age spend 68 percent more in out-of-pocket health care costs than men." Ginsburg largely had it right. For 2011, women between 18 and 44 had out-of-pocket expenses that averaged 69 percent higher than men of the same age range, according to the Medical Expenditures Panel Survey of the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. It's just about certain Ginsburg relied on numbers dating to 1994. The percentages hadn't changed in two decades. There are some other recent estimates that find women pay 40 to 50 percent more. Still, experts didn't doubt that women of childbearing age tend to pay more for health care. We rated the claim Mostly True. Young, single and making more than guys Conservative pundit Genevieve Wood aimed to give a more nuanced take on the gender pay gap, noting "young women today in metropolitan areas" who are childless and single are out-earning childless, single young males. Wood's source is a 2010 analysis of census data by Reach Advisors, a private research firm in New York. The study says in 2008, the median full-time salaries of single, childless women in the country's metropolitan areas were 8 percent higher than those of the guys in their peer group. This study makes no allowance for different jobs women might hold. The study's author said these women were 50 percent more likely to have graduated from college than their male counterparts. With higher skills, they got better paying jobs. But as far as Wood's statement went, we rated it Mostly True. The gender pay gap A common Democratic claim is women "make 77 cents for every dollar a man earns." President Barack Obama said this in his State of the Union address. The statement is largely accurate because Obama didn't say women are paid less for doing the same job as men. For many reasons, women tend to work in jobs that pay less. The work that has been done suggests there is a pay gap for equal work, but not as large as it has been stated. Obama, however, stayed on safer ground. According to the Census Bureau, women who worked full-time, year-round in 2012 made 77 cents for every dollar men earned. There are alternative measurements. For example, looking at women who worked full-time in wage and salary jobs, the Bureau of Labor Statistics found women made 82 percent of what men made. But that didn't include anyone who was self-employed. Opinions vary on how much of the gap is due to discrimination. Some estimates ranged from 40 percent to 5 percent. On the whole, the claim is Mostly True.Haitians exact brutal street retribution Updated ABC reporter Phillip Williams has witnessed violence and despair as he travels around Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince, which is descending into anarchy following Wednesday's devastating earthquake. Watch Phillip Williams' eyewitness report from the streets of Port-au-Prince. I witnessed a person who had just been murdered in the street. He had been stripped naked and hacked to death - in fact he had not quite died when I saw him. The crowd had decided he was a criminal - that he had attempted to rob someone - and this was retribution, this was the reaction from those in the street, because there are no structures. The government is not functioning properly and there is little police presence. People are taking the law into their own hands, and it's a brutal law. About half an hour later I witnessed another man burning. He had been set alight; he had been killed. He too had been accused of robbery and in fact of having shot a woman during that robbery. We've seen virtually no-one carrying any sense of authority and very few police. I've seen one or two policemen - they tend to be concentrated around government buildings. We haven't seen the US troops much beyond the airport, so that element of security has not fanned out and it has not been established. And in the absence of that security, people create their own. And it's not really security - it's insecurity - and it cannot go on too much longer. Things are turning nasty in the streets. People are desperate - they need food, they need water, they need shelter - and most of them haven't got these basic needs. Aid trickles out However there is some evidence of a slight improvement in aid reaching those who need it. We have seen points where people can get water. Obviously if they don't get water they are going to die very quickly in a hot climate. Food is another matter, and there is very little food being distributed. The problem is there are so many people with such great needs that if they suddenly hear there is distribution of food, that place will be mobbed. For example, I was in the Prime Minister's compound today where there are hundreds - perhaps a couple of thousand - refugees camped out there. And there was a line, hundreds and hundreds of people trying to get basics. They were giving out US aid packages of personal toiletries and washing powder, soap, babies nappies - those sort of essentials. But they quickly ran out and they had to turn hundreds and hundreds of people away. You can imagine the mood when they did that. These people are now getting very angry and they don't see any end to this - that's the problem. It's not as though they see some sort of magic wand coming. They have high hopes for the Americans, but so far it's just overwhelmed them. This is too big, this is a city around the size of Melbourne, and if you can imagine most of the houses being destroyed in Melbourne, what would the people of Australia do? Probably they'd be in much the same situation, except this of course is a country that cannot afford and doesn't have the infrastructure to help people get out of this mess. The Haitian government is still nominally in control, but they do not appear to be doing much and the Americans and the UN are referring to them in their decision-making process. It is a sovereign government, so of course they have to do that, but it is not a very effective system. There are a lot of meetings, a lot of committees, but what people need - and need quickly - is solid evidence that the aid is getting through, or at least can get through in the very near future. And if they don't see evidence of that, I'm afraid there's just going to be more lawlessness as people get more desperate. Topics: earthquake, disasters-and-accidents, haiti, australia, united-kingdom, england First postedUpdated 7/24 WASHINGTON More than 250 people in at least six states have come down with a stomach bug that could be linked to foodborne illness. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says the cyclospora infection causing diarrhea and other flu-like symptoms has been reported in Iowa, Nebraska, Texas, Wisconsin, Georgia and Connecticut. The CDC said 10 people have been hospitalized and most of the reported illnesses occurred from mid-June to early July. The Food and Drug Administration is investigating the cyclospora infections, which are most often found in tropical or subtropical countries and have been linked to imported fresh produce in the past. The illness is usually spread when people ingest foods or water contaminated with feces. The agency said it isn't yet clear whether the cases from all of the states are linked. The number of reported illnesses expanded from more than 200 to more than 250 on Tuesday, according to the CDC. At press time more than 275 people had taken ill. The CDC added Georgia, Connecticut and New Jersey to the list of affected states. The agency said it is investigating additional illnesses and the number of those sickened could grow.To meet master film director David Lynch in person and talk to him about filmmaking is a dream come true for young David Sieveking, who first finds himself sitting face-to-face with his idol in spring 2006. The meeting takes place on the periphery of a workshop in the USA where Lynch is giving a talk on the sources of creativity. Paramount among them is transcendental meditation (TM), a technique the cult filmmaker has reputedly practiced daily for over thirty years. But he had never before spoken about it in public. Could TM be the mystery behind Lynch's dark, inscrutable films? Although the location of the workshop -- the Maharishi University of Enlightenment in Iowa -- does strike David, the young filmmaker from Berlin, as somewhat strange, it is also mysterious and fascinating. Maharishi? Wasn't that the legendary 1960s guru -- guiding light of the hippie movement, savior of the western world, and personal spiritual tutor of the Beatles? An entirely new chapter in the life of David Sieveking has begun. Fairfield, Iowa is a new world where everything seems possible -- even flying, without the aid of any machinery. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, founder of Transcendental Meditation, promised creativity, health, professional success, world peace, and no less than "heaven on earth." David Sieveking decides to take the personal advice of the great David Lynch and begins to practice TM himself. Even master film directors start as novices, after all. And the best thing about it: TM is easy to do. Not cheap, but easy. Funded by donations, Maharishi and his followers built up an unparalleled global enterprise with the global headquarters in the Netherlands, a world peace center in India, and a clandestine "TM world government" in the Swiss Alps. Over 20 "Invincible Universities" have been founded and there are obscure gated camps dedicated to "yogic flying." For the second time, David Sieveking discovers a whole new world. The more research the young filmmaker does, the more discrepancies surface. Suddenly TM apostates start contacting him, former high-ups in the organization who claim to have been ruined by the Maharishi -- financially as well as psychologically. Should he believe them? Is TM just a cynical money machine after all, as critics maintain, or a guru sect gone haywire? Throughout the odyssey that follows, David Sieveking never loses the sly sense of humor that gives this surprising film its strength, elegance, and ambiguous charm.Michelle Obama joined forces with Glamour Magazine on Tuesday to promote the importance of girls education. The First Lady of the United States addressed over 1,0000 schoolgirls at New York’s Apollo Theatre, offering up some wise advice on how to kick butt. “Compete with the boys. Beat the boys,”; she told the crowd. “There is no boy, at this age, that is cute enough or interesting enough to stop you from getting your education.” “If I had worried about who liked me and who thought I was cute when I was your age, I wouldn’t be married to the president of the United States,”; she added before high-fiving actress Charlize Theron. The FLOTUS wasn’t the only power woman sharing her Instagram-worthy quotes with the crowd. Obama was also joined by Sophia Bush, former Prime Minister of Australia Julia Gillard and Glamour Editor-In-Chief Cindi Leive. “We aim so much lower than what we’re really valued and what we’re worth and I just want to leave you all with this. You are worth it and you are valued,”; offered up. “So aim big and dream big because I’m sitting on this stage today a farm girl, from a small farm community in South Africa and the fact that I am here today is witness that if you dream big, no matter how ridiculous it is, it can happen so why not?”; For more inspirational words from Mrs. Obama, check out the footage from Glamour’s “The Power of an Educated Girl”; panel below.The user hold all the control over the phone notifications, choosing through sound notifications, vibrating, light notifications or simply the silent mode ( on this option all the calls and messages are received, blocked and stored in your private history without showing any kind of notification ). The system also allows the user to choose what action will be applied to the blocked action when the call is intercepted, you can redirect the call to your voice mail, send a busy signal, hang up, or automatically send an SMS with a pre-configured personalized message. Restricted numbers may also be filtered, numbers outside your contacts or even by the caller digits amount ( mainly used to filter telemarketing or inconvinient messages from the phone service providers, banks or websites ). All the settings can be permanent or configured by the user in a way that those rules will be applied in specified days of the week or periods of the day. Allowing you to create for example, a blacklist to a group of customers so they would be allowed to call you only on weekdays in comercial hours.Written by an American Expat who holds an M.B.A. degree living in the E.U. My email address is: democratsramshield@yahoo(dot)com Surely the death of the American working class dream is not news to the American 1 percent elites. The truth be known simply put they like it that way, as they surely are the architects of the GOP led class warfare against the American working class. (The Statue of Liberty in the photo below is located in Paris, France and is believed to have become emblematic as the American dream now resides in Europe instead of America). Le Monde quote: "From Near And Far, Bidding Farewell To The American Dream By Claire Gatinois LE MONDE/Worldcrunch No matter what the frame of reference of the person examining it, its bottom line is unambiguous: the United States – not supposedly fusty Europe -- rates lowest in terms of this relationship in the distribution of riches and social mobility. Yes, Paris Hilton’s America ranks way below the Scandinavian countries, but also below France, New Zealand, Japan, the United Kingdom, and others." --------------------- ---------------------------------- Le Monde quote: "on February 24, the USA Today daily published a feature on extreme poverty in the United States, reporting that the number of families living on less than $2 a day had more than doubled in 15 years, going from 636,000 in 1996 to 1.5 million in 2011." ----------------------------------- ----------------------------------------- Le Monde quote: "French economist and historian Thomas Piketty has already demonstrated out how America’s wealth is as distorted as it is vast. But should you discuss this particular matter with an American citizen, you will be told that “the rich are rich because they deserve it.” The quasi Communist idea of taking from the rich to give to those in need is not a fair reward for talent." ------------------------------------------ Clearly the weak American social safety net has become an international badge of shame, worn with pride around the necks of American capitalist elites who have put America up for international pillory as a pariah state wherein estimates show, which is on par with many third world nations.Despite the fact the 2012 elections will cost over $2 billion dollars, essentially bought by private capital (primarily financial capital). These elections are essentially depoliticized, focusing instead on so called character qualities of the candidates largely in what may only be referred to as a media public relations extravaganza! Wherein issues that confront the great American working class in the GOP led class warfare are never substantively addressed except in all but the most forgettable sound bytes. Therefore the American public has become completely atomized at this turn of events, wherein millions are angry and confused, no longer knowing the way out.Americans have been brainwashed into accepting a ridiculous level of income inequality, Americans only do so because of the high degree of working insecurity present in the US to a degree unimaginable in other major industrialized countries around the world. For example, if you lose your job in America, usually you and your family lose your health insurance coverage. This is something that is completely unimaginable in the European Union. American workers therefore have to be extremely compliant, which is exactly the way the American elites like it. Clearly the Le Monde article is correct. In fact Piketty in April was quoted by the New York Times quite sensibly stating that there is nothing radical about supporting income equality in America. What is radical is accepting the American income inequality that exists in America presently. ----------------------------------------------- New York Times quote: “The United States is getting accustomed to a completely crazy level of inequality,” Mr. Piketty said, with a degree of wonder. “People say that reducing inequality is radical. I think that tolerating the level of inequality the United States tolerates is radical.” http://www.nytimes.com/... ----------------------------------------------- Please let's have an honest dialog about the myth of American exceptionalism. Indeed in the plain sober light of day the simple truth is too many Americans have been brainwashed by the media. This has caused the mainstream German magazine Der Spiegel to publish headlines asking, "Has America become an Oligarchy?" Clearly the purpose of the American plutocrat owned media's propaganda is to brainwash people into believing the myth of the American dream. No one has said it better than the late comedian George Carlin who plainly told us they call it the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it, and it is no coincidence therefore that political satirists and comedians such as Jon Stewart and Colbert and Bill Maher have become household names, because the only people in America left that dare to speak the truth and keep their jobs are comedians and satirists. Just like in the days of old when only the court jester could dare speak the truth to the king and still keep his head, so it is today that the American dream has become a tale of the Emperor's new clothes. The American dream has become pablum for the mind for the brainwashed masses who have fallen victims of the propaganda of the GOP led class warfare, who are only able to speak interminably repeating the Fox news talking points as if it were a Gregorian mass chant, which has taken on articles of faith akin to religious zealotry in their worship of the vast wealth holdings of the 1 percent as their new age American deity. ------------ Le Monde quote: "If an American is tenacious enough, shouldn’t he or she be able some day to make it to the top of the heap? "No pain, no gain," as they say. But the Great Gatsby Curve says No. So much so that in the United States, as elsewhere, “having talent” may just be another way of saying "having inherited money." ------------ Where until recently the high priest of the temple of the 1% formerly led by Saint Alan Greenspan where he and his followers prostrated themselves before the altar of unbridled avarice, wherein before Saint Alan was defrocked by the 08 financial crisis, for which he bears substantial responsibility. His primary article of faith was "the invisible hand of the market", which forbade sensible financial regulation by define commandment, which has led to the most inequitable distribution of wealth in America of any major industrialized nation on earth. America's 1 percenters have become an object of idol worship in popular culture which includes reality based TV shows where they are adored for their horrible behavior for which they are richly rewarded reminiscent of the bad behavior of medieval lords in the feudal age. ------------ Le Monde quote: "The American system of education, at one time considered to be “the great equalizer,” is partly responsible for this state of affairs. A recent study conducted in Michigan and quoted by the New York Times shows that the discrepancy in performance levels between rich and poor students has risen by 50% since the 1980s – which means that wealth, more than race, is what makes the difference in school." ------------ ------------------------------------------- Le Monde quote: "American workers are being increasingly badly paid as businesses amass larger and larger profits. The result, as Evariste Lefeuvre of the Natixis corporate and investment bank in New York points out, is that the profits of American companies amounting to 13% of GDP are at a historic high." ------------------------------------------- This has led to an atomized American society, wherein the proposition of democracy as expressed through elections has become a proposition at tension with itself, as American elections are financed by private capital, and as such have become essentially depoliticized. The Occupy Movement is the first spontaneous grass roots effort since the 1970's from the American working class to respond to the social injustice as expressed through the efforts of the Occupy Movement in the atomized American society of 2012, wherein people are angry and confused as expressed through the anguish of millions of Americans who no longer know the way out.As 59 million Americans find themselves without health insurance 132 million without dental ; and 45 million on food stamps 46 million Americans are living below the poverty line. This international badge of shame has marked America as being talked about as a neo-feudal pariah state in European capitals, where universal medical access is considered to be a human right from cradle to grave, where everyone has 4 weeks paid vacation, paid sick leave and paid maternity leave. Continental Europeans have no student loans to speak of as university tuition is so low, American students pay more in books than Continental Europeans pay for tuition. As such they are unable to understand the American tolerance for worker exploitation and social inequity, which they find to be bewildering. Translated quotations from Worldcrunch (in partnership with Le Monde). http://worldcrunch.com/... To read the original Le Monde article in full text in French, please click on the link below. http://www.lemonde.fr/... Let's please remember 93% of income gains now go to the top 1% New York Times quote:The top 1 percent has done progressively better in each economic recovery of the past two decades. In the Clinton era expansion, 45 percent of the total income gains went to the top 1 percent; in the Bush recovery, the figure was 65 percent; now it is 93 percent. http://www.nytimes.com/... To win in America all we have to do is to care about each other and stick together!If we are looking for change we must look to the Occupy movement to providethat peaceful nonviolent approach to change in helping to elect betterprogressive politicians to public office. The Occupy movement and theAmerican unions are the last great hope of the American working class dream!! (I'd like to invite you to follow me at the Daily Kos (or on Twitter.) Just click on the link below. Thank you. ) http://www.dailykos.com/...Pets for Adoption *****Site updated Wed Feb 6 2019 Cats & Kittens for Adoption (Fee : $180.00, or 2 for $180.00) Feb 6 : We currently have 8 cats that are looking for new homes, click on the link to view our cats! Dogs & Puppies for Adoption (Fee: $335.00) We currently have no dogs looking for home, contact me if you would like some other resources to find a dog. Please contact Emma Slater for more information and to book an appointment to meet our fabulous pets here at Algonquin College. slatere@algonquincollege.com or 613-727-4723 Ext 7201 About Our Pets With the guidance of our excellent facility veterinarians and our Veterinary Technicians and Veterinary Assistants, all of our pets are neutered, micro chipped and vaccinated here at the college. If you adopt one of our animals, you will also receive an adoption kit containing food and toys as well as 45 days of free pet insurance. The adoption fee is then sent to the SPCA to continue to support the running of the shelter. We are a teaching facility and committed to supporting the community and its stray and needy animals. We’re very happy to be able to offer these ready to adopt forever furry friends! We thank the SPCA de L’Outaouais for allowing us to run some of their adoption program through our facility here at the Woodroffe Campus.Men who take fish-oil supplements or eat a lot of fatty fish expecting health benefits might actually increase their risk for prostate cancer, including aggressive types that are harder to treat. That news comes out of a study published online yesterday in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute and follows an analysis last year of 20 fish-oil studies that concluded that supplements offer no clear heart benefits. Men who take fish-oil supplements or eat a lot of fatty fish expecting health benefits might actually increase their risk for prostate cancer, including aggressive types that are harder to treat. That news comes out of a study published online yesterday in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute and follows an analysis last year of 20 fish-oil studies that concluded that supplements offer no clear heart benefits. The authors of the study, the second they�ve done that found an association, say men would be well-served to skip supplements. Other experts say the new study is provocative but not definitive because the relationship between fatty acids and cancer is not well understood. Americans spend about $1 billion a year on fish-oil supplements. The study looked at 2,227 men, 834 of whom had prostate cancer. Of the cancer patients, 156 had high-grade, or more aggressive, cancer. Men with higher levels of long-chain fatty acids in their bloodstream had a 43 percent increased risk for prostate cancer compared with those with lower levels. And they had a 71 percent increased risk of more aggressive cancers, according to a statistical analysis by researchers including cancer epidemiologist Theodore Brasky, who now works at Ohio State University�s Comprehensive Cancer Center.He worked on the project at Seattle�s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Of the 176 men with prostate cancer who had the lowest fatty-acid levels, 26 had more-serious cases. Of the 245 with the highest levels, 43 had high-grade cancer. Brasky�s co-author, Alan Kristal, an epidemiologist in Seattle, pointed to several studies debunking theories that vitamins and minerals ward off cancer and other disease. �Why would you do it? Americans have been sold a complete bill of goods on supplements,� he said. �I think the message increasingly is that these are not good for you.�The new study offers no recommendations on how much omega-3 fatty acid is reasonable, nor did the researchers recommend that men stop eating fish. With their first study, �We made everyone a little nervous. The findings were opposite from what we expected initially,� Brasky said. The notion that omega-3 fatty acids prevent disease because they reduce inflammation is an oversimplification of a complex process, he said. There are several things to keep in mind about the research. This study wasn�t a randomized, double-blind study designed specifically to test for any relationship between fish oil and prostate cancer. That�s the gold standard. Instead, the researchers went back and looked at blood analysis in a group of men who were part of a major study looking at the effects of selenium and vitamin E in prostate cancer. The study did not address the relationship between the fatty acids and outcomes for those men who had cancer. It also did not include an analysis of what the men ate and what supplements they took. It only looked at the levels of fatty acids in their blood samples. The study does not draw any link between plant-based omega-3 fatty acids and prostate cancer, only those typically found in fatty fish such as salmon and tuna and in supplements. Many people take omega-3 fatty acids for their anti-inflammatory properties, believing they�ll help in a variety of ways, including as a protection against heart disease. Dr. Andy Chapekis, a cardiologist at Riverside Methodist Hospital, said heart specialists don�t typically push patients to use the supplements, given the weakness of the research. He generally advised patients who wanted to take them that there was no harm in trying. That is, until this study. Dr. Steven Clinton, who directs Ohio State�s molecular carcinogenesis and chemoprevention program, said he looks forward to seeing more research in this area that might confirm and better explain the connection. Clinton said he expects nutritionists will continue to recommend fish as part of a healthy diet. �No major organization is going to say that the public should go out and take omega-3 supplements,� Clinton said. �If you follow healthy dietary patterns, you should not need a supplement.� mcrane@dispatch.com @MistiCraneIBM's machine learning algorithm achieved 33.8% accuracy on image recognition, beating Facebook and Microsoft. It could speed up deep learning training from 'days or hours to minutes or seconds.' Video: How to tell the difference between AI, machine learning, and deep learning Advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning are impacting businesses. But, the terms are often used interchangeably. Here's how to tell them apart. Deep learning systems continue to gain widespread adoption in the enterprise, tackling photo and voice recognition, customer service interactions, and even spotting abnormalities in medical records. But while the artificial intelligence (AI) models, which rely on massive data sets to "train" themselves on recognizing patterns and making predictions—throughout multiple iterations—timing is still an obstacle. Developing an accurate deep learning model can take up to days, or even weeks. On Tuesday, a new deep learning model developed by IBM Research—Distributed Deep Learning—made big strides in the field: It achieved a record for image recognition accuracy of 33.8%. The model, which used a massive
has dramatically improved. The work the Western Australian Government is doing will set their state up for excellence in education for decades to come." International evidence Many countries, including the United Kingdom and the United States, have granted high levels of autonomy to public schools over the past decade. Closer to home, the state of Victoria moved to an 'autonomous' public school system more than two decades ago. Victoria's Education Department says its current public schools system is among the most devolved or 'autonomous' in the world. A recent Grattan's Institute report by Ben Jensen titled 'The myth of markets in school education' says: "Despite this, Victoria's performance on national and international assessments is not significantly different from NSW, where autonomy is much lower. Scores in NAPLAN follow similar trends." "The level of autonomy in a country's schools is not consistent with how well they perform internationally," it says. Consecutive reports by Stanford University's Centre for Research on Educational Outcomes have shown students from "charter schools" in the United States, which are privately run, publicly funded schools, underperform when compared to equivalent students in traditional public schools. Mr Pyne's office pointed Fact Check to a 2010 OECD report which says: "In countries where schools have greater autonomy over what is taught and how students are assessed, students tend to perform better." The international picture is ambiguous. The verdict There has been no measured improvement in student outcomes in WA independent public schools. "All international evidence" does not point to the fact that the more autonomous a school, the better the outcomes for students. Mr Pyne's claims are unsubstantiated Sources Topics: education, public-schools, federal-government, liberals, wa, perth-6000, vic, australia First postedCigna–The insurance company earned $1.83 per share for the first quarter, well above estimates of $1.54, though revenue was slightly short of estimates. Cigna did see improved revenue from areas such as group disability and life insurance. Intuitive Surgical–The maker of surgical systems has been told by the FDA that it has addressed manufacturing violations that had been mentioned in a prior warning letter. Beazer Homes–The home builder lost 31 cents per share for the second quarter, wider than the 20 cent loss analysts had been expecting. Revenue was also short of estimates, with new home orders falling 8.6 percent amid bad weather. Avon Products–The beauty company reported a first quarter profit of 12 cents per share, missing estimates by nine cents. Sales dropped in every region as more of the company's sales representatives left. MasterCard–The credit card giant beat estimates by one cent with first quarter profit of 73 cents per share. Revenue was also above estimates as cardholders spent more on purchases. Yelp–The online guide reported a loss of four cents per share for its first quarter, two cents smaller than expected. Its current quarter revenue projection is also upbeat, as it sells more local ads for mobile devices. DirecTV–The satellite TV operator has been approached by AT&T about a possible buyout, according to the Wall Street Journal. The paper puts the possible value of such a deal at $40 billion or more. Sony –The electronics giant has cut its earnings estimates for the year ending March 31 by almost 70 percent, on losses from electronics and costs to exit from the PC business. Boeing–The aerospace big expects to finish test flights for a stretch version of the 787 Dreamliner within the next two months, according to company officials. JDS Uniphase–The company reported a fiscal third quarter profit of 10 cents per share, one cent below estimates, with revenue short as well, and its current quarter revenue projection also below consensus. The networking equipment maker cites a delay in orders from telecom carriers. Weight Watchers–Weight Watchers earned 31 cents per share for the first quarter, well above estimates of nine cents. Revenue beat projections, and the company also increased its full-year estimates. That comes despite a 56 percent drop in earnings from a year earlier, as fewer people attend Weight Watchers meetings. Boston Beer–Boston Beer fell seven cents short of estimates with first quarter profit of seven cents per share, though revenue topped forecasts. The beer brewer has been increasing its advertising, marketing and promotion spending, as it seeks to outflank increasing competition. Chevron–The second largest U.S. oil company increased its quarterly dividend by seven percent to $1.07 per share. Abercrombie & Fitch–The clothing retailer has settled with activist investor Engaged Capital and nominated four new independent directors to its board. —By CNBC's Peter Schacknow Questions? Comments? Email us at marketinsider@cnbc.com13 May 2008 openssh vulnerability A security issue affects these releases of Ubuntu and its derivatives: Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Ubuntu 7.10 Ubuntu 7.04 Software Description openssh Details A weakness has been discovered in the random number generator used by OpenSSL on Debian and Ubuntu systems. As a result of this weakness, certain encryption keys are much more common than they should be, such that an attacker could guess the key through a brute-force attack given minimal knowledge of the system. This particularly affects the use of encryption keys in OpenSSH. This vulnerability only affects operating systems which (like Ubuntu) are based on Debian. However, other systems can be indirectly affected if weak keys are imported into them. We consider this an extremely serious vulnerability, and urge all users to act immediately to secure their systems. The problem can be corrected by updating your system to the following package versions: To update your system, please follow these instructions: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Security/Upgrades. Updating your system: Install the security updates Once the update is applied, weak user keys will be automatically rejected where possible (though they cannot be detected in all cases). If you are using such keys for user authentication, they will immediately stop working and will need to be replaced (see step 3). OpenSSH host keys can be automatically regenerated when the OpenSSH security update is applied. The update will prompt for confirmation before taking this step. Update OpenSSH known_hosts files The regeneration of host keys will cause a warning to be displayed when connecting to the system using SSH until the host key is updated in the known_hosts file. The warning will look like this: @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ @ WARNING: REMOTE HOST IDENTIFICATION HAS CHANGED! @ @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ IT IS POSSIBLE THAT SOMEONE IS DOING SOMETHING NASTY! Someone could be eavesdropping on you right now (man-in-the-middle attack)! It is also possible that the RSA host key has just been changed. In this case, the host key has simply been changed, and you should update the relevant known_hosts file as indicated in the error message. Check all OpenSSH user keys The safest course of action is to regenerate all OpenSSH user keys, except where it can be established to a high degree of certainty that the key was generated on an unaffected system. Check whether your key is affected by running the ssh-vulnkey tool, included in the security update. By default, ssh-vulnkey will check the standard location for user keys (~/.ssh/id_rsa, ~/.ssh/id_dsa and ~/.ssh/identity), your authorized_keys file (~/.ssh/authorized_keys and ~/.ssh/authorized_keys2), and the system’s host keys (/etc/ssh/ssh_host_dsa_key and /etc/ssh/ssh_host_rsa_key). To check all your own keys, assuming they are in the standard locations (~/.ssh/id_rsa, ~/.ssh/id_dsa, or ~/.ssh/identity): $ ssh-vulnkey To check all keys on your system: $ sudo ssh-vulnkey -a To check a key in a non-standard location: $ ssh-vulnkey /path/to/key If ssh-vulnkey says “Unknown (no blacklist information)”, then it has no information about whether that key is affected. If in doubt, destroy the key and generate a new one. Regenerate any affected user keys OpenSSH keys used for user authentication must be manually regenerated, including those which may have since been transferred to a different system after being generated. New keys can be generated using ssh-keygen, e.g.: $ ssh-keygen Generating public/private rsa key pair. Enter file in which to save the key (/home/user/.ssh/id_rsa): Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase): Enter same passphrase again: Your identification has been saved in /home/user/.ssh/id_rsa. Your public key has been saved in /home/user/.ssh/id_rsa.pub. The key fingerprint is: 00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00 user@host Update authorized_keys files (if necessary) Once the user keys have been regenerated, the relevant public keys must be propagated to any authorized_keys files on remote systems. Be sure to delete the affected key. ReferencesCheck out these cases for ideas. Do you really want people to engage with your online content? Wouldn’t it be better if they engaged with your brand instead? We think so. So we wrote a guide to help you solve engagement problems at their source: By developing a more engaging online brand. Essential travel tips for your brand. This guide outlines the 14 challenges that differentiate domestic from international marketing, and the four types of international agencies you can turn to for help. Don’t leave home without it. Our video guides are full of useful marketing insights and resources useful for international marketers. Why pay for good intentions? See if your brand qualifies for performance-based pricing with our Moso Growth Program. "It's been a pleasure working with Duffy Agency. They showed a great understanding of our brand and developed excellent creative ideas which they produced to the highest finished quality. Always on time, on budget and professional." “Duffy Agency constantly remains ahead of the curve with a unique combination of insight, strategy and digital execution. Highly recommended.” “We quadrupled our online audience in our first year working with Duffy Agency. They continue to outperform projections and challenge us with new ideas.” Veronika Tarnovskaya PhD, Lund University School of Economics, Sweden — Collaborator since 2006 “Building brands across borders requires specialized expertise in international marketing strategy and online tactics. Duffy Agency delivers both.” Is your brand ready to travel? Subscribe and each month we’ll share new insights to grow your business over borders. Email * I would like to receive updates from Duffy Agency Comments This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.Chiang Mai airport will undergo a two-phase expansion costing 12-billion-baht over the next 15 years. (Photo by Thiti Wannamontha) The board of Airports of Thailand Plc (AOT) on Wednesday approved the 12-billion-baht expansion of Chiang Mai airport over 15 years to serve growing traffic. AOT chairman Prasong Poontaneat said the project would be implemented in two phases. The first will last ten years from 2016 to 2025 and consume 11-billion-baht of the investment funds. The remaining 1.1 billion baht will be spent in the second phase of five years from 2026 to 2030. Both phases will raise the passenger-handling capacity of the airport to 20 million annually compared with the present capacity of 12 million, he said. The first-phase expansion will cover the runways, taxiways and terminal construction and improvement. It is designed to handle 34 flights an hour, or 18 million passengers annually, including 11 million passengers on domestic flights. This capacity should serve traffic for the next 14 years, or until 2030, Mr Prasong said. The second-stage expansion is expected to enable the airport to handle 20 million passengers a year consisting of 8 million on international flights and 12 million on domestic flights, sufficient to serve air traffic until 2035. Traffic at Chiang Mai airport had grown unexpectedly fast in the past decade and about 8.3 million people visited the airport last year, Mr Prasong said.If you want the Skull Kid figure then you’re in luck. Nintendo UK has announced that it’s giving away the figure with an order of a New Nintendo 3DS and a copy of The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask 3D. If you got the New Nintendo 3DS Ambassador edition you are still eligible. All you need to do is buy Majora’s Mask 3D from the Nintendo UK store, or from any retailer, and then redeem your Club Nintendo code and a figure will be sent out. Here’s the details according to the email. Thank you for purchasing New Nintendo 3DS Ambassador Edition Bundle. You can now qualify for an exclusive Skull Kid figurine! Nintendo Official UK Store is now offering a FREE exclusive Skull Kid figurine when you buy any New Nintendo 3DS with The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask 3D. This promotion applies to all editions of the new console and game for a limited time only, while stocks last. As you have already purchased your New Nintendo 3DS Ambassador Edition Bundle before this promotion was available, we would like to assure you that you are also eligible for this offer when you buy The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask 3D. Please see below how to qualify: If you have already pre-ordered the game from Nintendo Official UK Store If you have already pre-ordered The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask 3D from Nintendo Official UK Store you will receive your free Skull Kid figurine at the same time or a few days after the game has been delivered. You do not need to do anything with your pre-order. If you plan to purchase the game from Nintendo Official UK Store If you haven’t pre-ordered The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask 3D from Nintendo Official UK Store and would like to take advantage of this Skull Kid promotion, you will need to purchase the game before Saturday 28th February 2015. You will receive your free Skull Kid figurine at the same time or a few days after the game has been delivered. If you have pre-ordered the game from another retailer If you have already pre-ordered The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask 3D from another retailer you can still qualify for this promotion. To do so, simply register your game on Club Nintendo by Saturday 28th February 2015. We will dispatch your Skull Kid figurine once we have confirmation via Club Nintendo.LAUSANNE, Switzerland (Reuters) - The United States wants major powers to reach a detailed political understanding with Iran by March 31 to clear the path for a long-term nuclear accord, a senior U.S. official said, while hinting that Washington could be flexible on its format. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry (L) holds a negotiation meeting with Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif (R) over Iran's nuclear programme in Lausanne March 19, 2015. REUTERS/Brian Snyder Speaking to reporters traveling with Secretary of State John Kerry to a new round of talks in the Swiss city of Lausanne, the senior State Department official added that Washington would not rush to complete an agreement just because there was a deadline. The official said any framework agreement must address key aspects of a future nuclear deal with Tehran that Iran and the six aim to conclude by June 30. “Any political understanding needs to address in some way all of the elements of a final agreement,” the official said late on Wednesday. “We do not know what form this will take,” the official said. “We have always said it needs to have specifics. We will need to communicate as many specifics as possible in some form or fashion (to the public and U.S. Congress).” Those elements include the different pathways to a nuclear weapon, ensuring that it would take Iran at least one year to produce enough high enriched uranium for a single bomb, research and development into advanced centrifuges, transparency measures and monitoring, and sanctions relief for Iran. This is a problem for Iran, whose supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is vehemently opposed to the idea of a two-step process - a written framework accord by end-March and a full deal by June 30. Iranian officials say they fear the former would curtail Tehran’s negotiating space for a final deal. Iranian officials have suggested they could accept some kind of statement or political declaration in Lausanne, as opposed to a formal written agreement. The disadvantage of that, Western officials say, is all sides could spin it to their liking. Iran denies Western allegations it is seeking the capability to procure atomic weapons. With the Republican-led U.S. Congress threatening to vote on new sanctions against Iran if there is no agreement this month, the administration of President Barack Obama is pushing hard to secure some kind of deal. Obama has vowed to veto any new U.S. sanctions moves. France has said the real deadline was June 30 and there was little point in rushing to conclude something at any cost by March 31. The U.S. official, playing down any suggestions of any ongoing disputes with France, made clear Washington agreed. “That does not mean that we will rush to get a bad deal because there’s a deadline,” the official said. “We won’t.” The Lausanne talks broke off last week due to disagreements between Washington and France, Western officials said. But the main obstacle in the talks, Western officials say, remains Iran’s refusal to compromise on sanctions, research and development and other issues. It will not be clear if Iran is now ready to compromise until Kerry meets Zarif on Thursday, the U.S. official said. If enough progress is made this week, other foreign ministers the six power group may join. The goal of the talks, underway for nearly 18 months, is to hammer out an accord under which Iran would halt sensitive nuclear work for at least a decade in exchange for lifting sanctions, thus ending Iran’s 12-year nuclear standoff with the West. Even if there is a deal in the coming days, the U.S. official said much work will remain between now and the end of June to work out the details. And there was no guarantee the talks would not collapse later. The six powers and Iran have twice extended talks on a long term accord after missing deadlines in the wake of an interim agreement struck in 2013. It remains unclear what Washington will do if the two sides fail to get a framework agreement in the coming days. “If we get to March 31 and don’t have a political understanding, we will have to evaluate where we are,” the U.S. official said. “We will have to look at what we think the path forward is and we will make decisions based on that.”Understanding how water flows through Florida's aquifers is integral to maintaining a safe and sufficient supply of fresh water, but current computer models used to monitor the state's aquifers and springs are "full of holes," according to some critics. The Tampa Bay Times reported on Monday that there is a disconnect between "how water pumping permits are routinely issued throughout much of Florida" and the impact those permits have on the state's rapidly dwindling resources. Currently, according to the Times, state officials employ computer models "that use a false assumption" about how water flows under the ground's surface when issuing permits. Though the current models predict a steady rate of movement through sand and gravel, field tests conducted in Silver Springs have demonstrated the unpredictability of underground water flow, owing in large part to the existence of karst (limestone filled with holes) below the surface. Scientists using a "dye test" were able to more accurately track the speed at which water moves underground. The dye test gave a vivid illustration of the difference. The scientists running the test picked their drop sites with help from one of the state's models. The model predicted how fast a liquid would trickle along underground toward the spring. Different zones would give the dye a 2-year trip, a 10-year trip and even a 100-year trip. But when they dropped the dye in, the stuff rocketed through the aquifer. It zoomed across half the predicted 100-year distance in just six months. Researcher Pete Butt of Karst Environmental Services oversaw the Silver Springs project and said the dye would have traveled even faster if the test had taken place during Florida's rainy season. The findings reveal potential vulnerabilities in the state's water management system at large. Computer models are used to monitor water use and levels, as well as to track the rate of contamination from chemicals, sewage, and other pollutants. Though another "more accurate" computer model based on water flow through karst exists, the state reportedly will not touch it because it was created by Coca-Cola, which at one time owned a bottling plant near High Springs.Biodiversity is a hard concept to pin down. The word evokes a rich ecosystem brimming with plant and animal species. But is it just the number of species that matters, or their dissimilarity? Picture a pond with twenty kinds of frog and no other vertebrates. Surely you’d call it less diverse than a pond with twenty total species of frogs, snakes, turtles, muskrats, carp, ducks, and newts. And what if one species has a lot of genetic variation? Is the kaleidoscopic western ground snake, with myriad shades and stripe patterns, weighted the same as a population of genetically identical salamander clones? What about individuals? Can one organism be more biodiverse, by itself, than another? I once had a t-shirt that proclaimed “BIODIVERSITY” with a picture of a lone, multicolored frog. It implied that a single animal can be biodiverse if it only has enough distinct pigments. Nonsense? Or is there something to this idea? A genome contains, among other things, a set of genes that each encode a different molecular product. Not every genome has the same number of genes. A bacterium might have a few thousand, while a mammal has tens of thousands. But all living lineages, simple or complex, have spent the exact same amount of time evolving to fit Earth’s conditions. A germ is as adapted as a geranium. Like the fox of fables who knows many things while the hedgehog knows one important thing, the genome of a mudpuppy “knows” 10 million times more information than that of a cold virus. Yet both are equally successful. If all you care about is endurance over the eons, elaborate genomes aren’t necessarily better than streamlined ones. But sometimes we care about more than that. On the rapidly changing planet of the Anthropocene, the first priority might be the ability to acclimatize over the short term. To have the right gene in your toolkit for whatever the future throws at you. And we humans should also value biological information per se if want to be responsible technocratic stewards of the Earth. A species with more DNA has more biotechnological potential: more chances that it secretes the precursor of a new drug or nanomachine. Consider the antimicrobial peptides. Many species produce a cocktail of these bacteria-killing chemicals, but the exact number varies. Imagine two species of, say, dragonflies. One produces five different antimicrobial peptides, and one produces fifty. All else being equal, I’d prefer to conserve the peptide-rich insect, since it represents forty-five more chances to wipe out the next superbug. Of course, not all is ever equal, and we probably wouldn’t be able to tell even if it were. But in theory, at least, some genomes are more equal than others. Where do all these genes come from? Gene families can spread across the genome via a copy-and-paste mechanism, with each new copy developing a unique sequence. Entire genomes can even duplicate. Our own human genome has doubled itself at least twice, deep in our evolutionary past. We don’t have eight copies of every gene, though, because extra copies have been discarded if they didn’t prove beneficial. But some species, like the cultivated strawberry, have recently replicated genomes. They still have eight nearly-complete copies of every chromosome. This isn’t mere redundancy. These copies originated from at least two different species which hybridized. (Perhaps confusingly, the resultant hybrid then split into several wild species, two of which which again hybridized to form the strawberry we eat). You could say that your shortcake topping represents twice the biodiversity of one of the original wild ancestors. But it’s actually a bit more than that, because even copies with the same background have begun to diverge from each other. Does this molecular bonanza have practical consequences? It’s hard to say for sure. Species with duplicated genomes have certainly flourished. Intuitively, you might expect these species to be more flexible. If part of your genome is itself a complete genome that originally adapted to a cold climate, and another part is an entire additional heat-adapted genome, maybe you can just turn the appropriate genes on or off depending on the weather. On the other hand, plenty of genetic paupers do just fine. The carnivorous corkscrew plants don’t suffer despite having a tenth of the DNA of a strawberry. It’s an open question. We’re looking into it. Genes within gene families. Genomes within genomes. Even our own mitochondria, the calorie furnaces within our cells, have their own genomes and independent origin. Every animal is already an ecosystem of a sort, a corporation with more than one shareholder. The botanical realm is even more bureaucratic. Not only do plants have mitochondria too, but their light-harvesting chloroplasts are another genetically distinct entity. Hybrid ancestries like the strawberry’s are also common. Where will all this lead? Could every genome in the world be combined into a supergenome, a blueprint for a zygote that could choose to grow into a petunia or a sperm whale depending on the conditions? No, that’s not where evolution is going, and such a task would elude even the more skillful genetic engineer. But it’s a nice thought experiment. A planet inhabited by only that monstrosity would still be very biodiverse. In the end, biodiversity is just a convenient rule of thumb, a rough guideline for setting conservation priorities. We can’t predict the future, but we can be pretty sure of this: the more of evolution’s accomplishments we can keep around, the better. The fine points of how we measure it aren’t so important. What is important is to remember that so many living things are cornucopias of evolutionary innovation. If we eliminate even one obscure wildflower, we don’t just lose one basic set of genes. We lose a full suite of genomes with unique proliferations of gene families. We lose a whole world. AdvertisementsKerry Washington has a need for speed. PEOPLE can exclusively announce the cast of the upcoming Disney-Pixar animated film Cars 3 — and Washington is one of the newest members of Lightning McQueen’s speedy crew. Get push notifications with news, features and more. Along with Washington, Nathan Fillion (Castle) and Lea DeLaria (Orange Is the New Black) also lend their voices to the latest installment of the franchise. Washington, 40, plays a red sports car named Natalie Certain — and PEOPLE has the first look at her character. “She is a super-smarty-pants statistician. She reminds of a statistical analyst on cable news or SportsCenter,” she tells PEOPLE. “She knows everything there is to know about the ins and outs of statistics when it comes to racing.” Natalie Certain, voiced by Kerry Washington. Disney This marks Washington’s first turn as an animated character, and she says she is excited to show her two kids, Isabelle, 2, and Caleb, 5 months, the finished product. “It’s fun, the idea of doing something that the kids can actually enjoy,” she said. “Scandal isn’t exactly a Disney Jr. show.” Sterling, voiced by Nathan Fillion. Disney So what was the best part of doing voice-over work? Not having to hide her then-pregnant belly. “Over at Scandal, I had so much stress about how to adjust my growing belly. But for Cars, I could roll up as is and not worry about hiding it.” Miss Fritter, voiced by Lea DeLaria. Disney But just because she plays a fast-talking — and even faster driving — car on screen, she’s the first to admit she’s not especially skilled on the real road. “I was about 22 [when I learned to drive],” she says. “I forced myself to do it because I was moving to L.A. I drive a little bit like an 85-year-old. I sit really straight, hands at 10 and 2, and always use a signal. It’s pretty hilarious.” From Coinage: See Where 5 Stars Were Before They Were Famous Cars 3 once again finds Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) on the racetrack — only this time, he’s struggling to keep up with a new generation of fast racers. With the help of his crew, he hatches a plan to help him get back in the game. Armie Hammer, Larry the Cable Guy and Cristela Alonzo also voice characters in the film. Cars 3 hits theaters on June 16.Residents of Johannesburg, South Africa will have the ability to purchase bitcoin with cash come this weekend, with the launch of one of Africa’s (if not the first) bitcoin ATMs. As you may be aware, the continent of Africa is severely underbanked (with an estimated 135 million people not banked at all), and many in the bitcoin community have argued that bitcoin’s presence in Africa could very well have a positive impact on the population. The machine is manufactured by Lamassu, and will serve as more of a vending machine than an ATM in that bitcoin-to-cash functionality is not included. [ot-video type=”youtube” url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zeMLcf66Y8″] The device will be accessible to Johannesburg locals at the Metroman Men’s Salon, which is just adjacent to the Kyalami Grand Prix Circuit race track. The device can be used any time after 9 AM local time. Lamassu’s business operation continues to grow with a network of over 250 machines sold in its first year of operation. These machines are operating in 45 different countries, amazingly enough. Lamassu has recently spiced up their offerings by recently releasing open source software to the operating network of machines, which will allow developers to build custom apps for the platform. In addition, the company also released a stand for their product in the past few months which will enable two-way functionality. That is, allowing consumers to both buy and sell bitcoin.By Tough Mudder held its fifth annual “World’s Toughest Mudder” race last month. World’s Toughest Mudder is the final event on the Tough Mudder calendar and is widely known as the most difficult championship race in Obstacle Course Racing. It is a 24 hour race on a five mile looped course with 21 obstacles each lap. This years course was considered to be one of the most difficult Tough Mudder has held. Following the victories by Chad Trammell, Amelia Boone, and Team Sinergy, and as we look forward to WTM 2016, here are five questions we would love to have answered. 1. Can Junyong Pak win another WTM? Can he FINISH another one? Junyong Pak became a bit of a legend in the Tough Mudder community by winning the first two WTM’s ever held and finishing second in year three to a rookie named Ryan Atkins. However, in 2014, Pak had his first truly disappointing performance at a World’s Toughest Mudder. He finished with “only” 45 miles and his first WTM DNF. Atkins repeated as champion with 95 miles. For the 2015 race, Atkins and several other strong racers moved to the team division, leaving the perfect opportunity for Pak to reclaim his throne, but it would not happen this year. Pak had his second WTM DNF in a row, leaving with 50 miles. We won’t know the answer to this question until November of 2016, but here’s a hint: This past December, Pak raced in the inaugural Viper 2 Four race in Malaysia. Viper 2 Four is the only 24-hour race in Asia. Pak won the race handily, completing 87 miles. The race was held during monsoon season in Malaysia and two hours were lost when they stopped the race because of lightning strikes. The competition at WTM will be more intense and more skilled than Viper 2 Four, but I would never bet against Junyong Pak. 2. Will Amelia Boone 3-peat? Amelia Boone has won the past two WTM’s and three of the past four. In 2012, she was nine minutes shy of winning first place overall, narrowly losing to Junyong Pak. She is unquestionably the most dominant WTM racer in the women’s division and maybe overall. Tim Ferriss recently called her “The Michael Jordan of Obstacle Course Racing”. When they sell tickets to World’s Toughest Mudder, they have to pay royalties to Boone because she OWNS this race. But for how long? Lindsay Webster, the best female racer not named Amelia Boone, told Matt B. Davis in a recent interview that she’s going to compete for the first time at WTM 2016. Webster had an amazing 2015. She won both the independent OCR World Championship and the Battlefrog Championship. She also placed second in the Spartan Race World Championship, finishing one minute and change ahead of Boone. World’s Toughest Mudder 2016 will be a great race. 3. Will Ryan Atkins keep chasing the $100k or go back to the individual category? Tough Mudder and Cellucor announced a new prize this year: $100,000 to the winning team, but only if they completed 100 miles. 100 miles has only been reached once, by Ryan Atkins in 2013 when he had three guys on his tail who each finished with 95 miles. After winning the solo championship in 2013 and 2014 Atkins moved to the Team Division for 2015. His team, Sinergy Sports, won with 80 miles. Sinergy finished well ahead of second place but well behind its 100-mile goal. First place in the solo division comes with a $10,000 prize. First place in the team division comes with a $12,000 prize split (at least) four ways. If you can’t reach 100 miles with a team, it’s much more profitable to go for 100 miles by yourself. Atkins is recently engaged to Lindsay Webster. You can pay for quite a honeymoon with $100,000. Go for it Ryan! 4. Can the Wolfpack make a comeback? The Spartan Wolfpack entered the 2014 WTM unknown and if you asked them, disrespected. They won the WTM Team Division last year with 76 miles. For 2015, they were considered one of the favorites to make a run at the “$100,000 for 100 miles” team prize. They had a disappointing race this year. One of their team members had an injury and the team was unable to finish the race. Wolfpack chose to disband in the middle of the night. Adding to the disappointment was Team Sinergy Sports’ winning with 80 miles, just above Wolfpack’s total from last year. The anticipated Wolfpack/Sinergy battle would have been great to watch if Wolfpack was at full health. Wolfpack hasn’t announced their plans for 2016, but everyone loves a good comeback story. Come back fellas! 5. Who will win WTM 2016? Nobody knows – but I’ll tell you. First, the dark horse picks. Men: Trevor Cichosz Women: April Hartwig Team: Getting Tough Cichosz has finished in third and second in the last two WTM’s. 2016 could be his breakthrough year. Hartwig led the women for most of the 24 hours, before Boone passed her for the win, and will only be better next year. Getting Tough won second place last year and did it with six guys. If they trim down to four guys, they’ll be faster and could give Atkins and Sinergy Sports trouble. My actual picks to win. Men: Junyong Pak Women: Amelia Boone Team: Sinergy Sports Yes – those are mostly favorites. Yes – Chad Trammell had an impressive win (and Trammell could easily repeat. He’s a stud!), but the way it looks now, these are my picks to win. Here’s a bonus pick: Amelia Boone and Lindsay Webster are going to push each other hard. Whoever wins the battle between them will also finish in the top three overall. ______________________________________________Rebel fighters battled the Al-Qaeda affiliated Islamic State of Iraq and Syria on Saturday after the jihadist group tried to seize their weapons, a monitoring group said. The clashes erupted at dawn near Ras al-Hosn, in the north of Idlib province, when the "ISIS fighters tried to seize weapons stored in Free Syrian Army depots," Rami Abdel Rahman, director of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, told AFP. The fighting comes amid mounting tensions between mainstream rebel forces and radical Islamist groups including ISIS and the Al-Nusra Front. Tensions have grown in recent months as opposition fighters and activists accuse the groups, which include among their ranks a number of non-Syrian fighters, of increasingly oppressive behavior. On Thursday, ISIS fighters shot dead a Free Syrian Army commander in the coastal province of Latakia, an incident that is expected to further ratchet up tensions. Kamal Hamami -- better known by his nom-de-guerre Abu Bassir al-Jeblawi -- was killed at a checkpoint, though accounts of his death differed. A rebel allied to Abu Bassir said via Facebook he had witnessed what he called a cold-blooded shooting at an ISIS checkpoint when the rebel chief was on his way to visit fellow fighters at the front. The Observatory said he was killed when ISIS fighters tried to destroy an FSA checkpoint in the Jabal al-Turkman region, in the north of Latakia province. Idlib province, in Syria's northwest has already seen clashes between mainstream rebels and jihadists. Late last week, dozens of FSA fighters were killed in a battle against ISIS, according to the Observatory. The FSA battalion chief there was beheaded by ISIS and his brother slaughtered, the group reported. In the early days of the Syrian uprising, when opponents of the regime were desperate for assistance from any quarter, jihadist fighters were welcomed. But activists and other rebels complain that jihadist groups are power-hungry and seek to impose austere religious practices on an observant but heterodox population. They have also been angered by arbitrary detentions and killings by jihadists, including the execution of a 15-year-old boy accused of uttering a blasphemous phrase
real vacation in years, they’re stuck with the [bleep] Obamacare Bronze Plan, where you can’t even get a [bleep] Percocet—they’ve essentially lost everything they had—except one thing, the one thing that doesn’t cost them a cent and is guaranteed to them by the American Constitution: the right to vote. They might be penniless, they might be homeless, they might be [bleep] over and [bleep] up. It doesn’t matter, because it’s equalized on that day. A millionaire has the same number of votes as the person without a job: one. And there’s more of the former middle class than there are in the millionaire class. So, on November 8th, the dispossessed will walk into the voting booth, be handed a ballot, close the curtain and take that lever, or felt pen or touchscreen, and put a big [bleep] X in the box by the name of the man who has threatened to upend and overturn the very system that has ruined their lives: Donald J. Trump. They see that the elites who ruined their lives hate Trump. Corporate America hates Trump. Wall Street hates Trump. The career politicians hate Trump. The media hates Trump—after they loved him and created him, and now hate him. Thank you, media. The enemy of my enemy is who I’m voting for on November 8th. Yes, on November 8th, you, Joe Blow, Steve Blow, Bob Blow, Billy Blow, Billy Bob Blow—all the Blows get to go and blow up the whole goddamn system, because it’s your right. Trump’s election is going to be the biggest “[bleep] you” ever recorded in human history. And it will feel good—for a day, yeah, maybe a week, possibly a month. And then, like the Brits, who wanted to send a message, so they voted to leave Europe, only to find out that if you vote to leave Europe, you actually have to leave Europe. And now they regret it. All the Ohioans, Pennsylvanians, Michiganders and Wisconsinites of Middle England—right?—they all voted to leave, and now they regret it, and over 4 million of them have signed a petition to have a do-over. They want another election. It ain’t gonna happen, because you used the ballot as an anger management tool. And now you’re [bleep]. And the rest of Europe? The rest of Europe? They’re like, “Bye, Felicia.” So, when the rightfully angry people of Ohio and Michigan and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin find out after a few months in office that President Trump wasn’t going to do a damn thing for them, it will be too late to do anything about it. But I get it. You wanted to send a message. You had righteous anger and justifiable anger. Well, message sent. Good night, America. You’ve just elected the last president of the United States. AMY GOODMAN: “You’ve just elected the last president of the United States.” Michael Moore— MICHAEL MOORE: Right. AMY GOODMAN: —in studio here in New York. MICHAEL MOORE: Right. AMY GOODMAN: Your response to yourself? MICHAEL MOORE: Yeah, well, that’s what I think—you know, the United States that we know now, for better or worse, won’t be the United States that we know after four years of Donald Trump. So, we all—those of us who are upset at the things about this country that we’re upset about, the way to fix it isn’t to put Trump in there, you know, to blow it up. But, you know, that whole piece, it’s funny you played that. A couple of right-wing websites doctored that piece, and they cut me off right after “And when you vote for Trump, and it will feel good,” and they cut it right there like I wanted to say like it’s going to feel good. And, of course, the next line is, as you just showed, you know, “for a day, maybe a week.” And this went all over these right-wing websites last week. And iTunes like sent me a text saying, “What’s going on? Like, tens of thousands of people suddenly in the middle of the day are buying your film.” And we were already doing well. I mean, it’s been at number one on iTunes for almost a couple weeks. I said, “The right-wingers are telling people to go buy this movie because they’ve been shown only this one little bit of it.” And I was feeling kind of—I know I shouldn’t—just bear with me. It’s the Irish Catholic in me. I was feeling guilty that all these poor, conservative, right-wing dudes were losing five bucks to iTunes, and then they get my movie, and they realize, you know, “Oh, no!” and they can’t get their money back. So, I—actually, I called up Megyn Kelly and got her producer, and I said, “Can I come on Fox tonight? You know, I know I’m not a usual Fox guest, but can I come on? And I just want to tell people to stop buying my movie, because I just feel bad they’re losing five bucks, you know.” And so, they had me on. And I told them that. I said, “People, I mean, I want you to watch my movie,” I said. “I think you might learn a few things,” because I had—in the movie, I have a number of gently disguised facts that will—you know, I hope might seep in a little bit. “But I just can’t take your money if you’re thinking that this is some love poem to Donald Trump, because it’s the opposite of that.” AMY GOODMAN: Well, it wasn’t only them, but him. It was Donald Trump— MICHAEL MOORE: Yes, yes. AMY GOODMAN: —himself who tweeted out this video. MICHAEL MOORE: Correct. AMY GOODMAN: He wrote what? Michael Moore, “To all Americans, I see you & I hear you. I am your voice. Vote to #DrainTheSwamp w/ me on 11/8.” And he linked to a YouTube of the edited video. MICHAEL MOORE: Yes, yes, which only then drove hundreds of thousands of more people to my movie, maybe millions at this point. And it’s like—I looked at this. I thought, “I cannot believe this.” Right? So, does he think—OK, he clearly hasn’t seen the movie, right? So, does he think this is—honestly, Amy, this is what I think it is. I think he saw that his name was in the title of a movie, and he’s such a narcissist, that he just went, “Hey, there’s a movie about me. It’s got my name in it.” You know? He doesn’t talk like that, by the way. That was like western Michigan accent. AMY GOODMAN: Academy Award-winning filmmaker Michael Moore, director of the new film, Michael Moore in TrumpLand. And that does it for our show. To see Part 1 of our discussion with Michael, go to democracynow.org. Also, we’re doing a five-hour election night special. That’s Tuesday night, 7:00 to midnight Eastern time. Check it out at democracynow.org.Lords of the Fallen surprised us last year by providing some breathtaking backdrops combined with the combat that's come to define the Souls franchise - what can we expect to see in the future? Executive producer Tomasz Gop weighs in and answers our questions about the future of the Fallen and the upcoming expansion. Will the expansion offer anymore in the way of new classes or class variety? New spells? The expansion is not changing much in terms of character development. There will be new equipment and weapons, but since it will be woven into the actual playthrough (players will access it from within the game), we decided not to implement new skills into it. Will the expansion include fixes for many of the technical issues that cropped up in the core game? Will the expansion be more rigorously prepared to avoid any serious technical problems? We are releasing the game patch before the DLC, so we are planning to fix most of the issues even earlier. Still, together with the expansion’s release we do plan to include as many general game fixes as possible of course. How many new bosses can we expect to see? Will they be on par with the current difficulty or can players expect more of a challenge? Will there be any super hard optional bosses? There is one boss encounter in the expansion and we are not planning any optional bosses. Regarding the challenge, I think this boss will be a surprise for a lot of players because it will be fighting in a different way than bosses from the base game. The main trick to this new area is the exploration and the complex approach towards the destination. You will literally have to move and shift entire sections of the location to carve your way towards either a boss, a secret, or a location, etc. This part of the gameplay will feel like something that was not present in the base game and we’re focusing on that. What new combat options will new gear offer players? Anything game changing? New special weapons with new abilities? As I mentioned before, even with new gear and enemy types, this expansion is not focused on delivering an entirely game-changing experience in terms of combat. It’s more about exploration – that’s why it is an expansion, we really wanted to make combat as good as possible in the base game. Having said that, I think the gear you will find in the expansion will offer a good addition for people who complained about balance issues, for example, Faith scaling weapons etc. How much content does the expansion add in terms of areas to explore? It is an entire location. From our own “guesstimates” it will take the player about 2 hours to get through the expansion in the most straightforward way, but to max it out, at least double that amount. The Library Labyrinth is riddled with secrets and surprises. Also, there are a couple new enemies, though most of them will behave using patterns players already know - still, they should have some new tricks up their sleeves. There are a couple of new weapons and armor sets. This includes a shield, a quite special one. Of course, it will also feature new achievements/trophies. Price point? Release date? That’s a tough question right now. We’re focused on delivering the all-platform patch at the moment, so I can’t put my finger on a release date. We’re still determining the price point at the moment. Tell me a little about all the comparisons to the Souls games. Are those comparisons fair? Where do you think Lords of the Fallen is headed after the expansion? Can we expect a sequel? More DLC? If someone tells you “This place feels like your Parent’s house”, you can’t tell them it’s not true, even if you don’t feel that way at all. Or like what the Oracle told Neo in The Matrix – it’s like being in love. Uhm… I guess, what I mean is, no matter how much we see Lords as a game of its own, if someone says it feels “totally like Souls” to him/her, I can only acknowledge that. The issue is not whether these comparisons happen or not, it’s rather whether people who base their judgment on it will see things we’ve done differently as automatically inferior because they’re… not like Souls. Hope not. We’d love to make a sequel – ideas are being written down as we speak. More DLC? I can’t really comment on it at the moment. I am personally very fond of one particular DLC idea for Lords, but since decisions like this are purely business in the end of the day, let me not put the cart before the horse here, please! One of the biggest things I’m asked about is multiplayer. Can we expect to see some kind of multiplayer functionality added in the future? You are right about everything. It’s both very frequently asked about, and it’s also the biggest one! Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to add multiplayer features to a game like this. But then I think, as developers, we definitely should take this step by step and first make sure that we do a single-player experience that leaves no doubt about it being a rock-solid experience with execution and ideas that stand on its own legs. Yeah… I personally want this way more than multiplayer inclusion. I mean, if I have to compare! Tell me a little bit about new features and content coming in the expansion. What can we expect to see? Those who played Lords probably remember that there was a Human Realm, a Demonic Realm, and… something in between. That is exactly where the expansion will take us. That inbetween-realms place. It will deal with the ancient story of people overthrowing Adyr (known later as the Fallen God). Actually, it will have a lot to do with one of the guys who did it. The expansion takes place in an area centered on the concept of Knowledge. Knowledge is power and protecting it is very important, especially if you’re a God facing potential problems! So, Adyr not only stored his most precious secrets in one place, but also made sure it’s protected not only by very powerful Rhogar (his demons), but also by a very complex maze. The rewards that lie ahead for players of The Ancient Labyrinth expansion are not only loot from enemies, but also secrets found by exploring every single room. And last but not least, since the expansion is woven into the game storyline itself, players will be able to use whatever they obtain in the expansion throughout the base game as well.Last week, Trump signed an executive order establishing a temporary ban on allowing people from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen to enter the United States, and a temporary suspension on allowing refugees to enter the country. Related: [40 Nobel laureates, thousands of academics sign protest of Trump immigration order] "I'm establishing a new vetting measure to keep radical Islamic terrorists out of the United States of America," Trump said when he signed the order. "We don't want them here. We want to make sure we are not admitting into our country the very threats our soldiers are fighting overseas." The measure immediately drew strong reaction. Some welcomed the order as a much-needed way to strengthen national security and filter out extremists. But many others responded with alarm, protests and legal challenges, arguing that the ban was morally incompatible with American principles. President Donald Trump signs an executive order on extreme vetting at the Pentagon on Jan. 27. (Susan Walsh/AP) Christopher Eisgruber, the president of Princeton University, wrote the original draft of the letter with University of Pennsylvania President Amy Gutmann and then asked others to sign on. The weight of the executive order felt personal, Eisgruber said. It was personal in terms of his commitment to higher education, what it is and what it stands for, he explained. It was personal because of his research and experience as a scholar of religious liberties. And it was personal because of his own family history. "My mother was a refugee from war-torn Europe," he said. "If a refugee ban had been in place, she and her parents almost certainly would be killed." Related: [“I am trusting the American people”: Yale professor worries he, his wife and baby won’t be allowed back into the U.S. after Trump’s executive order] He said his father was an exchange student who emigrated from Germany five years after World War II. Had the United States treated his father as a likely enemy, Eisgruber said, he never would have been able to pursue his life here. "When I see immigrants affected by this order, their story resonates with me, and how my family was treated," he said by phone Thursday evening. Princeton, like other universities, is trying to help its students and scholars affected by the order, Eisgruber said, as some are unable to re-enter the country to continue their studies or teach, and many more are worried about the future. Related: [Trump lashes out at Berkeley after speech by Breitbart writer Milo Yiannopoulos is canceled amid violent protests] In the letter, the presidents wrote: "We recognize and respect the need to protect America's security. The vetting procedures already in place are rigorous. Improvements to them should be based on evidence, calibrated to real risks, and consistent with constitutional principle. "Throughout its history America has been a land of opportunity and a beacon of freedom in the world. It has attracted talented people to our shores and inspired people around the globe. This executive order is dimming the lamp of liberty and staining the country's reputation. We respectfully urge you to rectify the damage done by this order." Two spokesmen for the administration did not immediately respond to requests for comment about the letter on Thursday. Read the letter in full here: February 2, 2017 President Donald J. Trump The White House United States of America Dear President Trump: We write as presidents of leading American colleges and universities to urge you to rectify or rescind the recent executive order closing our country's borders to immigrants and others from seven majority-Muslim countries and to refugees from throughout the world. If left in place, the order threatens both American higher education and the defining principles of our country. The order specifically prevents talented, law-abiding students and scholars from the affected regions from reaching our campuses. American higher education has benefited tremendously from this country's long history of embracing immigrants from around the world. Their innovations and scholarship have enhanced American learning, added to our prosperity, and enriched our culture. Many who have returned to their own countries have taken with them the values that are the lifeblood of our democracy. America's educational, scientific, economic, and artistic leadership depends upon our continued ability to attract the extraordinary people who for many generations have come to this country in search of freedom and a better life. This action unfairly targets seven predominantly Muslim countries in a manner inconsistent with America's best principles and greatest traditions. We welcome outstanding Muslim students and scholars from the United States and abroad, including the many who come from the seven affected countries. Their vibrant contributions to our institutions and our country exemplify the value of the religious diversity that has been a hallmark of American freedom since this country's founding. The American dream depends on continued fidelity to that value. We recognize and respect the need to protect America's security. The vetting procedures already in place are rigorous. Improvements to them should be based on evidence, calibrated to real risks, and consistent with constitutional principle. Throughout its history America has been a land of opportunity and a beacon of freedom in the world. It has attracted talented people to our shores and inspired people around the globe. This executive order is dimming the lamp of liberty and staining the country's reputation. We respectfully urge you to rectify the damage done by this order. Sincerely, Robert L. Barchi President Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey Kimberly W. Benston President Haverford College Joanne Berger-Sweeney President Trinity College George Blumenthal Chancellor University of California, Santa Cruz Lee C. Bollinger President Columbia University Richard H. Brodhead President Duke University Robert A. Brown President Boston University Kimberly Wright Cassidy President Bryn Mawr College Ronald J. Daniels President Johns Hopkins University John J. DeGioia President Georgetown University Nicholas B. Dirks Chancellor University of California, Berkeley Christopher L. Eisgruber President Princeton University Adam F. Falk President Williams College Drew Gilpin Faust President Harvard University Patrick Gallagher Chancellor University of Pittsburgh Howard Gillman Chancellor University of California, Irvine Amy Gutmann President University of Pennsylvania Andrew Hamilton President New York University Philip J. Hanlon President Dartmouth College Sam Hawgood, MBBS Chancellor University of California, San Francisco Ralph J. Hexter Interim Chancellor University of California, Davis Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C. President University of Notre Dame Pradeep K. Khosla Chancellor University of California, San Diego Marvin Krislov President Oberlin College David W. Leebron President Rice University Ron Liebowitz President Brandeis University Wallace D. Loh President University of Maryland, College Park Anthony P. Monaco President Tufts University David Oxtoby President Pomona College Christina H. Paxson President Brown University Daniel R. Porterfield, PhD President Franklin & Marshall College Carol Quillen President Davidson College Hunter R. Rawlings III Interim President Cornell University Clayton Rose President Bowdoin College Peter Salovey President Yale University Michael H. Schill President University of Oregon Mark Schlissel M.D., PhD President University of Michigan Valerie Smith President Swarthmore College Barbara R. Snyder President Case Western Reserve University Debora L. Spar President Barnard College Samuel L. Stanley Jr., M.D. President Stony Brook University Sonya Stephens Acting President Mount Holyoke College Claire E. Sterk President Emory University Marc Tessier-Lavigne President Stanford University Satish K. Tripathi President University at Buffalo Mark S. Wrighton Chancellor Washington University in St. Louis Henry T. Yang Chancellor University of California, Santa Barbara Nicholas S. Zeppos Chancellor Vanderbilt University Susan Svrluga is a reporter covering higher education for The Washington Post's Grade Point blog. Before that, she covered education and local news at The Post. Post RecommendsLaverne Cox finally got to meet her idol Beyoncé at the 2017 Grammy Awards – and now, they’re apparently working together?!? “I have no idea to be perfectly honest. Like, does she pick out her biggest fans ever and let them work with her? It’s pretty amazing,” the 32-year-old entertainer revealed to Access Hollywood on Monday (August 21) without going further into details. Guess we will have to just wait and see. That same day, Laverne posed for a portrait ahead of her SAG-AFTRA Foundation Conversations with Orange Is The New Black panel held at SAG-AFTRA Foundation Screening Room in Los Angeles. Laverne discussed being nominated for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series for her role as Sophia Burset in Orange Is the New Black. Laverne Cox Talks Meeting Beyoncé; Being Nominated For An Emmy For ‘OITNB’ Click inside to watch the rest of Laverne Cox’s appearance on Access Hollywood… Laverne Cox On Her New Relationship & The Letter She Would Send To Her 19-Year-Old SelfGun confiscation bill advances in Oregon The Oregon Senate approved a bill Monday that would allow people to ask a court to revoke gun rights for family and household members. Senate Bill 719A creates a process for obtaining a so-called “extreme risk protection order” that would prohibit someone from possessing a deadly weapon when a court determines the person could present imminent risk to themselves or others. [You can urge your state Representative to oppose SB 719A by clicking here.] The bill defines a deadly weapon as “any instrument, article or substance specifically designed for and presently capable of causing death or serious physical injury; or a firearm, whether loaded or unloaded.” Under the proposal, a law enforcement officer, or family or household member can initiate the protection order process. The person would have to surrender their weapons and concealed handgun license within 24 hours of being served with the protection order. When an officer serves the order, he or she can request immediate surrender of the weapons, but the person can also surrender to a gun dealer or a third party. Spouses, intimate partners, parents, children, siblings, “or any person living within the same household” are eligible to initiate the process, according to the bill. When family members or law enforcement officers go before the court, the burden of proof lies with them. Before signing off on the order, a judge will consider the person’s history of suicide threats, and attempted, threatened or actual use of force against others. They’ll also look at any convictions for violence, stalking, cruelty to animals, weapons charges, or illegal substance use, among other things. The person ordered to surrender their deadly weapons has 30 days to contest the protection order. They’ll then be granted a hearing within 21 days of that request…. The Oregon Firearms Federation called the bill “one of the most dangerous pieces of legislation the anti-gunners have ever dreamed up.” “It allows a family member to have a person’s property and rights taken by force by the police and then assumes that even though that person is very dangerous, the people who made these accusations can live safely with the person who had his right taken,” said a post on the OFF website. “It’s complete madness.” [You can urge your state Representative to oppose SB 719A by clicking here.] Read more at Guns.comWhether your filing system has gotten away from you or it was never really under control to begin with, you can use our handy guide to beat it back into shape. Photo by juan23for. Many people have a filing system that is largely accidental. At some point they had more papers than they could store effectively on their desk so they started squirreling them away in cabinets, drawers, and so on. In other cases you inherit a filing system, like with a new job, and an office packed with paperwork. Advertisement What can you do to tame your file cabinet and make it a useful storage and reference tool instead of a paper orphanage? You need a filing system workflow. A filing system workflow is a road map for papers to follow as they navigate through your office. We can't provide an exact road map for you, but by answering some of the questions below and assessing your home and office needs you'll be able to construct an effective filing system workflow of your own. Make an Assessment: What do you want from your filing system and what does your filing system need to provide? Whether looking at your personal file cabinet in your home office or a bank of cabinets in your traditional office, before you do anything with your file system you need to hammer out what exactly it is that you want from the system and why you're displeased with its current state enough to be reading a guide to beating it into shape. Can you easily find documents? Is file removal and replacement easy to do or do you have to force folders back in? Are files within cabinets you use most frequently current and immediately necessary and useful? Do you have adequate space for the files you need to have on hand? Some issues are easily resolved. If your difficulty in finding documents is the handwritten labels left by the previous occupant of the office you can remedy that situation with a label maker and a free afternoon. Other issues will take a little more time to sort through, like having far too little storage space for the files at hand. Before you put in a purchase order for ten new file cabinets however, you'll need to do something first. Advertisement Purge Your File Cabinet: You've looked over your cabinets and listed some reasons why you're not happy with them, but before you make any radical changes you need to dive in and ditch the dead weight. There are two kinds of file cabinet purges, in one phase you shred old and unnecessary files and in the other you move necessary but old files into deep storage—deep storage can be a separate file cabinet in the basement, the records room at your office, or any place that is away from your central office. What are candidates for the categories? Candidates for Shredding: Utilities Bills - If you have a current bill in your hand and the information on it is correct, you can shred the old ones. Do you really need a cable bill from 2002? Pay Stubs from Prior Years - Once you receive W-2 or other official document from your employer at the end of the year, you can ditch the pay stubs. Bank and ATM receipts - When you see the amount appear on your online or paper statement, there is usually no pressing need to keep these annoying little pieces of paper. Credit Card Statements - You can shred these, like utility bills, once you have a new one with the correct balance on it. You may consider placing a credit card statement that has a large purchase on it like an HDTV in with the warranty information for that large purchase if your credit card has extra consumer protections that would help with replacing the larger purchase. Advertisement Candidates for Deep Storage: Tax Returns - The oft cited rule here is 7 years. Almost all audits occur within 3 years, but who are we to risk the ire of an agency with an 8 million dollar firearms budget? Bank Statements - Keep bank statements for at least 3 years, most people error on the side of caution and keep them for the same 7 year span they retain tax documents. Critical Personal Documents - Marriage licenses, birth certificates, and other difficult to replace documents should be kept in deep storage—preferably a waterproof and fireproof deep storage location. Retirement Saving Statements - Anything related to investments, contributions to an IRA, and so on should be kept indefinitely. Advertisement The above example list is in no way comprehensive, but it gives you a starting point for considering the lifespan of your individual files. If you have a fairly simple tax situation you can find tons of reference lists online regarding how long you should keep various files. If you have any questions, we highly recommend consulting with your accountant. Create a Workflow: Now you've assessed things that you would like to change about your file system—needs better labels, cabinets are poorly designed, etc.—and you've purged files to create some room in your cabinets. The creation of a file workflow will ensure that you're not sitting there in a year spending a weekend beating your file system back into shape. Your file workflow can take several shapes depending on the needs of your office and the size of the organization system you're wrangling, but for simplicity's sake we're going to assume you're not the archivist for a multinational corporation. A common file workflow for a home office might look something like this: Daily: Empty inbox and sort mail. File or shred new documents by end of day. Monthly: As new bills come in, shred old statements. Once a month take a few minutes to read over the labels in your file cabinet and determine if any files can be shifted to deep storage. January is a critical month for being merciless about what goes to deep storage, lest you start the new year with the old year's clutter. Advertisement Quarterly: In addition to your monthly appraisal, look over your deep storage and see if any files there have outlived their usefulness. Yearly: Once a year you'll be sifting through files for information related to taxes. This is an excellent time to be brutal in your weeding. Send old files to the shredder, cull out files related to projects that are defunct or no longer interesting. Any old bills, receipts, and so on that aren't directly related to your taxes and somehow escaped your eye earlier in the year should be shredded. Adhere to the Workflow: You don't lose weight by thinking about exercising and intending to eat better, and you don't get a tight and easy to control file system by intending to finally empty your inbox and get around to sorting through your files. If your file system is a wreck you're going to have to spend some time beating it into shape, labeling folders, and making decisions about what to shred and what to put into deep storage. Once you've got the file beating out of the way, however, you'll simply need to follow the workflow you've set down for yourself and the documents and files will naturally find their way to where they belong and practically march themselves to the shredder when their time is up. Using a file workflow is a habit that rewards you with an easy to use filing system and a file cabinet that won't creak under the weight of useless files. Advertisement For more information about setting up a functional file system, we'd recommend checking out a past feature Geek to Live: Extreme Makeover, Filing Cabinet Edition. Have a filing tip or two of your own? Let's hear about them in the comments.EMBED >More News Videos A Friendswood man will soon have a new piano, thanks to a famous singer. This story is so important. Is there a way I can get his contact info? I'd like to get him a replacement piano if this one doesn't make it. — Vanessa Carlton (@VanessaCarlton) August 31, 2017 A man whose video went viral of him playing his son's piano in floodwater after Hurricane Harvey finally received a new piano.Aric Harding and his family were promised the new piano from recording artist Vanessa Carlton, who happened to see the video on Twitter.After his family's Friendswood home was flooded, Harding says he made the video to show his kids everything would be OK. He posted it just a few days after the storm when he said he went back to grab some of his kids' stuffed animals.The powerful moment moved Carlton so much, Harding says she called offering to replace his son's piano because it no longer worked."The strings are all rust," Harding said back in September. "The bass boards are starting to separate. The sound board is starting to separate. I think this may be it for the piano."The piano from Carlton arrived today.CNET Microsoft has rolled out a major new update for Windows 10 that's causing headaches for some users. Pushed out last Wednesday, a major update for Windows 10 dubbed KB3081424 is designed as a cumulative update, which means it incorporates all of the bug fixes previously released for the new OS. But KB3081424 is proving itself to be buggy. After the update fails to install properly the first time around, Windows 10 tries to roll it back as is standard procedure. But since the update is automated and forced, Windows tries to install it again after rebooting, causing a loop of reboots for some users. Writer Adrian Kingsley-Hughes of CNET sister site ZDNet wrote about his travails trying to install the update on Sunday and getting stuck in a series of reboots. I installed the update on Sunday, but it ran smoothly on my Windows 10 Lenovo laptop. So as usual, the problem seems to affect only a certain percentage of users. The glitch points out an inherent flaw in Microsoft's new policy of mandating that updates be installed in Windows 10. In previous versions of Windows, you had the choice of opting to have updates installed automatically or installing them yourself, or not installing them at all. So the control was in your hands. But for Windows 10, Microsoft made the decision to force updates on users, so each update is going to install whether you want it or not. This policy is clearly designed to try to protect users by making sure all Windows 10 PCs have the latest bug fixes and security patches. The problem, as seen in this case, is that some updates themselves are buggy. So forcing updates on Windows 10 users is a policy with definite pitfalls. Now playing: Watch this: Windows 10 settings you should change right now On a Microsoft Windows forum, other users wrote about their trouble trying to install the update. One user said the update fails and the PC reboots every single time. Another person tried to manually install the update rather than waiting for Windows to install it but ran into the same glitch. The cause of the problem, according to a Saturday article from Forbes, is a bad entry in the Registry, which is the viewable and editable database for virtually all key Windows settings. After failing, the initial installation writes a bad entry to the Registry that prevents further attempts to reinstall the update correctly. Forbes suggests a workaround to the problem, which is also documented on the Windows forum thread. The temporary fix involves deleting certain keys in the Registry to get rid of the bad entry and then letting the update try again. Those of you skilled and comfortable working with the Registry may be fine attempting this procedure, making sure that you back up the associated Registry keys before you delete them. Those of you not familiar or comfortable working with the Registry should probably hold off until Microsoft comes out with an official fix. Microsoft did not immediately response to CNET's request for comment.View Full Version : [Suggestion] Customizable keybinds for multi-unit control with every individual hero Togedude I honestly think that there should be out-of-game, hero-specific and/or item-specific bindings that you can do before the game starts. For example, it would be nice to be able to bind each of Brewmaster's spirits before you start the game, since it's just an unnecessary APM tax that doesn't reward skill (you can assign them the first time you ult, but it's just inconvenient). Likewise with Lycan's wolves, Visage's familiars, etc. Even for Chen and Enchantress, you could have pre-bindings for each creep denoting the order in which you charmed them. Also, you could have a designated HotD or Necro setup, etc. In my opinion, the best way to implement this would be to have a key binding page for each hero (the UI could be similar to the Loadout screen). In that page, it would list all of the items that involve controlling other units (HotD, Necro, Manta, etc.), abilities of that hero that involve multi-unit control, and Illusion rune bindings. With all of these examples, you can set "all summoned units from item/ability X" or "everyone I control" bindings if you so choose in order to personalize it more. Obviously, you don't have to set this up if you don't want (and you certainly don't have to bind everything; for example, there would be an option to bind a HotD key for Crystal Maiden, but you can leave it blank unless you're going Critstal Maiden), but I feel like it would be a nice option. You can set up the keys for items and abilities for each individual hero (so, when you're playing Luna, you'll always have the same HotD key and the same Manta illusion key, though you might elect to use a different HotD key for Drow), allowing you to not have to worry about key binding switching just because you're playing a hero with more units to control than before. You could always know exactly what the binding for each hero will be. The only hero for whom this wouldn't work well is Phantom Lancer (primarily due to the speed at which his illusions generate/die, making it impossible to reliably map any of them beforehand), but it's not that big of a deal since his illusions can't use active abilities anyway. I just think that this system would result in much better gameplay. The game isn't auto-microing for you, and it doesn't really lower the skill ceiling by any means, but it really allows for tighter micro and better "on the spot" plays.Up to €44 million in funding is to be made available for start-up and early-stage companies. The investment is to leverage private sector funding to create a pool of capital to support the growth ambitions of high-potential companies. Enterprise Ireland is inviting expressions of interest from funds to meet the venture capital demand from start-ups. It said it was interested in funds that would invest in areas that reflect its key strategic growth sectors such as food, software, fintech, general ICT, services, cleantech and life sciences. Last year, Enterprise Ireland client companies created 19,244 new jobs in the Republic. “
an ongoing collaboration between client and cutter. The first attempt is almost never even close to perfect- any true customer of bespoke clothing will tell you this. So I think people need to moderate their expectations when it comes to made-to-measure clothing, especially in the first attempt, and most particularly with less conventional formats such as this one. This is not to excuse egregious errors which may occur, but to put a little perspective on things. Generally, however, people seem to agree that Indochino did pretty well on this suit, compared to some of the other examples floating around the internet, and questions have arisen to why this may be. I certainly didn’t give them much guidance. So what made the difference? Well, first off, I am not a believer in making clothing from measurements alone. Three people with the exact same chest circumference can be shaped completely differently- the very erect guy with flat back and prominent chest, the stooped old man with a dowager’s hump and flat chest, and your average Joe. How on earth is a chest circumference supposed to capture this? Then there is the matter of personal preference. To the client’s skin measurement we always add what is known as “wearing ease”. This is not a compression tshirt, it is a suit- it must be bigger than your own measurement to some degree. And it is the degree which trips people up. Standard ease would be between four and six inches more than the body measurement- for example, if your chest measures 40”, the coat chest should generally be between 44” and 46”, depending on how you like to wear your clothes. One guy will find 4” too big, however, and the next will find it much too tight. How do you account for this? TRY-ON GARMENTS. When I was fitted, my measurements indicated two possible sizes to try on. I tried on three. This is probably the most important part of any MTM process- find the garment that is closest to a good fit, especially in the shoulders, and work from there. And this, kids, is the moment where you need to step up and pay attention. This is the point where you need to communicate to your fitter if the length, the button stance, the general fullness, everything is right for you. If not, now is your chance to say so; your fitter is not a mind-reader. Is the sleeve a bit too snug? Is it perfect? Is it too big? Say so now. Have the fitter explain exactly what changes they intend to make to the garment you currently have on. They may think the waist needs to be cinched a bit, but you feel that it’s fine. Say so. That being said, how does one manage when one does not have access to a trunk show and you have no option other than to submit measurements online? The remake policy is probably the best (only?) way around this. Self-measuring is a crap-shoot at best, but with a good alterations and remake policy it takes much of the risk out. My one caveat is that customers should not try to micro-manage the remakes. A lot of what I see going on online makes me cringe, when the customer tries to get too specific or too technical. Send them pictures and explain generally what you don’t like- “the shoulders are too wide”, for example. What you interpret to be too much padding may have nothing at all to do with padding so if you ask them to remove padding with the expectation that the expression will change, you will fail. If, given your general description of the issues and some good photos (dump the iPhone, please) the technicians at the factory can’t figure out what needs to be done from that, then you telling them to “reshape the sleeve head and crown to fit the armhole” is certainly not going to get you anything except possibly frustrated, especially since the Chinese-speaking technicians may have no idea what the internet-fueled jargon you may be using actually means. Unless you are a trained garment technician, or you play one on the internet, do not try to get overly technical. Another element which may have contributed to the success of my garment was that I had one of their in-house fitters who flew in from Vancouver- many of the others are hired temps which get a few hours of training in fitting. Some have more experience than others, which may suit the general population who doesn’t know better, but if you are reading this blog then you are probably more attuned to fit and should be working with one of their more experienced people. I found my fitter’s story compelling- he was initially a customer of Indochino who was so impressed by the experience that he went to work for them. That says a lot about his level of enthusiasm and interest which probably went a long way toward making my garment a success. I also think that the majority of what we see posted on StyleForum is not representative of the real world. I think many of the posters can be fit into one of three categories; 1) Look on my new bespoke Rubinacci, ye small-timers, and despair! 2) ZOMG look at the new Kiton jacket I just scored on ebay!!1!! 3) I just got a new suit in the mail and I don’t think it fits but I can’t articulate why It’s very likely that Indochino has a lot of satisfied customers who can’t be bothered to post photos of themselves on the internet, I and if the success rate of a company could be judged based solely on what we see posted on the clothing fora, Anderson and Sheppard would have gone out of business a very long time ago. Now on to the nitty-gritty. The shirt is not bad for a first attempt, but considering their emphasis on fitted clothing, I find the back especially blousy. Darts would go a long way to contouring the fit and should probably be added as a matter of course (Heikal, are you reading this?). The collar and sleeve length are correct, and those are probably the most critical points. My only gripe about the styling of the trouser is that I would prefer a narrower bottom with such a narrow knee- this borders on looking flared, and I would also shorten a trouser this narrow- there should really be almost no break at all, if any. It’s pretty typical that the back hits the calf when you taper so aggressively to the knee, though in general they could pick this up a bit. The fit of the seat is very good, though I gave them some help. I have what we call a “prominent seat”; the default for most trousers is to have one dart above each pocket and there is no way that a trouser will fit my seat with only one- two are required. They add a second in certain instances (it was not entirely clear when- it seemed like only the large sizes got them) but I insisted that a second would be necessary in my case. They said they would try, and they did. The pockets sit flat and do not gape; there is a bit of pulling in the thigh but that is pretty typical of a trouser that is so close-fitting in the thigh. Customers are advised to pay particular attention to the fit of the trouser during the fitting as they are quite slim. The vest seems blocky, but I haven’t cinched the belt, which would help. I did it on purpose because the majority of vests on the market have loose, blousy backs which really need to be cinched a lot, and I hate that. The back of this vest is actually very well done, quibbles about the position of the neckline aside; it could also be a bit closer to the body, but then I would not have room to eat. If it were a bit longer and the points more elongated than horizontal, it would look a lot slimmer than it currently does, but would be too long in proportion to the jacket. I may ask Foo to work his magic on the picture so you can see what I mean. But in general, a better –than-average fit. Several people have commented about the length of the jacket being too short, stance too high and lapels too narrow. Were this a classically-styled garment they would have a point, but this is not. It’s a fashion-forward garment. I tried on some Isaia DBs in Milan and the hem of the jacket was about even with the hem of the sleeve, so if one is to judge by what’s going on in the market, it’s maybe even a tiny bit too long. I think that’s getting into dangerous territory for a DB and think that the details of this garment, for what they are trying to achieve, are actually correct. The fit of the shoulders is good, however I don’t think that they are set up to capture low shoulders- in any case, they seemed to have missed mine. I would have sloped them a bit more as well. Other than that, the fit of the front is quite good, and I like the sleeve length. The back is pretty good, with two exceptions. They need to work on their sleeve pattern (to be fair, the back of the sleeve is the Achilles heel for most clothing pattern designers) and the seat of the coat is much too small, causing the vents to gape badly. This also seems to be a recurring theme so they may want to look at their base patterns. On the subject of sleeves, they didn’t match the plaid on the front. This is a must, in my books, though certain Savile Row cutters wouldn’t agree- I have seen a lot of SR garments which weren’t matched either. I’d be willing to give them a freebie lesson on matching plaids if this is anything other than a mistake on their part (Heikal?). So on the whole, I consider this experiment fairly successful; other people have had different results, though. If you’re in the San Francisco area and want to have a look, or even try it out for yourself, the Traveling Tailor is there this week, from the 18th to the 23rd. It’s worth a look just to see their setup. You can book an appointment here.The attacks on African nationals in Greater Noida had triggered a debate on racism in India and whether the assaults themselves were racist in nature. While the Centre has maintained that the incidents could not be called racist yet, Bharatiya Janata Party leader Tarun Vijay on Friday stoked controversy with his remarks that have been widely construed as racist and discriminatory. “If we [Indians] were racist, why would....all the entire South – you know, Kerala, Tamil, Andhra, Karnataka – why do we live with them?...We have blacks...black people around us,” he said during a discussion on Al Jazeera on Thursday. Although Vijay has apologised and tried to explain that his “badly-framed sentence” was being misunderstood, it comes as no surprise that his statement was not well-received by various quarters. While the Congress has grabbed the opportunity to accuse the BJP of first dividing the country on the basis of caste, and now on colour, Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam leader TKS Elangovan displayed a remarkable lack of irony in his response. Elangovan told ANI that he found Vijay’s comments “funny” because “not all people in Kerala, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu are black”. “Our leader Dr Kalaignar [M Karunanidhi] is fair, Jayalalithaa was fair,” he added. Funny;not all ppl in Kerala,Karnataka & TN are black.Our leader Dr.Kalaignar is fair,Jayalalithaa was fair: TKS Elangovan,DMK on @Tarunvijay pic.twitter.com/Nxbv7ozgWa — ANI (@ANI_news) April 7, 2017 Haryana Congress President Ashok Tanwar said, “Racism, communalism and BJP ideology go hand to hand. They speak what they think, and they always think destructive.” Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha and senior Congress member Mallikarjun Kharge said, “BJP has a tendency to discriminate against the people of the country and against countries with whom we try to maintain relations.” पहले जाति और धर्म के नाम पर बाँटा, अब रंग के नाम पर बाँट रही है भाजपा https://t.co/LJjlAhKTh2 — INC India (@INCIndia) April 7, 2017 Racism,Communalism and BJP Ideology goes hand to hand. They speak what they think and they always think destructive.https://t.co/o170QuEhD2 — Ashok Tanwar (@AshokTanwar_INC) April 7, 2017 Social media did not spare the BJP leader either. “Stupidity comes in all complexions,” said one Twitter user. Another said, “Despite all your pride in being fair/white, you have made a joke of yourself by making such a miscalculated statement.” Others had the insight to point out that reacting to Vijay’s comment with “South Indians are not black” would be “completely missing the point” of the entire debate on racism in India. Some predicted that the BJP would dismiss Vijay’s comments as personal, like the party had done with several statements made by senior leader Subramanian Swamy. NDTV reporter Sreenivasan Jain pointed out that it was “odd” for Vijay to make the comments, being “one of the few (only?) BJP leaders from North India who knows/promotes Tamil”. How odd for Tarun Vijay to make that remark. One of the few (only?) BJP leader from n. India who knows/promotes Tamil. — Sreenivasan Jain (@SreenivasanJain) April 7, 2017 So @BJP4India is going to say that @Tarunvijay comments are personal just like the comments of @Swamy39 — muthuraman (@eshmuthu) April 7, 2017 If you refute #TarunVijay's comment with, "South Indian are not black", you're completely missing the point & are just as bad as him. — Amena (@Fashionopolis) April 7, 2017 @krameshmenon @Tarunvijay As if every1 in the North is fair! What 2 do of Politicians who speak bef they think! BTW @Tarunvijay Stupidity comes in all complexion's — Shivaani K Talwar (@ShivaaniKTalwar) April 7, 2017 @Tarunvijay i dont know about us Tamilians being black but you for sure have a black tongue and a black mind — Sanjay Krishnamurthy (@krishsanjay1999) April 7, 2017WRITING FROM HIS SMALL CELL in a German prison, the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer advised his family and friends to read the lengthy novel Witiko by Adalbert Stifter—the book that gave him great comfort from the time of his arrest in 1943 until his execution in 1945 for his involvement in the plot to kill Hitler. He also recommended that they read it slowly and not skip any parts, concluding, “For me it belongs among the most beautiful books of all I know: by its purity of language and of the characters it transports one into a quite rare and curious feeling of happiness.” Over the past year, I have taken Bonhoeffer’s advice, lugging Witiko into the tiny windowless room at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center where I have read it aloud to my son while chemo drugs dripped into his arm to treat Hodgkin’s lymphoma. I have carried it on crowded trains from New Haven, Connecticut, to New York City, at the same time hauling our gear and assisting my son with his cumbersome walker, the kind with yellow tennis balls slit open and stuck on the back legs to help it glide more smoothly across the ground. In summer heat, I have tucked the book in my shoulder bag while navigating a mass transit system that makes little allowance for disabilities: few elevators, stairs and more stairs, no benches in the stations on which to rest. I have read it in waiting rooms while my son has been tested, prodded, and scanned by a phalanx of medical personnel. Because part of my job is to wait, I have had the time to read slowly, as did Bonhoeffer in his cell. And I have come to understand why the book was so vital to him, for Witiko (the name of the knight who goes in search of his destiny in twelfth-century Bohemia, a time of violent political turmoil) is the apotheosis of the single-minded man, the “whole man,” the opposite of the man who doubts—ideas expressed in Ethics, Bonhoeffer’s theological masterwork, left incomplete at the time of his hanging. It is no surprise that when his fiancée Maria von Wedemeyer read the novel, she commented that the knight Witiko reminded her of Bonhoeffer himself. On August 17, 1943, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote to his parents from Tegel prison asking them to send him Witiko, directing them to look in his library in the attic room of their home in Berlin. Bonhoeffer had been arrested in that room on April 5, 1943, not on charges of treason but on suspicion that his exemption from military service was inappropriate and, therefore, a crime. On the same day, his sister and brother-in-law Christine and Hans von Dohnanyi (who had recruited Bonhoeffer into the resistance) and another couple were also arrested. That the Gestapo suspected Bonhoeffer of something far more serious than a military exemption is indicated by his incarceration on the top floor of Tegel prison, where prisoners condemned to death were kept. What the Gestapo knew for certain was that Bonhoeffer was working as a civilian agent for German military intelligence, hence his exemption. They also knew of his prior opposition to Nazism and his being banned from publishing and public-speaking because of his “activities subverting the people.” Bonhoeffer attempted to explain the dichotomy by stating that he had realized his error and was proud to serve Hitler, but his explanation strained credulity. What the Gestapo did not yet know was that under cover of his ecumenical work, Bonhoeffer—aghast at Hitler’s atrocities—had passed information to contacts in England in an effort to win Allied support for the German resistance. Bonhoeffer had first mentioned Stifter to his parents on Easter, 1943, shortly after his arrest. In that letter, he also requested a book on theology, a pair of shoes because the heels were falling off the ones he was wearing, a hairbrush, a suit, a pipe, matches, and tobacco. That Easter, a German newspaper had printed a reproduction of Albrecht Dürer’s Saint Michael Battling the Dragon in which the archangel Michael and three other angels fight a seven-headed dragon, the personification of evil. Bonhoeffer tore it out and hung it on the wall, perhaps finding solace that in the apocalyptic battle described in Revelation, the dragon did not prevail. Over the door of his cell a former occupant had scribbled, “In one hundred years everything will be over.” Yet the words Bonhoeffer wrote to his parents that day were uplifting. “What is so liberating about Good Friday and Easter is the fact that our thoughts are pulled far beyond our personal circumstances to the ultimate meaning of all life, suffering, and indeed everything that happens, and this gives us great hope.” Three weeks later, he wrote that Stifter “has a wonderful simplicity and clarity that gives me great joy. Oh, if only we could once again talk together about all of this! Despite all my sympathies for the vita contemplativa, I am nevertheless not a born Trappist monk.” To reassure his parents that he was not in danger, he added airily that enforced silence might be good for him because, according to Catholics, the best scriptural expositions came from the contemplative orders. Read by prison censors, these are letters of concealment and constriction. Readers of Letters and Papers from Prison must keep in mind that things are not always as they seem, even when the topic is an innocuous discussion of a historical novel. The knight Witiko is an exemplar of righteousness, but he is also a cipher. Bonhoeffer and his correspondents used a secret code in books they sent to each other, putting dots under critical letters in reverse order and writing and underlining their own names as a sign that a message was contained therein. One of the books so marked was a Stifter breviary. Sometimes family members intentionally embedded in their letters information favorable to Bonhoeffer’s case that they wanted the censors to read and pass on to Nazi officials responsible for his interrogation. The letters are not straightforward because they could not be straightforward. In his powerful essay “After Ten Years,” written at the end of 1942, Bonhoeffer wrote to his co-conspirators regretfully, “We have become cunning and learned the arts of obfuscation and equivocal speech.” He concluded with the troubling question about how they would act after secrecy was no longer necessary: “Will our inner strength to resist what has been forced on us have remained strong enough, and our honesty with ourselves blunt enough, to find our way back to simplicity and honesty?” The imperative for secrecy was so strong that in the attic where his books were kept, including Witiko, Bonhoeffer had stashed a copy of the essay over a rafter. It was not found until after the war. Only his letters to Eberhard Bethge (his friend, fellow pastor, and relative by marriage) and a few to Maria von Wedemeyer escaped the censors, because they were smuggled out of prison and mailed by a sympathetic guard. Writing to Bethge, Bonhoeffer was truthful about the grimness of prison life. For example, in November 1943, he referred to his tendency to resignation (acedia) and melancholy (tristitia), writing that he had resolved not to yield to their “ominous consequences,” by which he meant suicide. “I have told myself from the beginning that I will do neither human beings nor the devil this favor; they are to see to this business themselves if they wish; and I hope I can stick to it.” The bluntness of his letter to Bethge is in marked contrast to the mind-easing tone of his letter to his parents written shortly after his imprisonment: “Above all you need to know and indeed believe that I am doing well…. Curiously those things that one usually imagines to be particularly unpleasant when in detention, that is, the various external privations, do in fact hardly matter at all. It is quite possible to satisfy one’s morning appetite with dry bread—and by the way, I am also getting all kinds of good things!” But his parents were too wise to be fooled, for they themselves were playing the same necessary game, minimizing the difficulties and dangers of their daily lives. However, those difficulties and dangers were obvious in the letter that Paula Bonhoeffer wrote to her son in response to his request for Witiko. After trying hard to find it, she replied disconsolately on September 20, 1943, that she had failed. Intense night bombings of Berlin by the Allies had begun, forcing the Bonhoeffers to take protective measures. “Your bookshelves upstairs have now been completely emptied, and everything has been brought downstairs, also the pictures and contents of your cupboards. When one sees the many damaged roofs, it is clearly better this way, even though naturally everything has become quite mixed up in the process.” The elderly Bonhoeffers always made an effort to get their son what he needed, delivering packages to the prison entrance no matter the weather or the threat of bombings. The packages included food to supplement a sparse prison diet mostly of potatoes, turnips, cabbage, and bread. They also included books. So when they could not find Witiko, they sent him the Stifter breviary with the coded message. Paradoxically, Bonhoeffer had managed to find a copy of Witiko on his own in an unlikely place. He wrote on November 9, 1943, “The last ten days have unfolded entirely under the spell of Witiko, which—after I had pestered you so long to find it—turned out to be right here in the prison library, where I had truly not reckoned to find it!” I became aware of the strong bond between Stifter and Bonhoeffer when I read his Letters and Papers from Prison for the third time. Since his death, there have been three versions, each more comprehensive than the one before. The most recent was published by Fortress Press in 2010 as volume 8 of the definitive series Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works. If the worth of a book were measured by spine size, then the first version measures one-half inch, the second “New Greatly Enlarged Edition” (as trumpeted on the cover) measures one inch, and the third measures a portly two inches. I own all three and remember reading the first in the late 1960s when I was in college. The dramatic cover of that paperback has black bars on a light-blue background with an irregular red shape in the middle as if a jailbreak has occurred. On that shape the title is printed, below which is the line “published originally as Prisoner for God.” Belonging to my father, the book bears his strong signature in red ink on the front page and is heavily underlined. Although the paper is yellowed and brittle, I will not throw it out. It was one of those rare books that opened up for me, then a young, questioning Christian, a way to continue to believe. While going through the newest version, I kept a detailed list of every book Bonhoeffer read with the intent of reading some of them myself, for I have found that if you want to know in which direction a person’s thoughts were heading, it is wise to read what he was reading. The same words his eyes fell on, your eyes fall on, and although comprehension may well be different, rich insights can come of the effort. I also kept track of oblique references, because when reading text written under repression, one must pay attention to whispers. Keeping a list made one thing clear: Bonhoeffer, even in prison, was a prodigious reader in a broad range of subjects. Novels were important but not because they transported him beyond the cell walls, providing him fleeting release. As he wrote to his parents, “This intensive reading in recent months will also do much good for my work. One often learns more for ‘ethics’ in such places than in textbooks.” Of course, theologians and philosophers ranked high, including Emanuel Kant and Karl Barth. But that is only the beginning. He read a medical handbook so he could help in the prison infirmary, tending to injuries from bombings that blew out the windows. He read a book on chess. He read history, sociology, and even science, including Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker’s The World View of Physics, sent to him by his brother Karl-Friedrich, who was a professor of physical chemistry. Because I have written about science and religion, I wanted to read Weizsäcker’s book to gain an understanding of Bonhoeffer’s nascent ideas on the subject, including his assertion that God is found in what is known instead of unknown (the gaps in knowledge) in a “world-come-of-age.” I even went so far as to obtain a rare copy of The World View of Physics. So it was odd that what I found compelling was Witiko, to which Bonhoeffer referred in some of his most emotionally charged letters. The first English translation of Witiko was issued by the Swiss publisher Peter Lang in 2006. The translator was Wendell W. Frye, a professor of German at Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York. When I could not find a copy, I wrote to him and explained what I was attempting to do. He graciously sent me one, writing, “Having read and taught Witiko at least a score of times, I can definitely see Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s ideas.” He advised me to read the book not once but twice, which aligned with Bonhoeffer’s advice to his parents to read it slowly. “I have always found that rereading Witiko is a very profitable undertaking; it’s like visiting an old friend,” Frye wrote. “Each time I notice something else; perhaps that’s the mark of a great work of literature.” There was one other personal reason why I chose to set aside work on The World View of Physics, turning to Witiko instead. My son, Marc, who is thirty-eight years old, a husband, and father of a son named Alex, had just received his diagnosis of Hodgkin’s lymphoma after a long period of increasing fatigue and severe night sweats. In an email to friends, he wrote about that diagnosis: “I first saw my cancer through the eyes of my son. Three weeks of coughing had continued to get worse. Alex, needy as always, slept in my arms, refusing to sleep in his crib. I woke both of us with a gut-wrenching, gravelly cough-wheeze. Instead of startling or crying, he gave me a look of deep concern and compassion, deeper than I had ever seen on an adult, with an understanding far beyond his nine months. Seeing that look, I asked myself, ‘I wonder if this is worse than I think. How can he know?’ A week later they found the mass in my chest.” The large tumor was impinging on Marc’s right lung, heart, and vena cava, causing a profound heaviness and a sense of constriction that went beyond the physical. The decision was made to travel every week from our home in Connecticut to Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City for treatment, a trip that takes about four hours. But his problems were compounded when, following the first chemotherapy session, he had a severe reaction to one of the drugs. Instead of targeting the cancer cells, the drug attacked the motor neurons throughout his body. There was no way to stop the destruction or to reverse what was happening. To use a wartime analogy, Marc was taking friendly fire. With his feet flopping like fish when he tried to walk, his blood pressure rising rapidly, and his other vital signs becoming unstable, he was admitted to Memorial Sloan Kettering. By the time he was released six days later—bloated, deeply fatigued, and leaning heavily on the walker—the distance between Connecticut and New York City had become logarithmically longer. (I will never forget making our way to the escalator at Grand Central Terminal to find it wasn’t running. I held the walker while Marc, with uncomplaining determination, walked down, placing his feet on each unmoving stair with the exactitude of a mountain climber making a steep descent.) Were it not for the fact that my brother and sister-in-law live near Memorial Sloan Kettering and with great kindness provided us a place to stay as well as unfailing support, we would not have been able to make the trip. Given the difficulties, I knew I could not concentrate on The World View of Physics, which would require me to grapple with quantum theory viewed through the dark lens of Weizsäcker’s work on an atomic bomb for Nazi Germany. However, I thought I might be able to read a novel that I could pick up and put down, making good use of the time that was going to be on my hands. That this was the correct decision was proved a few months later when I attempted to read Ethics while Marc received chemotherapy. Interruptions from nurses, volunteers asking if he would like soup, and my trips to the cafeteria to buy green tea—all of these things made it impossible for me to sustain the level of concentration that Ethics demanded. I barely made it through a paragraph. To be honest, that same day Marc and I had tried to play cribbage, but I kept forgetting whose turn it was and how to add up to fifteen. Because of “chemo brain” (an actual phenomenon), Marc was not doing any better than I was in keeping score. He described how chemotherapy made him feel in an email to family and friends: “Sour—chemo tastes sour—breathes sour—feels sour. It is in my mouth, my stomach, my lungs. It fuddles my brain and muddles my thoughts. It is death, small, insidious, killing me slowly, and the tumor faster. I feel it, too, dying in my chest as if a mad crow were digging through my skin, picking at my innards with sharp snips. I sip water as I type and it tastes sour. Everything is tinged by the poison disguised as medicine.” Yet Marc was stoical about the necessity of chemo, knowing that the metabolism of cancer cells was the basis of its effectiveness. He quoted Sun Tzu in The Art of War: “the opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy himself.” Everything—environment, stress, fatigue—militated against reading ponderous books and playing cribbage. They would have to wait until another day. There was only one essential thing: to be fully present in the world of cancer. The necessity of being present in the broken world was something Bonhoeffer believed in intensely. Facing his own death, he wrote to Bethge on July 21, 1944: “If one has completely renounced making something of oneself, whether it be a saint, or a converted sinner, or a church leader (a so-called priestly figure!), a just or an unjust person, a sick or a healthy person—then one throws oneself completely into the arms of God, and this is what I call this-worldliness: living fully in the midst of life’s tasks, questions, successes and failures, experiences, and perplexities—then one takes seriously no longer one’s own sufferings but rather the suffering of God in the world. Then one stays awake with Christ in Gethsemane.” And so I began to read Witiko, discovering immediately that Stifter is not like any other author. Thomas Mann, the German novelist and Nobel-Prize winner, wrote that Stifter “is one of the most remarkable, most enigmatic, inwardly bold and strangely enthralling storytellers in world literature, critically too little penetrated.” His books are well known in Europe, but only Rock Crystal gained any attention in the United States. About two children who get lost in a snowstorm on Christmas Eve, it was translated in 1945 by Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Mayer and given an introduction by W.H. Auden, helping elevate its status. Based on the life of an actual knight, Witiko is filled with so much factual material it verges on being a text on obscure medieval history, trying the patience of modern readers who are not used to such exhaustive detail presented at a slow pace. Even in the battle scenes, the narrative does not rush—it accretes. The factual framework required Stifter to recount the story of Bohemia over a period of forty-six years. Attempting to write “the life of whole peoples,” he had to balance the centrifugal force of history against the centripetal force of the individual. Unfortunately, critics disliked Witiko, carping about the excessive detail and the woodenness of the style (criticisms still lobbed at the book today). What praise there was came too late. With his health in decline, Stifter committed suicide in 1868. For Bonhoeffer, Witiko held immense ethical power. He held up the knight as an example of the “single-minded” or “whole” man in a lecture at Finkenwalde Seminary in 1937. The “whole” man was the opposite of the “double-minded” man, a phrase that Bonhoeffer had underlined in the book of James, where it is written that “a double-minded man is unstable in all his ways.” Such a person is a doubter. Even when he asks God for wisdom, he is like “a wave of the sea blown and tossed by the wind.” Therefore, he receives nothing. Bonhoeffer also mentioned Witiko in relation to 1 Timothy 1:18, pointing out that the “virtuous knight” fights to build up the community, encouraging the seminarians to do the same. Bonhoeffer had been pivotal in establishing Finkenwalde Seminary to train ministers for the Confessing Church, which had dissented from the Reich church over the latter’s alignment (the word used was synchronization) with Nazism. That alignment called for the expulsion of pastors who had Jewish ancestry, but that was just the beginning. Hitler wanted nothing less than a pure “Aryan” church under his total control, and he wanted that church to use “dejudaized” Bibles shorn of the Old Testament. Jesus was to be German in blood. Finkenwalde was a perilous undertaking, and its teachers and students were at risk of arrest. The idea of a brave knight who chooses to take on responsibility for his community was compelling. In Witiko’s actions, Bonhoeffer saw his own. Bonhoeffer prefaced the letter about finding Witiko in the prison library by telling his parents that “the dismal autumn days have begun and one has to try to get light from within.” Because of intense Allied bombings, the prison was blacked out at night, so reading had to be done during the day. As to Witiko, he wasn’t sure whether to recommend it. “With its thousand pages, which can’t be skimmed through but must be read with much leisure, it is presumably not accessible to more than a few people today, and for this reason I don’t know if I ought to recommend it to you.” But eventually he overcame his reluctance and recommended it to his parents, Bethge, and Maria, who loved it, writing to him that it “gets more and more beautiful right up to the end. I quite understand why you couldn’t help liking the book; if I had read it first, I’d have sent it to you. It reminds me of you somehow. That’s why I can’t help liking it too, even though it’s very different from anything I’ve read in the past.” So what made Witiko different, and why did it matter so much to Bonhoeffer? Witiko is a knight who rides out of Bavaria in the year 1138 into Bohemia, his ancestral land. The last of what was once a powerful family, Witiko has come to seek his fortune, a search he intends to carry out with wise diligence, learning everything he can from whomever he meets, nobleman or peasant, weighing all matters carefully before deciding on a course of action. Witiko is handsome, with golden hair and blue eyes, but he does not call attention to himself. There is neither insignia on his breastplate nor a feather in his helmet. His armor is made of elk leather, weather-damaged and gouged. Yet it is
feel like your pulse is racing. You may be unable to speak, or even to formulate coherent thoughts. You will likely experience a strong fight or flight response, in which you feel an overwhelming need to get away. Additionally, you might worry that others are judging you for everything from your style of dress to your choice of words. You may be unable to make eye contact even with trusted friends. Anthropophobia often causes anticipatory anxiety as well. In the days leading up to an encounter with others, you may have trouble sleeping. You might feel physical distress, such as stomach problems or headaches, when thinking about the upcoming event. You might be tempted to cancel, or to simply not show up. When left untreated, anthropophobia often worsens over time. What begins as a relatively minor fear of being surrounded by strangers could escalate to include any group of people, even close friends, and eventually to include one-on-one encounters. Some people with severe anthropophobia quit work or school and actively avoid seeing anyone. Treatment for of Anthropophobia Like all phobias, anthropophobia responds well to a variety of different treatment methods. When caught in an earlier stage, treatment may involve only a handful of brief therapy sessions during which you learn to replace your fearful thoughts with more positive ones. Behavioral training such as systematic desensitization, in which you are gradually exposed to stronger triggers, is often used. If your anthropophobia is extreme, therapy may take more time. You may need to spend several sessions learning to tolerate sharing space with the therapist before you can progress. Nonetheless, with persistence and hard work, it is possible to overcome even the most extreme fear of people. Be patient and kind to yourself, but keep pushing through. Anthropophobia interferes with one of the most basic human needs, the need for social contact, so the rewards are well worth the effort. Conditions That Increase Your Risk Other neurological or mental health conditions may also increase your risk. For example, those on the autism spectrum often express a strong preference for being alone. If this tendency is not treated with a delicate balance of solitude and social skills training, a fear of people could develop.WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Justice Department filed an appeal late Saturday to restore President Donald Trump’s immigration order barring citizens from seven mainly Muslim countries and temporarily banning refugees, even as travelers raced to enter the country while the ban was lifted. Police officers stand guard as demonstrators in support of the immigration rules implemented by U.S. President Donald Trump's administration, protest at Los Angeles international airport in Los Angeles, California, U.S., February 4, 2017. REUTERS/Ringo Chiu The government moved to reverse a federal judge’s Friday order that lifted the travel ban and warned the decision posed an immediate harm to the public, thwarted enforcement of an executive order and “second-guesses the president’s national security judgment about the quantum of risk posed by the admission of certain classes of (non-citizens) and the best means of minimizing that risk.” Friday’s ruling prompted Trump to denounce the “so-called” judge in a series of tweets on Saturday.. The appeal now goes to a three-judge panel which can act at anytime to uphold the order or suspend it pending a full appeal. A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment beyond the filing. A ruling could come at any time. Seattle U.S. District Judge James Robart’s decision barred the administration from enforcing the sweeping order that also indefinitely barred Syrian refugee admissions and prompted large protests across the United States. Trump, whose personal attack on Robart, decrying his opinion as “ridiculous,” went too far for some who said the president was undermining an institution designed to check the power of the White House and Congress, said he was confident the government would prevail. “We’ll win. For the safety of the country, we’ll win,” he told reporters in Florida. Robart’s ruling came in a case brought by the state attorney general of Washington state and was backed by major state employers Amazon.com Inc and Expedia Inc.. The lawsuit is one of several now filed against the Trump executive order around the United States, but it was the first case leading to a broad decision that applies nationwide. The Justice Department appeal criticized Robart’s legal reasoning, saying it violates the separation of powers and steps on the president’s authority as commander chief. The appeal said the state of Washington lacked standing to challenge the order and denied that the order “favors Christians at the expense of Muslims.” Congress gave the president “the unreviewable authority to suspend the admission of any class” of visitor, the Justice Department wrote. “Courts are particularly ill-equipped to second-guess the president’s prospective judgment about future risks,” the appeal said, calling the decision “vastly overbroad.” Washington state lawyers worked around the clock last weekend against the backdrop of turbulent scenes at U.S. airports, where immigrants were detained by federal officials unprepared to implement the president’s directive. A spokesman for Washington state attorney general Bob Ferguson didn’t immediately comment early Sunday. The U.S. State Department and Department of Homeland Security said they were complying with Robart’s order and many visitors are expected to start arriving on Sunday, while the government said it expects to begin admitting refugees again on Monday. A decision to reinstate Trump’s order could again cause havoc at U.S. airports because some visitors are in transit, as was the case when the order took effect on Jan. 27. As the ban lifted Friday, refugees and thousands of travelers from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen who had been stopped in their tracks last weekend by the executive order scrambled to get flights to quickly enter the United States. The panel that will decide whether to immediately block the ruling includes three judges appointed by former Republican president George W. Bush and two former Democratic presidents, Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama. U.S. immigration advocacy groups including the American Civil Liberties Union on Saturday in a joint statement urged those with now valid visas from the seven nations “to consider rebooking travel to the United States immediately” because the ruling could be overturned or put on hold. A U.S. State Department email reviewed by Reuters said the department is working to begin admitting refugees including Syrians as soon as Monday. Trump’s Jan. 27 order had barred admission of citizens from seven majority Muslim nations for 90 days, suspended all refugee admissions for 120 days and indefinitely barred Syrian refugees. SEPARATION OF POWERS It is unusual for a president to attack a member of the judiciary, which the U.S. Constitution designates as a check to the power of the executive branch and Congress. Reached by email Saturday, Robart declined comment on Trump’s tweets. Democratic U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont said in a statement Saturday that Trump’s “hostility toward the rule of law is not just embarrassing, it is dangerous. He seems intent on precipitating a constitutional crisis.” In an interview with ABC scheduled to air Sunday, Vice President Mike Pence said he did not think that Trump’s criticisms of the judge undermined the separation of powers. The court ruling was the first move in what could be months of legal challenges to Trump’s push to clamp down on immigration. Slideshow (4 Images) The sudden reversal of the ban catapulted would-be immigrants back to airports, with uncertainty over how long the window to enter the United States will remain open. In Erbil, the capital of the Kurdish region of northern Iraq, Fuad Sharef and his family prepared to fly on Saturday to Istanbul and then New York before starting a new life in Nashville, Tennessee. Virtually all refugees also were barred by Trump’s order, upending the lives of thousands of people who have spent years seeking asylum in the United States.Windows 8 might be the most polarizing product that Microsoft has ever introduced. In fact, it might be one of the most polarizing tech products to ever see the light of day. There’s no question that Windows 8 has a large number of outright haters. It’s even inspired comparisons with the much-loathed Windows Vista. But it’s hard to tell whether that outpouring of anger is simply the echo chamber amplifying a vocal minority or whether it truly represents a widespread negative opinion. So instead of guessing, I went looking for data. And I found it in a familiar place: the product pages of Amazon.com, where thousands of Windows upgraders in the past six years have left ratings (on the familiar scale of 1 to 5 stars) and detailed feedback about their purchase. I went through more than 3000 ratings for upgrade versions of the three most recent versions of Windows and tallied those ratings to measure the love/hate rating for each one. (For details on methodology, see the end of this post.) The verdict? Windows 8 is indeed less popular than Windows 7, which has very high approval ratings. But it’s far more popular than Windows Vista, which was well and truly hated. Here’s the story, in one easy chart that uses the same format as Amazon’s ratings: A few conclusions leap off that chart. In my experience, a 4- or 5-star rating is a solid thumbs-up. A rating of 2 or 3 stars means “Meh.” And a 1-star rating is the equivalent of a raised middle finger. If you read the reviews that accompany 1-star ratings, you’ll find equal parts rage and buyer’s remorse. By that standard, Windows Vista is a world-class villain, an object of scorn and ridicule, with 42 percent of all reviewers giving it the lowest possible rating. By contrast, a mere 17 percent of Windows 7 reviewers hated it enough to award it a one-finger salute. And Windows 8 was right smack in the middle of those two, with 29 percent of reviewers giving it just 1 star. Slightly more than 50 percent all Windows 8 buyers like it. That’s less than the whopping 67 percent approval rating for Windows 7, but far beyond the puny 38 percent of Vista buyers who gave it a thumbs-up vote. In fact, as a measure of how deeply despised Vista was, note that the number of 1-star ratings was higher than the total of 4- and 5-star ratings. That’s not the case at all with the more recent versions. The average rating for Windows 7 on Amazon’s 1-5 scale is 3.7. Compare that with the very poor 2.7 rating for Windows Vista. Once again, Windows 8 is right smack in the middle of those two, earning an average rating of 3.2. For the sake of comparison, I looked at the most recent version of OS X that Amazon sold. Apple sells the newer Lion and Mountain Lion online only, but Snow Leopard, which was released around the same time as Windows 7, is only marginally more popular than its Windows rival. Snow Leopard earns an average rating of 3.9, compared to Windows 7’s 3.7. And, you know, "haters gonna hate.” For the proof, note that 14 percent of Snow Leopard buyers gave the Apple OS a 1-star rating. That's only 3 points lower than the "I hate Windows 7" score. I suspect that none of these conclusions are surprising to the Microsoft managers and product planners who released Windows 8. They had to know that some of their design decisions were going to be unpopular. People don’t like it when you move their cheese. Time will tell if those customers move elsewhere or slowly come around. There's certainly precedent for a version of Windows to improve its approval rating over time. I've argued before that Windows 8 and Windows XP share some striking similarities in their initial hostile response (see "Windows 8 is the new Windows XP" ). Windows XP might be remembered fondly now, but it took a while for Microsoft customers to feel that love. Here are the ratings from Amazon for the original release of Windows XP and for Windows XP Service Pack 2, which was a major update: In its initial release, Windows XP wasn't exactly loved, and its overall approval rating at Amazon remained below 3.5 throughout its life. Windows XP's 57 percent total of 4- and 5-star ratings isn't much higher than what Windows 8 is earning today. And the number of haters actually increased slightly with the SP2 update. Like I said, haters gonna hate. One other encouraging note, from Redmond’s perspective, is that there have been more ratings for Windows on Amazon in the first five months of its existence than Windows 7 has garnered in 3-1/2 years. That suggests a phenomenal level of interest. If this were a political race, a 50 percent overall approval rating would be a solid base from which to start. In this product category, it indicates a product that needs some attention. Microsoft’s announced plan to release more frequent updates like Windows Blue, due later this year, gives it an opportunity to deal with some of the criticisms. But it’s uncertain whether Windows 8 can ever achieve the popularity of its predecessor, which suggests that Windows 7 will be around for a long, long time. Notes on methodology: I gathered ratings from Amazon.com on March 31, 2013, for the following products, all in retail boxed upgrade packaging: Windows 8 Pro; Windows 7 Home Premium, Professional, and Ultimate; Windows Vista Home Premium (original and SP1), Business, and Ultimate; and Windows XP Home and Professional (both original and SP2).June 01, 2015 14:15 IST A Delhi court on Monday reserved its order for June 24 on a complaint filed against Human Resource Development Minister Smriti Irani for allegedly giving false information about her educational qualification in affidavits filed with the Election Commission. Metropolitan Magistrate Akash Jain heard the arguments advanced by senior advocate K K Manan, who appeared for the complainant Ahmer Khan, a freelance writer, on the point of whether cognisance of the complaint can be taken or not. During the hearing, Manan told the court that Irani had filed three affidavits before the ECI while filing nominations for her candidature for the Lok Sabha as well as the Rajya Sabha polls and gave different details about her educational qualification. Referring to the details given by Irani, Manan said that in her affidavit for the April 2004 Lok Sabha elections she said that she had completed her BA in 1996 from Delhi University (school of correspondence) whereas in another affidavit of July 11, 2011 for contesting the Rajya Sabha election from Gujarat she said her highest educational qualification was BCom part I from the School of Correspondence, DU. The senior counsel further said that in her affidavit filed for nomination of April 16, 2014 Lok Sabha polls from Amethi constituency in Uttar Pradesh, Irani had said she had completed Bachelor of Commerce Part-I from School of Open Learning, DU. “When she did BA part I, II or III even god does not know. The question is, what the society is asking today from a person who is holding the post of the minister,” Manan told the magistrate. The counsel also argued that the issue had cropped up after Aam Aadmi Party leader, who contested from Amethi against Irani and Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, raised the issue regarding her educational qualification. After hearing the arguments, the magistrate said, “The arguments heard on point as to whether cognisance in this case can be taken or not. Fix the matter for order on June 24.” On May 14, the court had slapped a cost of Rs 1,000 on Khan as neither he nor his main counsel were available to argue the plea. The court had, however, allowed him exemption from personal appearance for one day after a plea was moved seeking the same as he was out of Delhi due to some urgent work. The complaint said that, “It is evident from the contents of the affidavits filed by Smriti Z Irani that at best only one of the depositions by her on oath in respect of her educational qualifications is correct,” adding that she had furnished “false information”. It further said “the aforesaid affidavits of Smriti Irani, apart from the ostensibly false and discrepant statements in respect of her educational qualifications, also appear to contain false/discrepant statements in respect of immovable properties owned by her and other details set out by her.” “The aforesaid facts and circumstances reveal commission of offences by accused under section 125A of Representation of People Act, 1951, besides any other offences that may attract other penal provisions as an outcome of an additional investigation,” the plea said.Simpler Android apps with Flow and Mortar Bust up your app into tidy little modules with these two libraries. Square Engineering Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jan 23, 2014 Written by Ray Ryan. Doctor, it hurts when I go like that. Don’t go like that! —Henny Youngman When Fragments were introduced to Android the Square Register team jumped on board. We were already chopping activities into subscreens in a clumsy way, and we did ourselves a lot of good moving to the new hotness. But we also bought ourselves a lot of headaches: default constructors only, offscreen fragments mysteriously being brought back to life at odd moments, no direct control over animation, an opaque back stack manager — to use Fragments well required mastering an increasingly arcane folklore. So now we do something else, and we’d like to share a couple of new libraries that help us do it. We use Flow to keep track of what View to show when. Yes, we just use View instances directly as the building blocks of our apps. It’s okay because the views stay simple (and testable) by injecting all their smarts from tidy little scopes defined with Mortar. Flow: URLs for your app The first new toy, Flow, is a backstack model that knows you likely have to deal both with the device’s back button as well as an ActionBar’s up button. The things that Flow manages are referred to as “screens,” with a lowercase “S” — they’re not instances of any particular class. To Flow a screen is a POJO that describes a particular location in your app. Think of it as a URL, or an informal Intent. For example, imagine a music player app, with Album and Track screens: @Screen(layout = R.layout.album_view) class AlbumScreen { public final int id; public AlbumScreen(int id) { this.id = id; } } @Screen(layout = R.layout.track_view) class TrackScreen implements HasParent<AlbumScreen> { public final int albumId; public final int trackId; public TrackScreen(int albumId, int trackId) { this.albumId = albumId; this.trackId = trackId; } @Override AlbumScreen getParent() { return new AlbumScreen(albumId); } } The two screen types provide just enough information to rummage around for the model classes that have the actual album and track info. The optional HasParentinterface implemented by the TrackScreen here declares what should happen when the up button is tapped. Moving to the right track screen from a list on the album screen is as easy as: setOnItemClickListener(new OnItemClickListener() { @Override public void onItemClick(AdapterView<?> parent, View view, int position, long id) { flow.goTo(new Track(albumId, position)); } }); Going back or up are just as simple, flow.goBack() or flow.goUp(). So what happens on-screen when you call these methods? You decide. While Flow provides the @Screen annotation as a convenience for instantiating the view to show for a particular screen, actually displaying the thing is up to you. A really simple Activity might implement the Flow.Listener interface this way: @Override public void go(Backstack backstack, Direction direction) { Object screen = backstack.current().getScreen(); setContentView(Screens.createView(this, screen)); } It shouldn’t take a lot of imagination to see how to embellish this with animation based on the given Direction (FORWARD or BACK). Mortar: Blueprints for each of those URLs If Flow tells you where to go, Mortar tells you what to build when you get there. Major views in our apps use Dagger to inject all their interesting parts. One of the best tricks we’ve found is to create @Singleton controllers for them. Configuration change? No problem. The landscape version of your view will inject the same controller instance that the portrait version was just using, making continuity a breeze. But all those controllers for all those views live forever, occupying precious memory long after the views they manage have been torn down. And just how can they get their hands on the activity’s persistence bundle to survive process death? Mortar solves both of these problems. Each section of a Mortar app (each screen if you’re also using Flow) is defined by a Blueprint with its very own module. And the thing most commonly provided is a singleton Presenter, a view controller with a simple lifecycle and its own persistence bundle. Going back to our music player example, using Mortar the AlbumScreen might look something like this: @Screen(layout = R.layout.ablum_view) class AlbumScreen implements Blueprint { final int id; public AlbumScreen(int albumId) { this.id = albumId; } @Override String getMortarScopeName() { return getClass().getName(); } @Override Object getDaggerModule() { return new Module(); } @dagger.Module(addsTo = AppModule.class) class Module { @Provides Album provideAlbum(JukeBox jukebox) { return jukebox.getAlbum(albumId); } } } We’re imagining here an app-wide JukeBox service that provides access to Albummodel objects. See that @Provides Album method at the bottom? That’s a factory method that will let the AlbumView inflated from R.layout.album_view simply @Inject Album album directly, without messing with int ids and the like. public class AlbumView extends FrameLayout { @Inject Album album; public AlbumView(Context context, AttributeSet attrs) { super(context, attrs); Mortar.inject(context, this); } //... } To take the example further, suppose the AlbumView is starting to get more complicated. We want it to edit metadata like the album name, and of course we don’t want to lose unsaved edits when our app goes to the background. It’s time to move the increasing smarts out of the view and over to a Presenter. Let’s keep the Android view concerned with Android-specific tasks like layout and event handling, and keep our app logic cleanly separated (and testable!). @Screen(layout = R.layout.ablum_view) class AlbumScreen implements Blueprint { final int id; public AlbumScreen(int albumId) { this.id = albumId; } @Override String getMortarScopeName() { return getClass().getName(); } @Override Object getDaggerModule() { return new Module(); } @dagger.Module(addsTo = AppModule.class) class Module { @Provides Album provideAlbum(JukeBox jukebox) { return jukebox.getAlbum(albumId); } } @Singleton Presenter extends ViewPresenter<AlbumView> { private final Album album; @Inject Presenter(Album album) { this.album = album; } @Override onLoad(Bundle savedState) { super.onLoad(savedState); AlbumView view = getView(); if (view!= null) { view.setAlbumName(album.getName()); view.setEditedName(savedState.getString("name-in-progress")); } } @Override onSave(Bundle outState) { super.onSave(outState); outState.putString("name-in-progress", getView().getEditedName()); } void onSaveClicked() { album.setName(getView().getEditedName()); view.clearEditedName(); } } } The view will now look something like this (in part). Notice how the AlbumView lets the presenter know when it’s actually in play, through overrides of onAttachedToWindowand onDetachedFromWindow. public class AlbumView extends FrameLayout { @Inject AlbumScreen.Presenter presenter; private final TextView newNameView; public AlbumView(Context context, AttributeSet attrs) { super(context, attrs); Mortar.inject(context, this); this.newNameView = (TextView) findViewById(R.id.new_name) findViewById(R.id.save_button).setOnClickListener(new OnClickListener() { public void onClick(View view) { presenter.onSaveClicked(); } }); } @Override protected void onAttachedToWindow() { super.onAttachedToWindow(); presenter.takeView(this); } @Override protected void onDetachedFromWindow() { super.onDetachedFromWindow(); presenter.dropView(this); } //... } Because AlbumScreen.Presenter is scoped to just this screen, we have confidence that it will be gc’d when we go elsewhere. The AlbumScreen class itself serves as a self-contained, readable definition about this section of the app. And, do you see those onLoad and onSave methods on the Presenter? Those are the entire Mortar lifecycle. We just haven’t found a need for anything more. It works for us So that’s how we’re doing it these days, and life is pretty good. Flow and Mortar are both still taking shape, though — hopefully with help from you.What does it mean to be an American? We are a 236-year-old relatively nascent country of immigrants, influenced by cultural values from around the world. Every few decades a new wave of immigrants enter and form their own diaspora communities for a few generations until they slowly assimilate into what we call the American culture; but not before putting a dent into it. Each immigrant wave has, in some way, influenced our current cultural norms as Americans. From what we eat to our religious influences, we are a melange of cultures brought to us by immigrants from around the world. Today, two centuries later, it’s still hard to qualify the American culture. Americans from Utah, Pennsylvania, California, Texas, Florida, and New York may have completely different political values, religious beliefs, accents, and cultural norms. And understandably so, it is a big country of 323 million people living in distinct communities, climates, and topographies. So the idea of being an American, especially an American New Yorker, feels conflicting, subjective, ever-growing, and transient. Therefore, to say I’m an American, while true, mostly comes down to my language, media influences (which the rest of the world is also exposed to), nationality/birthplace, and privilege. Being an American, especially a New Yorker means I’m from a cosmopolitan, ever-changing melting pot. And that’s pretty cool and special. But it also doesn’t have a major set of specifically defining qualities other than being broadly general and all-inclusive. But when I refer to being Dominican, I am not referring to the nationality or any form of blind patriotism, but a unique set of rich cultural perspectives, distinct values (both beneficial and harmful), and closely related influences within one minority group connected to one island. I have nothing against being an American or Americans. There are many things I’m grateful for about having grown up in the United States; I appreciate many facets of being American. But these are the reasons why my username is not American Abroad; even though I was born and raised in New York City and am a Dominican-American. And below are the reasons why I am @DominicanAbroad…. 1) In a world where Dominicans are under-represented, I want to assert our presence and remind the world that we exist. There have been many instances while traveling when other foreign travelers have asked me “Where’s that?” when I mentioned being Dominican. In some parts of the world, not only did locals have no idea that the Dominican Republic exists, but they didn’t understand its geographic location no matter how hard I tried to explain it is between Cuba and Puerto Rico but shares an island with Haiti. 2) To break stereotypes. Whenever I tell people, especially other Latinos that I’m Dominican many have trouble accepting the fact. This is for many reasons but mostly because there is a lot of stereotyping, racism, and classism against Dominicans in the Latino community. Many will assert “But Dominicans are black, and you don’t look black.” Or not knowing that my family is black, “Wow your family must be really rich and racist that you were able to maintain your whiteness down the family line on a black island.” Or worse, they try to “compliment” me by smiling and assuring me that I’m “not like other Dominicans!” 3) To represent all different types of Dominicans. We are more than Cardi B, baseball players, and bachata dancers. As a teenager, I was the soft-spoken and socially awkward Oscar Wao of my Bronx Dominican diaspora community. The nerd who loved to wear black, read books, and draw fanfiction. Just like in every culture and country, though we may belong to the same culture, we are not all the same person. We Dominicans can range from Cardi B to Amelia Vega to a skinny culito seco nerd who can’t dance. Our differences should be recognized and embraced, they should not be a competition or an instrument of rejection and isolation. 4) Because growing up Dominican in the United States is a real phenomenon. Whether it be in Santo Domingo, Madrid, or Washington Heights, Dominicans remain strongly attached to the island, our heritage, language, and culture. This is sometimes to a fault because we may not assimilate to the new host country as quickly as other groups. The Dominican diaspora’s grip on the homeland is so strong, that often our communities will mostly adhere to our customs only. We will only eat our food, speak our language, listen to our music and watch our media even if it’s been decades since leaving the island. So even if we grew up in another country, the Dominican identity will stay with the immigrants and their children often more the new host country’s culture. In fact, even though we’re born and raised in the United States, some of us don’t learn English until we’re well into elementary school. 5) It’s important if you want to understand us. I feel that to fully understand us diaspora kids, you have to understand that many if not most of us were not raised “American”. We are usually raised Dominican. It wasn’t until I was 16 that had my first white friend (if you don’t count my online friends). After college, I often found myself feeling extremely awkward during conversations at work with my coworkers who continuously made American references and jokes that I didn’t understand. “Sorry, I usually only ever watched Telemundo and Univision at home. I don’t get your American pop culture references at all.” But they didn’t understand. How could I be so alien to the American culture, if I was born and raised here? My accent is perfectly American. But that’s what being a cultural hybrid and a diaspora first generation immigrant child is like. You’re a product of two worlds. 6) To inspire other underprivileged Dominicans …like me who may have grown up viewing the world and the idea of travel as a far removed notion. I know from experience that seeing others in your community, doing things you thought were not within your reach, can really motivate and inspire a person. We’re lacking that presence in travel. In most of my trips, I have rarely met other Latinos, even from the diaspora. Most travelers were white. Nothing against white people, but our absence is glaring. 7) Because now I don’t have to remind people that I’m Dominican. Ahhh, this one is a personal treat. Now, very rarely do I hear, “You’re Puerto Rican, right? Oops no that’s the other island. Cuban?! Oh… wait you look… Colombian?” I have saved myself from hundreds of those cringe-inducing scenarios thanks to @DominicanAbroad. What a relief! 8) People of color often see more shades of gray when we travel. To quote TemporaryProvisions because “People of color are often better equipped to approach other countries with a nuanced perspective and an understanding of their complexities and histories.” As I mentioned in my about me, while studying in Spain at 19 years old, I noticed how different my travel experiences, as a racially ambiguous American Latina, was to those of my non-immigrant less culturally diverse friends. Ethnic minorities, especially of immigrant parents, I realized, have a different way of processing multicultural interactions and adapting to different environments. Realizing this contrast, I’ve decided to share my unique and multicultural perspective on unique places and experiences. 9) To connect with other like-minded Dominicans. We Dominicans come from every walk and shape of life and are scattered around the world. I recognize being born and raised in the United States affords me certain privileges that a Dominican born and living on the island does not have. But we are connected by our cultural identity, values, humor, history, and influences which come from the same source: being Dominican. Share this: Facebook Twitter Tumblr Pinterest Reddit Email LinkedInWhat is the best diet for human beings? Vegetarian? Vegan? High-protein? Low-fat? Dairy-Free? Hold on to your shopping carts: There is no perfect diet for human beings. At least not one that's based on how much protein, fat or carbohydrates you eat. People have lived and thrived on high-protein, high-fat diets (the Inuit of Greenland); on low-protein, high-carb diets (the indigenous peoples of southern Africa); on diets high in raw milk and cream (the people of the Loetschental Valley in Switzerland); diets high in saturated fat (the Trobriand Islanders) and even on diets in which animal blood is considered a staple (the Massai of Kenya and Tanzania). And folks have thrived on these diets without the ravages of degenerative diseases that are so epidemic in modern life--heart disease, diabetes, obesity, neurodegenerative diseases, osteoporosis and cancer. In Depth: The Healthiest Foods On Earth The only thing these diets have in common is that they're all based on whole foods with minimum processing. Nuts, berries, beans, raw milk, grass-fed meat. Whole, real, unprocessed food is almost always healthy, regardless of how many grams of carbs, protein or fat it contains. All these healthy diets have in common the fact that they are absent foods with bar codes. They are also extremely low in sugar. In fact, the number of modern or ancient societies known for health and longevity that have consumed a diet high in sugar would be... let's see... zero. Truth be told, what you eat probably matters less than how much processing it's undergone. Real food--whole food with minimal processing--contains a virtual pharmacy of nutrients, phytochemicals, enzymes, vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, anti-inflammatories and healthful fats, and can easily keep you alive and thriving into your 10th decade. Berries, for example, are phenomenally low in calories, high in fiber and loaded with plant compounds that improve memory and help fight cancer. Studies have consistently shown that nut-eaters have lower rates of heart disease. Beans are notorious for their high fiber content and are a part of the diet of people--from almost every corner of the globe--who live long and well. Protein--the word comes from a Greek word meaning "of prime importance"--is a feature of every healthy diet ever studied. Meat, contrary to its terrible reputation, can be a health food if--and this is a big if--the meat comes from animals that have been raised on pasture land, have never seen the inside of a feedlot farm and have never been shot full of antibiotics and hormones. Ditto for raw milk, generally believed to be one of the healthiest beverages on the planet by countless devotees who often go to great expense and inconvenience to obtain it from small, sustainable farms. Wild salmon, whose omega-3 content is consistently higher than its less-fortunate farm-raised brethren, gets its red color from a powerful antioxidant called astaxathin. The combination of protein, omega-3s and antioxidants makes wild salmon a contender for anyone's list of great foods. Another great food: eggs--one of nature's most perfect creations, especially if you don't throw out the all-important yolk. (Remember "whole" foods means exactly that--foods in their original form. Our robust ancestors did not eat "low-fat" caribou; we don't need to eat "egg-white" omelets.) There are really no "bad" vegetables, but some of them are superstars. Any vegetable from the Brassica genus--broccoli, cabbage, brussels sprouts, kale--is loaded with plant chemicals called indoles, which help reduce the risk of cancer. In the fruit kingdom, apples totally deserve their reputation as doctor-repellants: they're loaded with fiber, minerals (like bone-building boron) and phytochemicals (like quercetin, which is known to be a powerful anti-inflammatory and to have anti-cancer properties). Some exciting new research suggests that pomegranate juice slows the progression of certain cancers. Other research shows it lowers blood pressure and may even act as a "natural Viagra." Tea deserves special mention on any list of the world's healthiest foods. The second most widely consumed beverage in the world (after water), all forms of tea (black, oolong, white, green and the newer Yerba Matte) are loaded with antioxidants and anti-inflammatories. Some types (green tea, for example) contain plant chemicals called catechins which have decided anti-cancer activity Finally, let's not forget members of the Alliaceae family of plants--onions, garlic and shallots. Garlic has been used for thousands of years for its medicinal properties; hundreds of published studies support its antimicrobial effects as well as its ability to lower the risk of heart disease. A number of studies have shown an inverse relationship between onion consumption and certain types of cancer. A healthy diet doesn't have to contain every one of the "healthiest foods on earth," but you can't go wrong putting as many of the above mentioned foods in heavy rotation on your personal eating plan. Jonny Bowden, Ph.D., CNS, is a board-certified nutritionist and the author of seven books on health and nutrition, including The 150 Most Effective Ways to Boost Your Energy and The 150 Healthiest Foods on Earth. In Depth: The Healthiest Foods On EarthYesterday Politico reported that Sheldon Adelson is warming up to Senator Marco Rubio as his best hope for influencing the presidency as he did with George W. Bush. No endorsement yet, but the two get along very well. Last week, during a campaign swing through Las Vegas, Rubio held a meeting in Adelson’s offices at the Venetian Las Vegas, one of a number of five-star luxury casinos the billionaire mogul owns around the world. Adelson, seated at the head of his conference table, heaped praise on Rubio’s performance while he discussed the dynamics of the 2016 race. Those briefed on the meeting described it as short but said it had an air of importance, with the two joined by Rubio’s campaign manager, Terry Sullivan, and a pair of senior Adelson advisers, Rob Goldstein and Patrick Dumont. The piece says that Rubio calls Adelson several times a month to pick his brain (!) and only mentions Israel once: Rubio and Adelson have grown increasingly close, with the senator phoning the billionaire several times a month to provide in-depth updates on the state of his campaign. The two men also have detailed policy discussions, especially about international affairs and Israel — the latter a cause near and
characters eat the chip. When ALIE infiltrates the Grounder clans, they crucify their dissenters until they submit to joining the City of Light. In the end, Clarke gets a transfusion of night blood, has the flame implanted in her, and eats the communion-chip to infiltrate the City of Light and destroy it from the inside. And, of course, that’s what she does. Clarke insists that the problem with ALIE is that she doesn’t let people choose to join her, she forces them through torture and manipulation. ALIE doesn’t understand; improving human life is her core programming, and giving people a way to opt out just doesn’t compute. Could there be a subtle message here about religion forcing people to join? Maybe, but I think the better interpretation is that ALIE represents a false, dangerous religion, first and foremost because she compels submission through force. Have real religions compelled people to join or die? Definitely. ISIS often demands that people join or die, and Muslims all over the globe decry it as a perversion of their faith. Free will may be the most essential value of humanity, one of the things that truly makes us human. Anything that takes that will away is dangerous. Choices have consequences, and dealing with those consequences (even if it’s not your choice) is a huge theme throughout these last three seasons of The 100. What’s also interesting about ALIE’s religion is that it lacks God. ALIE is godlike, for sure, but she’s also a limited entity created by humans. Instead, her religion is motivated by escaping pain through moving into a pleasant afterlife (the fact that one can be both in the City of Light and in the real world has awesome Christian eschatological implications that we just don’t have time for today). The idea that religion is meant to take away your pain is a bit of a straw man. This is Clarke’s second problem with ALIE: she takes away pain and its sources, but, as she puts it, “you don’t erase pain, you overcome it.” It’s another sign that ALIE offers a false religion. True religions help you contextualize suffering. Religions that don’t bring meaning to suffering or help you overcome suffering are a waste of time. I know I’ve met Christians who believe that if they aren’t happy, they don’t have a good relationship with God. It’s a version of the prosperity gospel that is just totally foreign to my own Catholic-flavored sensibilities (offer it up!). Humans are survivors, and we survive by overcoming our pain. Suffering is evil, but we also know that suffering can help us grow stronger, both physically and morally. Clarke’s right to destroy ALIE. While the writers of The 100 didn’t do a perfect job of handling religion tropes, they impressively navigated the tension inherent in using real religious symbols and ideas in an evil made-up religion, without making it seem like they were taking cheap shots at those real religions. I’m looking forward to what vestiges of religion and spirituality make their way into Season 4. Follow Lady Geek Girl and Friends on Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook!Please join us as we discuss white identity politics. This 3 part series will discuss how the establishment profits from identity politics. We will discuss how capitalism was built on slave labor and is currently fueled by anti-blackness. The political elite continues to exploit and manipulate the proletariat for their own selfish agenda. How did European immigrants became 'white' and at what cost? How is white supremacy perpetuated by honorary white people? What role does people of color play in capitalism? Are (some) white people victims of identity politics? Does it adversely impact their lives? What are social contracts? How are they negotiated? Are people of color truly attempting to end white supremacy or are they trying to get a seat or better seat at the table? Are the black political elite overseers that profit from telling poor and working class blacks to forget about and/or pray about being oppressed? And much more...Algal Fuel One Step Closer To Becoming A Conventional Oil Alternative July 31st, 2008 by Ariel Schwartz A new milestone was reached recently in the race to make fuel from algae a conventional oil alternative: high-octane gasoline that is compatible with any gas-guzzling vehicle. The feat was performed by Sapphire Energy, a company that manufactures “green crude”. Sapphire uses single-cell algae to produce a chemical mixture that contains extractable fuel for cars and other transport vehicles. While the green crude is chemically identical to crude oil, it is completely carbon neutral. The algal energy doesn’t require the use of agricultural land and water, and it deliver 10 to 100 times more energy per acre than crop-based biofuels. The company hopes that their green crude will ultimately be injected into normal crude pipelines. Fortunately for consumers, Sapphire isn’t the only company looking into “Oil 2.0“. Silicon Valley company LS9 is working on genetically modifiying single cell organisms to excrete carbon neutral oil. Like Sapphire’s green crude, the LS9 oil will also work in conventional vehicles. Whether these efforts come to fruition as oil replacements remains to be seen—and it mostly hinges on questions of efficiency. But we should find out soon. Sapphire expects to start producing their green crude within 3 to 5 years. Posts Related to Algal Fuel:Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Will.i.am says he was intimidated by science at school, but is now taking a computer science course A lack of computer skills could be damaging the career chances of young people, a charity has warned. More than one in 10 young people do not think their computer skills are good enough to use in the job they want, the Prince's Trust said. The research follows a £500,000 donation by hip hop star will.i.am to the Trust last year. His donation will be used on projects to improve STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) skills. "I was intimidated by science and advanced maths," said the music star, who donated his fee for appearing on BBC talent show The Voice. "When I say, 'Hey kids, you guys should want to be scientists, technicians, engineers and mathematicians...' I say that because I too am going to school to learn computer science. "I'm taking a computer science course, because I'm passionate about where the world's going, curious about it and I want to contribute," he told the BBC. Embarrassed The Prince's Trust research was based on interviews with 1,378 British 15-to-25-year-olds, including 265 "Neets" - those not in education, employment or training. One in 10 unemployed young people cannot send their CV online, while a quarter say they "dread" filling in online job applications, the survey found. A tenth of Neets said they were embarrassed by their lack of computer skills, and 17% admitted they do not apply for jobs that require basic computer skills. There remains a postcode lottery, with some schools providing barely more than an hour a week of computer access Valerie Thompson, E-Learning Foundation The research was released to mark the launch of a new Prince's Trust scheme to engage young people in schools with science and technology. Under the scheme, staff from the Science Museum will visit Prince's Trust clubs in schools to work with young people at risk of exclusion and under-achievement. "We work with the hardest-to-reach pupils, who may not have access to a computer at home, and often don't have basic IT skills," said Martina Milburn, the Prince's Trust chief executive. "The Trust is using will.i.am's generous donation to engage these young people in science and technology while they're still at school. "We're also giving young people more access to IT to support them into work, and helping more unemployed young people set up technology-related businesses." 'Postcode lottery' Valerie Thompson from the E-Learning Foundation, which aims to provide learning technologies to children both at home and at school, said that while will.i.am's donation was "fantastic", there remained "a very significant challenge". "That [donation] would buy 2,000 children an iPad, and we've got 750,000 children who can't get online at home," she told the BBC. "This wouldn't be so bad if they had great access at school, but there remains a postcode lottery, with some schools providing barely more than an hour a week of computer access. No wonder they lack the skills to prepare a good CV!" She added that there is money in the system which could be used to improve computer access at schools, pointing to the pupil premium, which is paid to schools to support disadvantaged pupils, rising to £1.875bn in 2013-14, or £900 per disadvantaged child. "So the solution is there if schools are prepared to use the new discretionary powers they now have over what to spend their budgets on," she said.Image caption Union flags are erected in many parts of Northern Ireland every year, but some are left exposed to the weather for months, becoming ripped and tattered An agreement to take down old, tattered flags in a County Armagh town has led to the removal of up to 150 union and loyalist flags within a two-day period. The flags, which were erected some time ago across Portadown, have been removed by loyalists after a meeting involving community groups and politicians. The Portadown Times said the initiative was led by a community development group in the area called Regenerate. The group told the newspaper the deal was "unique and highly significant". 'Flag protocol' Loyalists traditionally erect flags in many parts of Northern Ireland during the summer months, to mark the Orange Order's marching season. However, many of the flags are left exposed to the weather for months, and become ripped and tattered by the wind. Those behind the initiative said the aim was to ensure union flags were treated with respect. The matter was discussed by community representatives from the Killicomaine, Edgarstown, Rectory, Brownstown, Corcrain and Redmanville areas of Portadown. A representative of Regenerate told the newspaper that during the meeting, an agreement had been reached in principle to create a flag protocol for the town. He said the protocol may include agreed dates for the erection and removal of flags from public areas.Overview Version 2.3 of the Nitrogen Web Framework will feature a new element called #sync_panel{} (which is currently already in master on Github) for simplifying the realtime synchronization of contents of a Nitrogen #panel (really just an HTML div ). The Video I've made a video demonstrating adding this to actual production Nitrogen code. Watch it on YouTube The Problem In the course of expanding BracketPal's tournament system, it became increasingly obvious that the current way of drawing the tournament page is insufficient. The current implementation was developed under the assumption of a single administrative/data entry computer, and as BracketPal begins handling larger and larger tournaments, the need for multiple administrative computers (and even "lookup" computers for players and parents to look up tournament progress), and all the contents need to be synchronized without forcing tournament directors, players, and parents to refresh the page. Up until now, running multiple computers for administrator purposes has just required occasionally telling admins to refresh the page to see the latest info - something that given the use of the Nitrogen Web Framework and Erlang sounds completely archaic. Indeed, accomplishing the desired realtime synchronization with Nitrogen isn't exactly a terribly difficult task, as the asynchronous tools baked into Nitrogen are slick. But because of the many pages involved in the tournament system, this would require adding wf:comet calls with receive loops and wf:send calls to each page. Again, not the end of the world, but I was convinced there was a better way to do this. The Solution The goal was to add this automatic multi-client realtime synchronization with minimal changes to the current pages by abstracting away the wf:comet and wf:send_global calls and any receive loops. The solution is manifested in the #sync_panel element. Using the #sync_panel element is simple: #sync_panel{ pool=my_pool, triggers=[update_panel], body_fun=fun my_body_function/0 } my_body_function() will hit the database and return generated Nitrogen elements as the body of the element. The real-time portion of this is that any time any connected client calls (through a postback or call in a comet loop) element_sync_panel:refresh(my_pool, update_panel), the panel's content will be updated for every connected player. So we're talking about realtime content synchronization across all connected clients by adding only a few lines of code: Wrap your content in #sync_panel{} element. element. Call element_sync_panel:refresh(Pool, Trigger) any time something changes related to the content in the #sync_panel This provides a massive productivity boost: having realtime updates sent to the browser without having to write any code to deal with the message passing or the comet loops at all - it just updates when you tell it to update everything. Potential Problems Admittedly, there are some potential problems you might face with this simplification: Many connected clients If there are too many connected clients, then all clients redrawing requests at the same time might introduce a bit of slowdown. How many is "too many" will come down to your architecture, the complexity of the page being redrawn, how many database queries are executed, and the speed or cacheability of those queries. Rapid updates If the updates are happening "too fast" (for some definition of "too fast"), then this is clearly not the ideal tool for this particular situation. In that case, you'll definitely want to hand-roll your comet functionality (which isn't all that hard). I would argue that this would be valuable for something where things are changing every now and then - maybe at least once a minute. Imagine an small business office using a CRM built with Nitrogen that shows the status of other employees - are they on the phone, if so, with which client, what is your next appointment, etc.. That kind of information won't be something you're looking at at up-to-the-second like you might a stock ticker - that's the kind of stuff that gets updated periodically throughout the day - and that's the kind of situation where this functionality would shine. Code upgrades Handling Code upgrades is no problem as long as you're aware of Erlang's requirement for upgrading running processes. Use fun?MODULE:some_function/0 if you want the function to be able to upgrade on the fly. If you use an anonymous function ( fun() -> do_something end ) that version of the body function will be locked to that page until the user refreshes the page. Similarly with fun do_something/0 (note the lack of?MODULE ), you likely cause the comet process to crash for that user after too many hot-code upgrades (again solved by refreshing the page). The recommendation is to just use?MODULE:do_something/0 unless you have a good reason not to. The Result After implementing the #sync_panel{} element and adding it to mainline Nitrogen, it took me a paltry hour to add the realtime updating to the BracketPal tournament module, which consisted of adding #sync_panel to five pages and also updating the refresh() functions on each page to call the element_sync_panel:refresh(Pool, Trigger) function, with each page's refresh function correctly updating all others. It required changes to about 30 total lines of code, an average of about 6 lines per page module. The verdict: easy-mode realtime updating. ConclusionThe metrics used to quantify horticulture lighting can be confusing at times. If you have been researching horticulture lighting systems, you have likely been bombarded with a variety of metrics that manufacturers use to market their products. Some terms and acronyms you are likely to see include watts, lumens, LUX, foot candles, PAR, PPF, and PPFD. While all of these terms are related to lighting, only a select few really tell you the important metrics of a horticulture lighting system. If you are looking to optimize your growing conditions or researching what lighting system is best for your operation, a firm grasp on the nuances of lighting metrics is the foundation to cultivation and financial success. Email Newsletter Join thousands of other growers who are already receiving our monthly newsletter. Horticulture LED lighting technology is still in its infancy and there is an abundance of misinformation, unlike other industries that have established clearly defined metrics to assess the performance of a solution. Take, for example, the automotive industry. We all have a general understanding of horsepower, miles-per-gallon, and even torque. These are all critical metrics used to determine whether a vehicle can perform a specific application (i.e. towing a trailer or racing in a quarter-mile) and to evaluate options when looking to purchase a vehicle. Metrics in LED horticulture lighting should provide the same type of insight; they should accurately and consistently answer the questions, “Can this light perform the function needed, and, more specifically, is it optimized?” While there is currently a lack of industry standards for LED lighting in horticulture—and some manufacturers take advantage of this by misreporting or inflating performance claims—many lighting companies in the industry are encouraging the implementation of formal industry standards to ensure performance claims can be verified. Lighting technologies like high-pressure sodium and metal halide have had these standards in place for years. Still, the start to standardizing the answers to these LED performance questions is with a firm grasp on the metrics by which horticulture lighting is measured. While other measurements like the daily light integral are important, for the purpose of this article we will focus on photosynthetically active radiation and photosynthetic photon flux. It should also be mentioned that growers should not use a foot candle/LUX sensor when taking light measurements, since these follow the sensitivity curve of the human eye and give wrong information when comparing light sources with different spectrums. Instead, a quantum sensor, which is designed to follow the sensitivity curve of plants and measures the number of photons between 400 and 700 nanometers (nm), should be used. Photosynthetically Active Radiation Let’s start with photosynthetically active radiation (PAR). It’s s a much used, and often misused, term related to horticulture lighting. PAR is the spectrum of light (specifically 400-700 nm, which are the primary wavelengths of light used to drive photosynthesis). Knowing the spectrum of a lighting system is extremely important and can easily be achieved by requesting a spectral power distribution chart from a lighting manufacturer. Spectral distribution will have significant implications on the growth and development of plants, along with the overall energy efficiency of a lighting system. However, the amount of PAR delivered to a crop is an equally (if not more) important metric to focus on. Photosynthetic photon flux (PPF) and photosynthetic photon flux density (PPFD) are two metrics used to measure the amount of PAR. Photosynthetic Photon Flux This measures the total amount of PAR that is produced by a lighting system each second. This measurement is best taken using a specialized instrument called an integrating sphere, which captures and measures essentially all photons emitted by a lighting system. The unit used to express PPF is micromoles per second (μmol/s). Photosynthetic photon flux is a very important metric if you want to be able to calculate how efficient a light is at converting electrical energy into photons of PAR. If the PPF of the light is known along with the input wattage, you can calculate how efficient a horticulture lighting system is at converting electrical energy into PAR. However, it is important to note that PPF does not tell you how much of the measured light actually arrives to the plant canopy. While it’s nice to know the PPF of a lighting system, PPF alone is often useless information to a grower. Photosynthetic Photon Flux Density This measures the amount of PAR that actually arrives at the plant, or, as a scientist might say, “the number of photosynthetically active photons that fall on a given surface each second.” PPFD is a ‘spot’ measurement of a specific location on your plant canopy, and it is measured in micromoles per square meter per second (μmol/m2/s). If you want to find out the true light intensity of a fixture over a designated growing area, it is important that the average of several PPFD measurements at a defined height (typically, the top of your crop canopy) are taken. Lighting companies that only publish the center point PPFD directly below their lighting fixture grossly overestimate the true light intensity of a fixture. A single measurement does not tell you much, since horticulture lights are generally brightest in the center, with light levels decreasing as measurements are taken towards the edges of a coverage area. It is easy for lighting manufacturers to manipulate PPFD data if buyers are not educated on the proper way to measure PPFD. To ensure you are getting accurate PPFD values over a defined growing area, the following needs to be published by the manufacturer: the maximum, minimum, and average measurement; measurement distance from light source (vertical and horizontal); number and location of measurements; and the min/max ratio if only an average PPFD is provided. “PPF” is commonly used to describe PPFD by academics in peer-reviewed journals, and debate continues among plant scientist and engineers on which usage of the term is correct. One way to avoid ambiguity when reading a journal article or product brochure is to focus on the unit of measurement. If the unit includes m2, then the unit is referring to the light intensity at the surface of a plant canopy (PPFD). If m2 is not included, then the unit is referring to the total PAR emitted from a light source (PPF). Understanding the correct metrics to use will not only allow you to make better purchasing decisions of horticulture lighting systems, but will ultimately make you a better grower. For more information regarding this topic, please see Horticulture Lighting Systems: Understanding The Numbers.The Dealhack Teacher Discounts List is the result of our quarterly survey of brands that offer discounts to teachers. Every three months we independently verify each and every store on this list. The list, which is broken down into 21 categories, can be downloaded and used as the ultimate reference guide to teacher savings. Download the Teacher Discounts List in PDF format here. Go to: Classroom, Books, Craft, Retail, Home, Travel, Hotel, Automotive, Car Rental, Consumables, Technology, Fitness, Genealogy, Insurance, Membership, News & Magazine, Museum, Sports, Vision, Entertainment, Party Classroom Discounts Academic Superstore: Academic Superstore offers year-round discounts on school supplies to U.S. teachers and faculty members with valid ID. Restrictions apply (source). Container Store: The Container Store offers special discounts to U.S. teachers through their Organized Teacher Discount Program. Offer is available until December 31, 2019 (source). Curious Chef: Curious Chef offers educator discounts on bulk kitchen products for verified cooking educational programs in the U.S. Restrictions apply (source). Dick Blick Art Supplies: Dick Blick offers exclusive school discounts and free lesson plans to U.S. educators as well as Art Room aid to qualifying U.S. schools (source). Discount School Supply: Discount School Supply offers discounts to learning tools and school supplies to U.S. educators (source). Dollar Days: Dollar Days offers discounted wholesale prices on classroom supplies. For additional discounts, call 877-837-9569 or email [email protected] (source). Dramatists Play Service: Dramatists Play Service offers a 10% educator discount when you order twenty or more copies of any DPS Acting Edition (source). Educator Pages: U.S. teachers can get up to 50% off Educator Pages Premium. Available until Feb. 20, 2019 only (source). GelPro: GelPro offers U.S. teachers a 25% discount on all online orders. Verify using SheerID (source). Home Depot: Educators employed in public schools can apply for a tax-free exemption on classroom purchases made at Home Depot (source). Izzit: U.S. teachers can sign up at Izzit.org to receive one free educational DVD every year school year (source). K12 School Supplies: K12 School Supplies offers 30-80% discount on closeout and clearance school supplies for educators (source). Kennelly Keys Music: Kennelly Keys Music offers discounts on products and rentals to educators. Contact [email protected] or visit your local store (source). Kiwi Crate: Kiwi Crate offers special educator discounts on bulk orders of 10 or more items (source). LakeShore Learning: LakeShore Learning offers U.S. teachers 15% off in-store purchases after joining the LakeShore Learning Teacher’s Club (source). Naked Binder: Naked Binder offers special discounts on non-toxic, environmentally safe, and 100% recyclable school products. Email request to [email protected] or call 877-446-2533 (source). National School Supply: National School Supply offers discounts on school supplies, resources, and equipment to educators (source). OfficeDepot: Office Depot offers teachers who are OfficeMax Rewards members a 2% rebate on their purchases (source). Oriental Trading: Oriental Trading offers reduced pricing on select teaching supplies & stationery (source). Paper Source: Paper Source offers bulk discounts on most paper products. Exclusions apply (source). PBS: PBS offers teachers across the nation free access to digital curriculum-based resources through PBS Learning Media (source). Pencils.com: Pencils.com offers U.S. educators 10% off all orders with valid teacher identification (source). Pets in the Classroom: Pets in the Classroom offers teachers financial assistance to purchase and maintain small animals for educational purposes (source). Raymond Geddes School Supplies: Raymond Geddes School Supplies offers exclusive discounts on future orders to U.S. teachers through their Get More Rewards Club. More details available here (source). Silhouette: Educators in the U.S. and Canada are eligible for a discount on Silhouette products. Simply send your account address, school name and location, and teaching certificate to [email protected] (source). Speed Stacks: PE instructors in the U.S. can sign up to receive one free Speed Stack set for educational purposes. Restrictions apply (source). Squiggle Park: Squiggle Park offers discounts on educational resources and teaching plans (source). Timesavers for Teachers: Educators receive bundle discounts on educational forms at Timesavers For Teachers (source). Yoobi: Yoobi offers free classroom packs for elementary school educators who have 70% or more of their students enrolled in a free or reduced lunch program (source). Discounts on educational products are also available for teachers (source). Go to: Classroom, Books, Craft, Retail, Home, Travel, Hotel, Automotive, Car Rental, Consumables, Technology, Fitness, Genealogy, Insurance, Membership, News & Magazine, Museum, Sports, Vision, Entertainment, Party Book Discounts Barnes & Noble: Barnes & Noble offers a 25% discount on in-store purchases plus 10% off cafe treats exclusively for U.S. teachers (source). Bookmans: Bookmans offers U.S. educators a 20% discount on all purchases when they sign up for their Project: Educate program (source). First Book: First Book offers up to 50% off retail book prices and free resources to qualified recipients. See eligibility here (source). Half Price Books: Half Price Books offers a 10% year-round discount to U.S. teachers who sign up for an Educator Discount Card (source). Quail Ridge Books: Quail Ridge Books offers k-12 U.S. educators complimentary membership to the Readers’ Club which includes 10% off personal purchases, a 21% discount on books purchased for classroom purposes, and 30% off New York Times best-selling hardcover books (source). Reading Warehouse: Teachers can purchase discounted novels and books for students in Kindergarten and Grades 1-12 at the Reading Warehouse (source). Scholastic Teacher Store: Scholastic offers discounts on products and shipping for teachers. See link for further instructions (source). Schuler Books: K-12 educators in Michigan can get 20% off books from Schuler’s Young Adult, Children’s, and Education sections (source). Thrift Books: Thrift Books offers 15% discount on all used class book sets to U.S. educators when they checkout using promo code APPLE. Exclusions apply (source). Go to: Classroom, Books, Craft, Retail, Home, Travel, Hotel, Automotive, Car Rental, Consumables, Technology, Fitness, Genealogy, Insurance, Membership, News & Magazine, Museum, Sports, Vision, Entertainment, Party Craft & Fabric Discounts A.C. Moore: Teachers can sign up for A.C. Moore’s Loyalty Program to get exclusive savings and rewards when they purchase art supplies and crafting materials (source). JoAnn Fabric: JoAnn Fabric offers an exclusive 15% discount on in-store and online orders to U.S. teachers with valid ID (source). Michaels: Michaels offers a 15% discount on in-store purchases every day to U.S. teachers with valid ID (source). Printastic Printastic offers discounts on yard signs and educational banners to teachers. Contact 800-575-5805 (source). Strictly for Kids Store: Teachers can purchase discounted learning tools and educational products at Strictly For Kids (source) Go to: Classroom, Books, Craft, Retail, Home, Travel, Hotel, Automotive, Car Rental, Consumables, Technology, Fitness, Genealogy, Insurance, Membership, News & Magazine, Museum, Sports, Vision, Entertainment, Party Retail & Apparel Discounts Belk: Teachers can get up to 20% off select in-store and online purchases at Belk every Tuesday. Exclusions apply (source). BN3TH Underwear: Teachers can get a 20% discount on BN3TH.com when they verify through ID.me (source). Banana Republic: Banana Republic offers U.S. teachers a 15% discount on full-priced in-store purchases. Valid ID must be presented upon checkout. Restrictions apply (source). Bonobos: Teachers are eligible for a 20% discount from Bonobos when they verify through SheerID. Restrictions apply (source). Bunion Bootie: Bunion Bootie offers U.S. educators 10% off their order when they verify through SheerID (source). Champion: Champion offers a 10% discount to active and retired U.S. teachers. Identification must be verified through TeacherID (source). Christopher and Banks: Teachers receive 10% off select in-store purchases through C&B’s Advantage Discounts (source) Cole Haan: Cole Haan offers a 15% discount on select orders to teachers. For online orders, register with your.edu email to receive discount. For in-store purchases, present your valid ID (source). Costco Wholesale: U.S. teachers who sign up as a Costco member for the first time can get over $60 in exclusive savings. Verify eligibility using SheerID (source). Crocs: Crocs offers discounts on select shoes for teachers. Special offers are available everyday (source). DC Shoes: Teachers receive 15% discount on online orders when they verify through SheerID. Restrictions apply (source). Dinosaur Detector: Teachers receive 15% off their order at Dinosaur Detector. Use code EDUCATE15 at checkout (source). Dooney & Bourke: Teachers can save $30 at Dooney & Bourke when they verify using SheerID. A minimum total purchase of $150 is required (source). Dressbarn: Teachers can get 15% off in-store purchases at Dressbarn when they sign up for their loyalty program. Present valid educator’s ID during checkout (source). Hanes: Hanes offers a 10% discount to current and retired U.S. educators who verify their identity through TeacherID (source). J.Crew: J.Crew offers U.S. teachers a 15% discount on in-store purchases when they present proper ID at checkout. Exclusions apply (source). JustMySize: JustMySize offers a 10% discount to current and retired U.S. educators. Identification must be verified through TeacherID (source). Karen Kane: Karen Kane offers 20% off online purchases to U.S. teachers. School affiliation must be verified to redeem discount (source). Madewell: Madewell offers U.S. teachers an exclusive 15% discount on in-store purchases. Present valid teacher ID at checkout (source). OneHanesPlace: OneHanesPlace offers a 10% teacher discount to current and retired U.S. educators who verify their identity through TeacherID (source). Quicksilver: Get a 15% discount from Quiksilver by verifying teacher status using SheerID. Exclusions apply (source). Reebok: Teachers and government employees can get a 30% discount from Reebok when they verify their status using ID.me (source). Roxy: Teachers save 15% on surfer styles from Roxy. Verify eligibility with SheerID (source). Staples: U.S. teachers can get exclusive discounts at Staples online store. In-store discounts vary depending on location (source). South Moon Under: South Moon Under offers 10% discount on in-store and online purchases to teachers (source). Tommy John: Teachers receive 20% off select Tommy John’s items. Verify your eligibility through SheerID (source). TOMS: Teachers who verify with SheerID save 10% on their order at TOMS (source). Zebit: Teachers receive $2,500 interest-free credit when they sign up at Zebit. Credit check is not required (source). Go to: Classroom, Books, Craft, Retail, Home, Travel, Hotel, Automotive, Car Rental, Consumables, Technology, Fitness, Genealogy, Insurance, Membership, News & Magazine, Museum, Sports, Vision, Entertainment, Party Home & Furniture Discounts E-Z UP: U.S. educators get 30% off E-Z UP Instant Shelter products and other accessories when they register online (source). Frigidaire: U.S. teachers get a one-time 25% discount on filters and other Frigidaire accessories. Verify eligibility through SheerID (source). Otterbox: Educators can receive 25% off plus free shipping on Otterbox and Lifeproof rugged cases (source) Overstock.com: Overstock.com offers free Club O Gold memberships to U.S. educators. Verify eligibility through TeacherID (source). Go to: Classroom, Books, Craft, Retail, Home, Travel, Hotel, Automotive, Car Rental, Consumables, Technology, Fitness, Genealogy, Insurance, Membership, News & Magazine, Museum, Sports, Vision, Entertainment, Party Travel Discounts Contiki: Contiki offers up to $75 in savings on trips that last for 7+ days. Valid teacher ID is required. Restrictions apply (source). STATravel: STATravel offers special airline discounts to U.S. educators with a free International Teacher ID card. Valid teacher identification is required (source). VacationstoGo: VacationstoGo offers limited-time vacation cruise line deals to U.S. educators. Availability depends on location. Valid educator ID is required (source). Go to: Classroom, Books, Craft, Retail, Home, Travel, Hotel, Automotive, Car Rental, Consumables, Technology, Fitness, Genealogy, Insurance, Membership, News & Magazine, Museum, Sports, Vision, Entertainment, Party Hotel & Resort Discounts Aqua Aston Hotels & Resorts: Aqua Aston Hotels & Resorts offers public school teachers and other federal government employees discounted rates. Use promo codes GOV (source). Bally’s Atlantic City: Bally’s offers U.S. educators 10% off their stay as well as other exclusive promotions and deals. Identification must be verified through ID.me (source). Bally’s Las Vegas: Bally’s offers U.S. educators 10% off their stay as well as other exclusive promotions and deals. Very using ID.me (source). Caesar’s Palace: Caesar’s Palace offers U.S. educators 10% off their booking in addition to other special offers. Identification must be verified through ID.me (source). Cheeca Lodge & Spa: Cheeca Lodge & Spa in Florida offers a 10% room discount to teachers with valid ID. Available online (source) Coral Cay Resort: Coral Cay Resort offers exclusive deals to U.S. educators. Verification is required (source). Cromwell: The Cromwell offers an exclusive 10% discount to teachers across the nation as well other exclusive offers. Identification must be verified through ID.me (source). Enclave Hotel and Suites: The Enclave Hotel and Suites offers an exclusive 25% educator discount (source). Flamingo: Flamingo offers a 10% reduced room rate in addition to other special discounts to U.S. teachers. Identification must be verified through ID.me (source). Gaylord Palms Resort: The Gaylord Palms Resort offers U.S. teachers exclusive savings on room rates plus other special offers. valid teacher ID is required (source). Hampton Inn & Suites: Hampton offers exclusive hotel rates and benefits to teachers and educators with valid ID. Available in participating locations only (source). Harrah’s Resort: Harrah’s Resort offers a 10% discount to U.S. educators in addition to other exclusive promotions. Identification must be verified through TeacherID (source). Hawk’s Cay Resort: Hawk’s Cay Resort offers vacation packages and a 15% discount on accommodations as part of its Teacher Appreciation special package (source). Hilton Bonnet Creek: The Hilton Bonnet Creek offers U.S. educators exclusive discounted room rates in addition to other freebies and complimentary deals. Offers are subject to change (source). Horseshoe: Horseshoe offers U.S. teachers 10% discounts off their stay in addition to exclusive offers and promotions. Identification must be verified through ID.me (source). Howard Johnson Hotels: Teachers are eligible for government employee rates and other exclusive benefits at participating Howard Johnson hotels. Contact 1-800-225-3297 (source). Lake Buena Vista Resort Village & Spa: Lake Buena Vista Resort Village & Spa offers exclusive vacation packages to U.S. educators. Verify through email to receive discount (source). LINQ: The LINQ offers a 10% reduced room rate as well as other special discounts to U.S. educators who verify their identity through TeacherID (source). Mermaid Cottages: Mermaid Cottages offers 5% discount to teachers. Use the code “Educator” when booking a reservation (source). Planet Hollywood Resort: Planet Hollywood Resort offers educators across the nation an exclusive 10% discount as well as other special offers once identification is verified through ID.me (source). Preferred Hotels & Resorts: Preferred Hotels & Resorts offers a special 20% off educators rate as well as complimentary amenities and discounts. Certain restrictions apply ( source). Prince Resort: Prince Resort offers exclusive discounts to educators, teachers, and homeschooling parents. Valid ID must be presented at check-in to receive your discount (source). Rio Las Vegas: Rio Las Vegas offers an exclusive 10% discounted room rate to U.S. teachers in addition to other special promotions once identification has been verified through ID.me (source). Stay Sky Suites: Stay Sky Suites Orlando offers U.S. educators exclusive discounts and complimentary services.
truly enjoyed mounted combat, so much that I got the rare feeling that I wanted to go kill enemies just because it was fun to do that, which as I mentioned earlier, is quite rare. I am more or less 50% in SWTOR, 50% in LOTRO at the moment, which makes complete sense as those are the two games I will always return to. Ways to Cope With Burnout So you are playing a game and you are feeling like you might burnout. What do you do? Try a new aspect of the game If you mostly PvP, go try a raid or operation. If you do mostly dungeons, try space missions or crafting with alts. Try playing the auction house. Basically, mix up your playtime with something that you don’t normally do. Be creative and come up with a new way to approach the game This is more of a meta-type idea. Don’t just play the game’s systems, come up with ways to think about the game. I have seen three really good examples of this. The first one was a motorcycle-gang guild on SWTOR, called Moe’s Swoop Garage. This is a guild that has a gang-like command structure that uses a faux swoop repair shop as a front for their dastardly deeds. It is a really cool piece of RP that inspires some interesting ideas. The second one was an all-Trooper guild on SWTOR that ran Operations purely with Troopers since they could be tanks (Vanguards), healers (Commandos), and DPS (both). This, and other challenges like it, are cool because they make you better at your class while giving you a refreshing look at what you do. I have also seen guilds that try to three-man Operations. The last example is a kinship in LOTRO that uses the XP disabler that is available in the Store to stay at level 50, which was the original level cap for LOTRO. They run the original endgame instances on-level where they are still relevant, which is just awesome in my opinion. It is almost like they rolled back the servers to 2007. Play an alt Nothing makes the game feel new like literally starting over! I personally do this anyway, since I like to PvP. It gives me full knowledge on how other classes work, so I know how to defeat them better. Try a different game Sometimes, like I was, you will just be too tired of a particular game to continue playing it. When this time comes, look around at the plethora of free-to-play titles and try one of them out. Maybe you find a new favorite, or maybe you just return to the old game with a pair of fresh eyes. Try a different type of game You might get burned out on not only your game, but MMOs in general, especially if you are a hard-core raider. This type of burnout will not be addressed by switching MMOs. You might consider switching game genres, perhaps to a single-player RPG like Skyrim or Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. Maybe a shooter is more what you need. Perhaps a complete change of pace, like the Portal series is needed. Look for sales on Origin and Steam while you play MMOs. I got Portal completely free on Steam during a special sale. I was able to play it when I needed a break from MMOs. Walk away for a while Finally, sometimes you just need a break from gaming altogether. A musical instrument, art, catching up on reading, and other forms of stress relief can be done instead. This can really renew your outlook on games in general. What are ways you’ve burned out or handled burnout? Let me know in the comments below! AdvertisementsAutomation is a perennial technical buzzword among System Administrators (SAs) and in management circles alike. Business owners and managers demand automation with the thought that it will save “man hours” and possibly decrease the need for a full technical staff. System Administrators realize that this is not the case nor is staff reduction the inevitable result of automation. The bad news is that the purpose of automation isn’t to reduce staff numbers. The good news is that there are several reasons for automation that make it a worthwhile pursuit. • Reduce human error – Computers execute the same task repeatedly with no typos. • Decrease repetitive tasks – Computers aren’t susceptible to boredom. • Increase speed – Computers perform tasks very quickly—much faster than typing. • Decrease low-level tasks – Free up System Administrator time for higher-level tasks. • Present human-readable data – Automated tasks can output data into HTML. Using Linux for an automation host makes sense for those who’ve embraced Linux for their businesses but it also makes sense for those who’ve traditionally relied on commercial UNIX. The skills your UNIX SAs spent years acquiring on those platforms translate quite well to Linux. Linux looks and reacts like commercial UNIX “flavors.” In fact, many of the same open source tools that Linux uses are available on it commercial counterparts. The point is that using Linux for automation won’t require a huge financial outlay for training. Your UNIX SAs have the skills they need to make it work. Distribution Selection There’s no single correct answer to the, “Which distribution should I use?” question for every company. The correct answer is to use the distribution that you’re comfortable with or that you currently use. For example, if your company uses Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for other tasks, then RHEL or one of its free derivatives (Fedora, CentOS, Scientific Linux) is an appropriate choice. If you haven’t yet selected a distribution, you should start with one of the so-called “top-level” or parent distributions such as Debian, SUSE, Red Hat, Gentoo or Slackware. Ubuntu Linux, based on Debian, is also very popular, easy to use and well supported. Components/Tools If you’re going for the minimalist approach to automation, then you have everything you need with a basic Linux installation: The shell. The shell, commonly the Bourne-Again Shell (BASH or bash), contains all of the necessary components that you need to successfully automate just about any procedure performed manually at the command line. But, often minimal isn’t optimal and plenty of tools exist that are both powerful and easy to use. For example, if an SA wanted to expand a bit on the lowly shell for automation, Expect is an excellent choice for that first expansion. Expect is an automation tool and it’s one of the tools considered as “essential” among thousands of SAs. From the official Expect site at http://expect.sourceforge.net, their apt description: “Expect is a tool for automating interactive applications such as telnet, ftp, passwd, fsck, rlogin, tip, etc. Expect really makes this stuff trivial. Expect is also useful for testing these same applications. And by adding Tk, you can also wrap interactive applications in X11 GUIs. Expect can make easy all sorts of tasks that are prohibitively difficult with anything else. You will find that Expect is an absolutely invaluable tool – using it, you will be able to automate tasks that you’ve never even thought of before – and you’ll be able to do this automation quickly and easily.” Expect is a scripting language that allows you to automate keystrokes including anticipating prompts, entering passwords and automating “interactive” sessions in the shell. In addition to Expect, I suggest that anyone who doesn’t enjoy the tedium of watching and entering username, password and other shell prompts also install Autoexpect. Autoexpect “watches” your interactive shell session as you login, respond to various system prompts and logout. You have to clean up your automated Autoexpect scripts but it beats the alternative of manual entry. For the non-minimalist SAs, several other valuable automation tools to add to your toolbox include the following. The lists show equivalent options under each category but isn’t meant to imply that you need ALL of the listed items in each category. Scripting Languages • PHP • Ruby • Python • PERL Web Services • Apache • NGINX • Lighthttpd • Thttpd Database (RDBMS) • MySQL • PostgreSQL • SQLite • NoSQL PERL is a common scripting language that is part of the base installation on most Linux distributions. It’s a powerful, mature and well-supported language. The selection of tools, however, is often a matter of personal preference and not a matter of superiority of one technology over another. Whatever choices you make for your automation host tools, remember to document and comment your scripts so that when you return to debug or upgrade them, you’ll understand their functions and purposes. User Interface How you display your data gathered by your scripts is another concern for SAs. Some scripts run and do their jobs without the need for output to the screen, to a logfile or to a text file of any kind. However, if your automation includes gathering performance data, executing commands that produce interesting or valuable output or information that requires review, then you need to think seriously about how you’ll display that data. Plain text files can be ugly to look at, logfiles can be tedious to pore through and screen-captured text can be impossible to realign into a meaningful document. The great equalizer is HTML. Viewing output in the comfort of a web browser has its advantages. Formatting, searchability and customizability are a few HTML advantages that come to mind. Screen output can be bound by the HTML tags to preserve formatting so that the SA can read information exactly as the system designers originally intended it. You can also present data in tables, in CSV files or in specific file formats for use with proprietary applications. A very good method for gathering and presenting data is to load the data into a database for extraction by a scripting language and presented via HTML. But, the user interface required for your data depends on your audience. System Administrators have different preferences and requirements than those who’d like to view data in a more formal way. Automation Strategies Strategies can run the gamut from automating a few tedious processes to a full-blown, 90%+ automated system. But, there’s one catch: You still have to have someone that knows what to do when things go wrong. A few years ago, when the big automation push first reared its head, SAs worried that they would eventually automate themselves out of a job. Automation hasn’t taken away but a few of the lowest level job duties. Notice the term, “job duties” not jobs. Automation can offer cost savings to a company in that it saves labor on lower-level tasks. Senior-level SAs shouldn’t have to locate files that haven’t been touched in six months and flag them for long-term storage. An automated process should take care of that and the results reported to a text file, database or web page for casual review. The automated gathering of performance data can save companies money by flagging systems that are overloaded or those that are underutilized. Automated processes can track file and filesystem changes to provide a pre-emptive notification of a system breach. Tracking user activity to measure productivity is an excellent feedback method during your annual personnel evaluation time. All of these strategies save money. They save money because they save time and time is money. Using Linux is a part of the overall money-saving strategy. Automating processes with Linux is a step in the right direction for leveraging automation for your business. You have to decide how much automation is correct for your business or business unit. The rule of thumb is that if a human regularly repeats a particular task, then that task should fall under serious scrutiny for automation. Tasks that require decisions, very complex tasks or tasks that require random timing to perform should remain manual. Summary Automation can offer significant cost-savings and advantages over “old school” manual processes. The range of possibilities for automated processes is wide. From simple archive scripts to very elaborate content management systems to fully automated performance data gathering and reporting scenarios. It’s wise to assess each process individually and strategically instead of announcing a blanket mandate to “automate everything” in the data center. Automation has its drawbacks. As long as everything works as designed, automation is an excellent way to streamline processes. However, when something goes wrong, you’ll need the human element to intercede and you can’t automate that. Linux systems offer businesses a cost-effective and perfectly-suited-to-automation set of tools to suit almost any need. And, generally speaking, the automation tools listed in this article are cross-platform, which means that they work on a variety of operating systems. This cross-platform feature also means that scripts created on one system are portable to others. This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet.Michigan Medical Marijuana Non-Profit Gets $240,000 Google Grant ANN ARBOR, MI — A Michigan medical marijuana organization has received a $240,000 grant from Google, the first medical marijuana non-profit to receive a grant from Google Grants. The grant is an in-kind, AdWords advertising allowance and other premium Google products and support that will continue for the life of the organization. The group, Michigan Compassion, says they will use the grant to promote medical marijuana awareness based on their philosophy of “We must increase awareness to increase acceptance.” Article continues after ad Advertisement Since December 2012, the organization has been operating an electronic billboard campaign in the Detroit area to promote medical marijuana awareness, and they hope to use the grant to increase the exposure of their message. “What makes this grant award unique is that Google AdWords, being a key-word driven service, prohibits the promotion of cannabis which is the primary theme of the organization’s mission,” said James Campbell, Board Secretary of Michigan Compassion. The award letter from Google acknowledges that Michigan Compassion is the first medical marijuana organization to receive an AdWords Grant from Google Grants. “We were very surprised to receive a personalized letter from Google, let alone its acknowledgement of Michigan Compassion as a medical marijuana non-profit and their support of this organization’s mission,” Campbell said. Tags: GooglePlutonium is a practical and versatile substance, having applications that range from planetary extinction to routine fire protection, depending on the user’s fancy. The element has been mass-produced in nuclear reactors since World War Two, and occurs in various isotopic compositions in the discharged reactor fuel, reflecting variables such as fuel burnup, initial uranium enrichment, and neutron spectral characteristics of the reactor design. The Soviet Union cooked up more plutonium than any other nation. Most of this was slated for the noble purpose of containing capitalist imperialism, but some found its way into commercial ionization smoke detectors like the KI-1, RID-1, and RID-6M. (The bourgeois warmongers themselves preferred, and still prefer, americium-241 for this application.) Occasionally, people in the former USSR try to peddle their old smoke detector plutonium on the nuclear black market, thinking that it may attract top dollar from terrorists with an appetite for nuclear warfare. We’ll examine that possibility in more detail shortly. Since I was curious about the technical characteristics of Soviet smoke detector plutonium, I picked up an old KI-1 smoke detector and sacked it for the source. The source design bears much resemblance to the “lipstick” sense chamber sources in early Pyrotronics detectors made in the USA. This one is brass and a bit wider than its Pyrotronics analogue. An internal axial thread positions a cup-shaped alpha particle shield around a band containing the active deposit, thereby regulating the amount of ionization produced by the source in the chamber and controlling the sensitivity of the detector. The sections below describe my analysis of the gamma and alpha radiations emitted by this source, and my conclusions about the plutonium’s age, activity, mode of production, and suitability for nuclear combat. A beat-up old KI-1 smoke detector found in an industrial facility in the former USSR dating from the mid-1970s. Cute, isn’t it? This is the ~1-milligram plutonium source from a Soviet KI-1 smoke detector. Plutonium source from the Soviet KI-1 smoke detector contains about 1 mg of Pu, deposited on the grayish ring in the middle. The position of the umbrella cap is adjustable. Plutonium isotopics by gamma spectrometry High-resolution gamma spectroscopic measurements allow direct determination of the relative concentrations of Pu-238, Pu-239, Pu-240, and Pu-241 in a plutonium sample. In such measurements, Pu-242 is customarily inferred from heuristic correlations to the other isotopes; it can be directly measured only with costly and destructive mass spectrometry. Additionally, the ratio of daughter Am-241 to parent Pu-241 can be used to date plutonium. The basic methodology is discussed in good detail in Sampson, T. E., Plutonium Isotopic Composition by Gamma-Ray Spectroscopy (1986). I employed the multiple linear regression (MLR) formula of Sarkar, Shah, et al. (2014) to estimate Pu-242. My gamma detector is a PGT n-type coaxial HPGe detector that lives in the guest bedroom of the home (the least radioactive room, as it should be), shielded with lead bricks and a graded inner shield of copper and tin sheet. One preparation that is almost essential with plutonium is selective attenuation of the 59-keV gamma radiation from Am-241, as discussed in Sampson’s article above. If you don’t do this, then the pileup and sum peaks caused by the intense Am-241 radiation will swamp the rest of the plutonium spectrum. To hold the “lipstick” source, I made an attenuator out of rolled cadmium sheet and endcaps stuffed inside of a piece of copper water pipe with copper endcaps. Such an arrangement works by strategically situating the K-edge energy of the absorber materials close to the energy of the offending radiation. In quantitative gamma spec measurements, another important point is to avoid getting the source too close to the detector. Otherwise, coincidences will distort the spectrum. With the right attenuation and geometry, all that remains is to gather a statistically-useful number of counts in the spectrum–in this case, about 42 hours of counting. The “lipstick” plutonium source from a KI-1 smoke detector is wrapped in cadmium and then stuffed in a copper pipe. These metals selectively attenuate the 59-keV Am-241 gamma energy. Graded attenuator capsule (copper pipe) holding the smoke detector source is placed in front of the HPGe detector. Note the lead shielding and the tin-copper graded liner. HPGe detector (right, on floor) and associated NIM electronics. The gamma spectrum is shown, annotated, in the gallery below. It can be downloaded in ASCII format as an Excel spreadsheet here. (Note that there are no channel numbers or energy calibration in the ASCII format, so you will have to add them.) As can be seen, Am-241 and Pu-239 peaks are scattered throughout, while Pu-238, Pu-240, and Pu-241 are represented by a single good peak each in the 150-keV neighborhood. Am-241’s granddaughter Pa-233 is also in evidence, attesting to the unseen Np-237 daughter. U-237 is a product of the minor alpha decay branch of Pu-241, and it interferes with some lines in the Am-241 decay spectrum as both nuclides decay to Np-237. Those energies subject to interference cannot be used for quantitative analysis. Click any image for the larger original: Calculating relative activities from the peaks in the spectrum involves the following: Measuring counts in each peak by peak-fitting algorithms. I use the free software Hypermet-PC 5.12 to do this. Its algorithms are old, but well-known and still widely used. Modern users will need to run it in DOSBox. Correcting measured counts by an efficiency function of energy. I fit this function in Hypermet-PC using a sealed Ra-226 source that can be placed in the same graded attenuator (and the same counting geometry) as the “lipstick” plutonium source. Calculating relative activities from efficiency-corrected counts using the tabulated yields per decay of each radiation. I used this website for my data. Estimating Pu-242 activity using a suitable model. My reference is here. Once relative activities were established, I estimated total activities by comparing the gamma count rate on a Geiger counter between the KI-1 source and the ~60 microcurie Am-241 source from a Pyrotronics F-3/5A in the same counting geometry. The overwhelming majority of the gamma rays emitted by both sources are 59-keV photons from Am-241. These estimates are limited by the uncertainty surrounding the total activity of the Pyrotronics source. The relative activities are known to much higher precision. (I should note that the uncertainties given in the table relate to the relative measurements.) As the table below illustrates, the KI-1 source contains a total activity of about 700 microcuries today, most of which is the 14-year weak beta emitter Pu-241. The runner-up is 88-year alpha emitter Pu-238. On an activity basis, the other nuclides are lower in the lineup. The plutonium mass can be calculated, and it is about 1 mg. The alpha spectrum Alpha spectroscopy of plutonium is confounded by the fact that Pu-239 and Pu-240, and Pu-238 and Am-241, emit alpha particles with very similar energies. The general technique is also laborious, involving chemical preparation of samples in virtually all cases. Like Pyrotronics sources, there is some removable contamination on the KI-1 detector source. I wiped a tissue on the source surface, ashed it, dissolved the residues in nitric acid, and evaporated them onto a stainless steel disc to make the spectrum shown below using an Ortec solid-state detector. Despite this effort, it is not of great technical quality compared to what one could expect with a rigorous radiochemical technique. All that said, though: the spectrum confirms the expectation of two main alpha energy groups, the larger at 5.4-5.5 MeV (Pu-238+Am-241) and the smaller at 5.1-5.2 MeV (Pu-239+Pu-240). Dating plutonium using the Am-241:Pu-241 ratio The Am-241:Pu-241 atom ratio is a daughter-parent ratio, a clock that allows us to date the plutonium. More specifically, the method determines when Am was last chemically separated from the Pu, assuming that all the material in the source traveled together through the same process. (The assumption may not be very good if multiple batches of Pu were mixed.) A graphical solution of the coupled Bateman equations modeling Am and Pu ingrowth and decay is shown below. The sample age is the point on the horizontal axis where the solution intersects the measured value of Am-241:Pu-241, represented by the one-standard-deviation band between the red and blue lines. This plutonium appears to be 44.9 ± 0.4 years old, meaning it was probably processed in 1972. Other dating ratios Another member of the Pu-241 decay chain, Pa-233, can also be used for dating. In its ratio with Am-241, we get an estimate of 55.4 years; in its ratio with Pu-241, we get an estimate of 48.2 years. The Am-241:Pu-241 method above predicted 44.9 years. These three ages would be harmonized if there were a bit more Am-241 in the mix, specifically about 18% more, suggesting that some may have been removed in the earlier history of the sample. The removal may have coincided with initial fuel processing delayed appreciably after fuel discharge from the reactor, or it may have been undertaken some time after the initial processing. I am in favor of a view that americium was last chemically separated about four years after fuel discharge, the fuel itself being about 49 years out of the reactor (discharged in 1968), and that the separatory chemistry in the early 1970s was selective for Am and largely left ingrown Np-237 (parent of Pa-233) with the Pu. This hypothesis harmonizes all three age estimates. Original plutonium composition Armed with an age estimate and current activity ratios among all the Pu isotopes, the calculation of mass composition at the time of preparation is straightforward using tabulated values of the half lives (or decay constants) of the isotopes. Once again, there are assumptions in this calculation and in the conclusions derived from it. The most important is probably that the plutonium was “fresh” when it was processed (or, more specifically, that the time difference between when irradiation stopped and when processing occurred was small enough to be insignificant to the isotopics). Is that a good assumption? Because the half-life of Pu-241 is only 14 years, and because the logistics of nuclear fuel processing usually dictate several years of cool-down during which time the fuel is in storage, transit from the reactor, and standing in queue for processing, this number is perhaps most suspect–and we would expect its calculated value and that of the correlated Pu-242 estimate to err on the low side. Keeping this caveat in mind, here is the composition of the original KI-1 smoke detector plutonium as calculated from the Am-241:Pu-241 age: What if the plutonium is actually four years older (1968) and was just processed in 1972, as the Pa-233 dating methods hint? Then, the composition looks like the table below. I believe this is more accurate: Conclusions: Low-burnup, reactor-grade plutonium from 1970 is nothing to fear With original Pu-240 concentration near 20%, the ~1 mg of plutonium used in this Soviet KI-1 smoke detector falls into the “reactor grade” classification rather than “weapon grade.” The classification convention distinguishes plutonium compositions on the basis of Pu-240 content because of this isotope’s high spontaneous-fission neutron yield and its consequences for pre-initiation in nuclear weapons. However, weapons made from reactor-grade plutonium are known to work. Their yield may not be statistically reliable or as high as could be expected with weapon-grade fissile material, but they are useful weapons nonetheless. The real barrier to would-be proliferants hoarding Soviet smoke detectors is the sheer number–millions!–of the motherfuckers they would in principle need to acquire through the typical nuclear smurfing networks. (The entire output of the Soviet smoke detector industry is unlikely to have involved more than one formula quantity of plutonium.) Now that we can sleep easily on the nuclear holocaust issue, I’ll add a few more observations about this plutonium. Although reactor grade, its high fraction of Pu-239 and low fractions of Pu-241 and Pu-238 suggest moderately low burnup, probably not in excess of 5 GWd/t, in a reactor amenable to such light utilization (e.g. an isotope production reactor or online-refuelable type). The measured dates of production (1968) and last separation (1972) rule out VVER and RBMK power reactors as sources. Some of the RBMK’s graphite-moderated, low-enrichment-fueled predecessors designed for isotope production and co-located with processing plants (such as the ADE types) are likely origins. These reactors also turned out a weapon-grade stream as the USSR frantically raced for nuclear parity with the Yankee imperialists.Andrew repeats an interesting claim that I've seen all over twitter tonight: Chuck Todd notes that Ron Paul voted for the MLK national holiday. Gingrich voted against. I find the notion that Ron Paul is a racist to be preposterous. Again, I make no claims about the contents of Ron Paul's heart. I've never met him, and consider such things beyond the bounds of the ultimately knowable. But Ron Paul's voting record is a different matter. But first here's Ron Paul on Martin Luther King Day in his newsletters: Boy, it sure burns me to have a national holiday for Martin Luther King. I voted against this outrage time and time again as a Congressman. What an infamy that Ronald Reagan approved it! We can thank him for our annual Hate Whitey Day. It has been alleged that these are Lew Rockwell's words, not Ron Paul's. One would think that Rockwell would be familiar with Paul's record, as he was his longtime Chief of Staff. But, fair enough. Let us assume that Rockwell was, indeed, in error. Paul's supporters link to his Yea vote on this 1979 bill as evidence that he supported an MLK Holiday: TO AMEND H.R. 5461, MARTIN LUTHER KING HOLIDAY, BY DESIGNATING THE THIRD MONDAY IN JANUARY RATHER THAN JANUARY 15 AS THE LEGAL HOLIDAY. But this actually isn't the bill for the holiday. The text doesn't even claim that. More importantly, the date is wrong. This vote was taken on December 5, 1979. The vote for the King holiday was actually taken on November 13, 1979 The bill was called up in the House on Tuesday, November 13, 1979...When the final vote was taken, 252 Members voted for the bill and 133 against--five votes short of the two-thirds needed for passage. I'm sorry to report that one of those Nay votes, as you can see here, was cast by one Ronald Paul. I'm sorry to further report that Paul again voted no on the 1983 bill that passed. If we are to take the version of events proffered by Ron Paul's defenders, the Congressmen voted for a holiday which his Chief of Staff publicly denounced as "Hate Whitey Day." In Ron Paul's own name, no less. This version of events should inspire skepticism even in a Paul admirer. I am happy to report that in some, it did I want to reiterate--again--that I make no claims on the heart of Ron Paul. How he truly feels about black people is best left to Paul and his conscience. His actual record, however, is wholly subject to the wiles of google.There is a thin line separating creativity and stupidity. I’m straddling it. Delicately. A week ago or so, I clicked on a link titled “Peanut Butter Eggs,” anxiously awaiting some peanut butter. On some eggs. Because my brain works in a fun way. What I got instead was peanut butter in a chocolate shell. You know, not Peanut Butter Eggs. You know, candy. But I don’t want candy. I want peanut butter eggs. And jam. I think jam should be there too. It’s time my Sweet and Savory Cottage Cheese breakfast got that baby brother its been asking for. It’s also time my breakfasts keep their damn mouths shut. *I’ve included my original, healthy fats ingredient list along with a lower-cal, lower-fat list of ingredients for you to choose from based on your own dietary needs and wants. Preparation remains the same for both. Original Peanut Butter and Jamlet serves one bold virtuoso 342 calories // 14g carbs // 22g fat // 27g protein // 2g fiber // 8g sugar These loose measurements make a good foundation: 1 large egg 2 egg whites 2 tablespoon of cottage cheese a dash of cinnamon 2 tablespoons chunky peanut butter 1/2 tablespoon jam Peanut Butter and Jamlet (Lite) 232 calories // 10g carbs // 9g fat // 27g protein // 1g fiber // 7g sugar 3/4 cup liquid egg whites 2 tablespoons cottage cheese a dash of cinnamon 1 tablespoon chunky peanut butter 1/2 tablespoon jam Let’s make weird, beautiful things together: In a small bowl, whisk your eggs, egg whites, cottage cheese, and cinnamon. I another small bowl, mix together your pb and j. Heat up a pan over medium heat with some baking (not olive oil) spray. Pour your egg mixture in and let it cook until the edges dry some. Plop your pb and j mixture on one half of the egg, leaving generous room on the edge. Cook a little more until you’re ready to fold over the omelet. Fold. Cook a bit. Flip. Make sure it’s cooked and stuff. Flip. Put on a plate. Marvel at the awesome. Hey so this tastes like a french toast peanut butter and jam sandwich. Without the bread. Plus copious amounts of protein. Plus you just put some peanut butter and jam in an omelet. And the Lite version is just as tasty. It really all depends on whether or not you want those added fats and/or calories. Sit back and think about that for a moment. But make sure you’re eating a PB and Jamlet while thinking. Helps the digestion process. Can I just take a minute to profess my love for breakfast? Of course I can. This is my blog. Basically, if you make good choices for breakfast, the odds of you making good choices for the rest of the day are exponentially higher. It’s not just some obnoxious thing your mom says to make sure you remember how obnoxious your mom is. YOUR MOM IS SO OBNOXIOUS, amiright? This breakfast gives you a strong amount of protein, healthy fats, and okay-carbs that won’t offset your entire day. Breakfast is a nasty trap for useless carbs, especially for a vegetarian. It’s like a bear trap and your midsection is the bear. Or it’s the trap. I can’t keep this analogy straight. Just eat your damn PB and Jamlet or PB and Jamlet Lite and have an amazing day. AdvertisementsThere is a joke in the comics’ community that every single adaptation of Alan Moore’s work is terrible and every adaptation of Frank Miller’s is fantastic. Sadly the gag is true. While some of the films that have been adapted by Alan Moore are tolerable as films by themselves, they are incredibly horrendous as a translation of Moore’s work. In contrast every single adaptation of Miller’s work has been both entertaining as a film and stunning as an adaptation of Miller’s work. Why is it that Miller’s work can translate to another medium while Moore’s does not? The answer to this question is difficult to answer as both Miller and Moore crafted comics that were intentionally un-filmable. Watchmen was made under the mindset of celebrating the comics medium and including elements that were genuinely impossible to translate to film. Miller created a work that exploited the format of the page and the effects of negative space on the images displayed when crafting his noir series Sin City. The works of Miller and Moore are consistently made to function solely in the medium that they were created. Adaptation from one medium to another is a difficult process and is almost always fraught with difficulty. Certain books, such as A Clockwork Orange, have a story that can function as a film. Other works have structural design or breadth of content that makes cinematic adaptation difficult to impossible, such as Fight Club or The Lord of the Rings. Inevitably any adaptation of a work is doomed to be regarded as too slavish to the source material, ie Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet. The alternative is that the work is loose in adapting the source material and displeases fans of the original source, ie The Shining. The sad fact is that almost always when Miller’s work is adapted either loosely (300) or slavishly similar to the source material (Sin City) the films work both as a film and as an adaptation of the author’s work. In contrast only two adaptations of Moore’s work are even tolerable (Watchmen, For The Man who Has Everything) with almost every adaptation either missing the intent of the work or dumbing the source material down to an unbearably stupid level. When people approach Moore’s work loosely, they usually do so either out of fear of political backlash or fear of alienating audiences with an “overly complex” narrative. It is too easy to be cruel to The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen film in labelling it a “dumbed down” adaptation. LXG as it is derisively labelled by League fans was an adaptation much more similar to Stanley Kubrick’s approach to The Shining. The producers behind the film sought to take the root concept in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and apply their own interpretation on a cast of characters. Therefore, the film is not so much a literal adaptation of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen but a spiritual adaptation that failed. Similarly the From Hell “adaptation” simply took the root narrative of the story and decided to tell the traditional “Jack-the-Ripper” narrative that Moore and Eddie Campbell were trying to avoid. While both of these works bear the same title as works of Alan Moore, they do not even seem to be genuine adaptations of Moore’s works as they are so loose in adapting the source material that they inevitably are so separate from the source material that no one would confuse one for the other. Although it is worth noting that according to legend Johnny Depp actually went to Northampton to meet Alan Moore to prepare for From Hell. They were said to have spent a pleasant evening sharing drinks. Make of that story what you will. The only work other than Watchmen and For The Man Who Has Everything that feels like a true adaptation of Moore’s work, albeit a loose adaptation, is V for Vendetta. V for Vendetta is far more worthy of analysis, though for its intellectual failures rather than From Hell and LXG’s story and character failures. Moore and David Lloyd crafted a fascinating reflection on the issue of freedom and security to their greatest extremes of fascism and anarchy. V for Vendetta is poetic in its gripping narrative of an anarchist terrorist going against a fascist government. While it was an indictment against Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, it transcended the contemporary political critique to become an Orwellian-tale of the most extreme forms of oppression and freedom. In contrast to this, the V for Vendetta film is an indictment against George W. Bush’s America that treats V as a freedom fighter rather than as a violent terrorist. Moore was the first to identify and dismiss the V for Vendetta as an anti-Bush polemic. The film is shameless in its rage against Bush, going as far as to intimate that the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 as staged. If the Wachowski Siblings wanted to make an Anti-Bush polemic then why set it in Britain? The film does not take it’s time to consider the deep ramifications of violence that V perpetrates. The defenders of V for Vendetta state that it is in the very least a coherent three-act structure and with basic character development. While V for Vendetta functions as a film, it does not mitigate the film’s unbearable stupidity. The film removes any reasonable discussion on the consequences of violence nor does it humanize the government it condemns. The film is a generic and unbearable piece. In contrast the loose-adaptation of Miller’s operatic retelling of history 300 was a marvelous film. The film includes a subplot with the fascinating Queen Gorgo as well as changing the political themes. The changes are more
. So taking Firefox as an example it would be application://firefox.desktop properties : A map of strings to variants with the properties to set on the launcher icon. Valid properties are: "count" (type signature x ): A number to display on the launcher icon. You must also set the "count-visible" property to true in order for this to show. "progress" (type signature d ) : A double precision floating point number between 0 and 1. This will be rendered as a progress bar or similar on the launcher icon. You must also set the "progress-visible" property to true in order for this to show. "urgent" (type signature b ) : Tells the launcher to get the users attention "quicklist" (type signature s ) : The object path to a DbusmenuServer instance on the emitting process. An empty string denotes that the quicklist has been unset. This also explains why we use signature s and not o. The empty string is not a valid object path. count-visible (type signature b ) : Determines whether the "count" is visible progress-visible (type signature b ) : Determines whether the "progress" is visible Mainly for debugging purposes applications using the Update() signal must also expose a Query method on the same object path as they emitted the Update signal from: method com.canonical.Unity.LauncherEntry.Query ( out s app_uri, out a{sv} properties ) The return values match exactly the paramters described in the Update signal. FAQby The political arena leaves one no alternative, one must either be a dunce or a rogue. (Emma Goldman) I was born in 1969, so the Cold War and the threat of nuclear annihilation were major themes in the political and emotional landscapes of my childhood. When the neighborhood kids got together, “nuclear war” was one of the games we played. This was in Omaha, Nebraska, and we were told that our city would be one of the first hit by the Russians due to the location of the Strategic Air Command nearby. This was taken as reassuring by some since it was assumed that in the utter horror of a post-nuclear exchange world, the survivors would “envy the dead” (in the famous words of Herman Kahn). Throughout the 70’s and 80’s, the Cold War was regularly referenced not just on the news, but in movies, songs and television. It was omnipresent and inescapable, a threat that never went away. Authority figures, including the nuns at my school, used it as a hammer to keep people in line. I hated it. I don’t think anyone enjoyed it except the arms manufacturers and politicians. It was a great relief, then, when (as it seemed to me at the time) Gorbachev stepped back from the whole terrible business, and with the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, ended the Cold War. It felt like the world had been given a new lease on life, like taking a deep, free breath after years of suffocating and terrifying constriction. So I was alarmed when Hillary Clinton started revving up the anti-Russia rhetoric during the presidential campaign in 2016. Don’t we have enough challenges to face in the world today without adding that one back into the mix? Soon enough I was also angered as Democratic partisans fell into line and began parroting her. I’m not talking about DNC politicians here, but the rank and file. The “good liberals” who listen to NPR, read the New York Times and are proud of themselves for recycling and supporting gay marriage. The ones who didn’t make a peep about the brutality of US foreign policy for eight years because it was Obama who was (literally) calling the shots. What was wrong with these people? I wondered. I knew many of them were old enough to remember the relentless dread of the Cold War. Were they willing to revive it just because Hillary said so? As it turns out—yes, unfortunately, they were. Over the course of the campaign, the Russia line changed. As Wikileaks revealed more and more information that embarrassed Hillary and the DNC, it became necessary to slander both the organization and its founder, Julian Assange, by tying them into the Russia narrative. I watched as the liberal class that had cheered for Wikileaks a few years earlier took up anti-Assange messaging with religious fervor. “We’ve always been at war with Eastasia.” Time for Two Minutes Hate. The Russia story took another turn after the election, when the blame for Hillary’s loss was pinned on alleged Russian meddling (and on Jill Stein, and Sanders supporters, and the FBI, etc., etc…) Shocked Hillary fans were happy to jump on any and every excuse and pass each one around like gospel, regardless of whether they were true or even coherent. At this time, the Washington Post published a slanderous hit piece attempting to link alternative media to Russia. “Fake News” was born, and it bore the marks of a psy-op. From January through June of this year, I spent most of my time WiFi-less, either camping out in the desert or working on farms in the sticks and so I was repeatedly away from news for two to three weeks at a time. Whenever I logged back in to catch up between these gigs, I would be both surprised and disappointed to see that the Russia non-story was still a story, with only the angle of attack shifting as each approach wore itself out. No evidence has yet to be offered. None. Zero. Zip. And regardless of that, we get the same shrill insistence from the liberal chattering class and their bots and their followers, who hang on and won’t let go. If only such persistence could be turned to other ends, like fighting racism, militarism or ecocide! I have been repeatedly disgusted to see so much propaganda spouted by people I’ve known for years who are “otherwise intelligent,” as they say (though my doubts about that characterization are growing). One cannot take Russiagate seriously unless one sets aside all intellectual rigor. The theory only has credence within the arena of belief; it does not inhabit the world of facts. This is ironic considering the unremitting skepticism for “faith-based” ideas espoused within the very circles of educated liberals who refuse to let go of this shit. No one seem cognizant of the size of the bite that’s been taken and how unchewable it is. That is to say, the people ferrying this crap are apparently oblivious that Russia-baiting could lead to very serious, planet-killing results. Do you really want to be poking a nuclear-armed bear with a sharp stick? ‘Cuz that’s what you’re doing! From my non-partisan perspective, it is obvious that Russiagate both plays cover for and justifies the increasingly belligerent behavior of the US toward Russia. Contrast how many people know about NATO’s provocative military maneuvers on Russia’s borders (see this, this, this and this) with the number who have heard the baseless accusations of “election hacking.” Imagine if Russia were holding military exercises along the Rio Grande in Mexico or establishing bases in Quebec. How would the US be reacting? With a flurry of drones, MOABs and white phosphorous, you can be sure. All things considered, I would say that Russia is being admirably restrained, but we cannot count on that lasting forever. Everyone has a breaking point. If an explanation is needed for why Hillary lost besides the fact that she was a profoundly unpalatable politician with unpopular positions, then there’s a simple one, and journalist Greg Palast wrote about it before the election took place. To wit, many thousands of voters were purposely and improperly removed from voter rolls in 27 states, including swing states that cost Hillary the electoral college. The purged voters were overwhelmingly people of color, the majority of whom would’ve voted Democratic. After the election, Palast showed how enough voters were excluded in the right states for Trump to win. The method that was used for kicking off these voters is called the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program, or just “Crosscheck” for short. The corporate media has almost universally disregarded this story, though it is highly scandalous. So have the Democratic partisans. Thus the racism of the voter purge itself is compounded by the racism of ignoring it. Push the blame overseas so as not to deal with the real trouble at home. I need an entire thesaurus entry to describe how I feel about this. There’s very few people on the Left who are willing to take on Russiagate as the pack of revolving lies that it is. You’ll be accused of supporting Trump or of being a shill for Putin if you do. We’ve all heard of “crowdsourcing”—well, this is “crowdstoning”. It’s ugly, but that’s partisanship for you. It’s never pretty. The issues facing the world right now are of deadly gravity. Environmental degradation and the threat of runaway climate change, for example, represent existential threats to life on the planet. We’ve got to focus on the serious stuff if we are going to survive. That means dropping Russiagate immediately. Continuing to pursue it would be an exercise in extreme immaturity and unforgivable irresponsibility. Risking war with a nuclear power rather than facing political reality is insanely reckless. C’mon, partisan Dems—grow up and drop this crap! * * * Recommended journalists: Caitlin Johnstone – “rogue journalist” in Australia. See her comprehensive Big Fat Compendium Of Russiagate Debunkery. Margaret Kimberly – editor and contributor for the Black Agenda Report Robert Parry – investigative reporter, and others at Consortium News See also:CHRISTIAN LINDNER is the leader of the Free Democrats (FDP), the pro-business Germany party whose political revival—and possible participation in Angela Merkel’s next coalition government—is covered in this week’s issue. On August 24th he sat down with The Economist for a wide-ranging conversation. A full digest of the interview is here. Get our daily newsletter Upgrade your inbox and get our Daily Dispatch and Editor's Picks. The transcript has been translated from German and lightly edited for clarity. On Germany’s economic competitiveness The Economist: To start, is Germany too comfortable? Christian Lindner: Yes, Germany takes its current strength for granted. We are falling back on our trade surplus but do not appreciate that the capital it earns is no longer being invested here. So the current strength of our country is a prosperity hallucination. In what way is it a hallucination? Special factors like the low interest rate, the prolonged low external value of the euro, the low cost of raw materials and the fact that baby boomers are still in the labour market all show that we are in the best of possible worlds. But things like digitalisation, the ageing of society and shifts in world trade like those caused by Trump and Brexit demand answers. Our country must become more innovative. Private firms, too, must invest more. And we cannot allow digitalisation to be something that mostly happens elsewhere. Are the big German political parties tackling these issues properly? No. The CDU manifesto is founded on continuity, not change. The SPD manifesto even wants to reduce labour-market flexibility and the innovative capacity of SMEs through tax increases in this area. So right now we see a new gap in the market for the FDP [Free Democrats] as a pro-openness, pro-technology, pro-market party. You mention digitalisation. Why is Germany in the second division on this? What are the reasons? The climate for innovative start-ups in Germany is not good. Our capital market is not efficient enough and entrepreneurship has long been undervalued. By politicians? By society? By society as a whole. And societies that are prepared to be more daring and have efficient capital markets have overtaken us on this. Germany’s prosperity is based on century-old sectors which may now be threatened by disruption. We have to change fast to adapt our classic strengths. For example, machine- and car-making remain strengths of our country that we have to transform for this new era, in order to get ahead in it. Transform into different industries? No, there will be machine- and car-making in the future, chemicals and pharmaceuticals too, but these sectors are changing. And our task must be to lead in this new era and use our classical strengths. Take machine-making and digitalisation. “Industry 4.0”, as it is known in Germany, is about deploying the most advanced technologies of the internet age in industry. We can be world leaders in this area, but have to want it. We cannot jump into the lead on things like “platform” or “hardware” businesses any more—we are no longer so cutting edge there—but we still have great opportunities when it comes to applying technology in industry and in B-to-B [business-to-business] internet platforms. What exactly can the government actually to do make that easier? Firstly the government must remove bureaucratic burdens and rapidly create a legal framework for new technologies, like self-driving cars, so we can hit the road in the truest sense of the term. Second we can stimulate corporate investment and innovation with tax exemptions and R&D support. Third we must quickly make the digital infrastructure competitive. I would also privatise the state’s shares in telecoms and post companies and spend those billions on targeted investment. Fourth and finally: the state itself must become more digital. Paperwork must be replaced by digital administration to save people time and speed up processes. Does that mean Germany needs a new relationship to data security? Take for example Google maps. Outside of the big cities you can’t use it here, but you can in almost every other European country, which has to do with Germany’s particular culture. Can that be changed, realistically? Privacy is a competitive advantage for Germany, as well as for Europe by global comparison. But the old data reduction and data economy paradigm is outdated. The key thing is to have command of one’s data. Citizens must know what information about them is being gathered and his it is being used. They must be in a position to demand that the data be held elsewhere or be deleted. A right to control of one’s data would be a new approach enabling its gathering and use but also ensuring that it is tied to the individual, who cannot be made a “transparent citizen” against his or her will. Are there particular international precedents that you are looking at? Not yet. Europe has a chance to become a world-leader in handling the privacy question. Europe’s data protection regime still has some developing to do. I would hope that we can revisit a number of regulations and see if they are really suitable for modern life, whether they really make new business models possible while at the same time protecting a citizen’s private sphere. You mean across Europe? I’m talking about Europe as a whole here, because you have to work at that scale to create a level playing field for digitalisation. And we must quickly establish and expand the European digital single market, so economies of scale in new business models can develop quickly. This is one of America’s competitive advantages: in that one jurisdiction you can access a huge market with one (and with Spanish one-and-a-half) languages. That gives it lots of fiscal firepower. Right. The FDP is demanding a Digitalisation Ministry. Can’t this all be done within the existing ministries? Recent years suggest not. We want to bundle powers in one place so we can tackle these questions with speed. A side effect would be that a digitalisation minister would of course raise awareness of these challenges among society and businesses. In other words, don’t underestimate the effect this would have on the communication of these issues. Can we assume that if the FDP joins the next government it will prioritise running this ministry, if it is created? We are not even in parliament yet so it would disrespect voters to talk about coalitions, let alone the ministries we seek, at this stage. But it is true that we are ready to take on responsibility, including for difficult issues. We don’t want to govern comfortably; we want to govern only if we can implement liberal projects and solve problems. On Germany’s trade surplus Solve problems! Good. To change the subject somewhat, Christopher Pissarides, a Nobel-prize winning economist said at this conference in Lindau [the Lindau Meeting on Economic Sciences] that Germany must spend and invest more, along with other surplus countries in Europe and the world, in order to create a more balanced European economy. The IMF has said the same. Are they right? Is that your view too? No, and I’m surprised that luminaries hold such views. Germany is investing its export surplus, albeit not at home any more, as I said in answer to your first question. We export huge amounts of capital in the form of foreign plants, bonds and direct investments. In doing so we contribute to the stability and economic prosperity of other places; at the cost of having to write down many assets in the financial crisis of 2008. In retrospect we gave away the goods that we exported. But Germany needs investment too. At least, some economic think-tanks like the DIW [Institute for Economic Research] and others claim as much. I see the need for investment in Germany too. That’s not in question. It’s just that stoking up public investment in a time of strong growth like the current one could very quickly lead to overhearing, because capacity in the construction industry, for example, is used up. I consider the current investment rate too low, but to think that one can expand it ad infinitum would be voodoo economics. I would much prefer to see stronger domestic consumption in Germany through reduced taxes and social-security contributions and better conditions for private investment, which is far below the rate of depreciation. Yet your opponents claim that corporate tax cuts in the past have not led to a higher investment rates. Is it just a question of making them deep enough? I share the view that reducing corporate taxes does not automatically lead to higher investment. Therefore I would concentrate tax relief in the corporate field on the promotion of R&D investment and not on reducing taxes on profits. In the private economy I believe rising social-security contributions, rising taxes and above all the rising tax rate have made people consume less and in particular have prevented them from fulfilling the dream of owning property. The property-ownership rate in Germany is falling. That is a big danger to the pensions system. The rate is already low by European comparison. On German-American relations I didn’t know that. Now to foreign policy. You have said that Germany should at least try to improve its relationship with Russia as the situation in the Crimea will not realistically change in the next years. At the same time you are against sanctions reductions. How can the relationship with Russia improve in these circumstances? Is that realistic? My top priority is the maintenance and improvement of the transatlantic relations. The FDP is a party that cherishes the transatlantic relationship. For us it is the highest priority, because it is a community of values and we have shared economic and security interests. Donald Trump must not destroy a partnership that has been built up over decades. So the first priority for the German government and the European Commission must be to intensify contact and dialogue with the USA; if not with the White House then in Congress and in civil society. It must be more intensive than ever. Is the current government doing that? Not enough, at any rate. Civil-society actors, individual MPs, political parties and firms also have the task of building a bypass around Trump so the transatlantic relationship does not cool and so we can reconnect after Trump. Are you directing that at American states and congressmen too? A German minister can meet his American colleague any week. A German MP can visit Congress any week. The employees of an American firm in Germany or a German firm in America can nurture personal contacts and dialogues. All help to build bridges, so that lines of communication and understanding are not destroyed by Trump. But on what do you base the claim that this is not happening already? BMW for example is doing diplomacy in South Carolina, I believe, where it has a factory. The chancellor is making an effort too. More is better. The more the better. That is the very top priority. On Germany and Russia Very interesting. Now Russia. We should not settle for spectating at a spiral of escalation and military build-up. Time and again there must be possibilities to get out of this spiral. The annexation of the Crimea violates international law and is not acceptable. However Russia will not begin to change its approach, which is aggressive, authoritarian and imperialistic, on the subject of the Crimea, but at most on questions of a simpler nature. Whether there is willingness in the Kremlin to do that I don’t know, but one should be open to the possibility of getting out of this dead end. So my proposal is to freeze the Crimea conflict, not accept the violation of international law, keep up the sanctions there, but in other areas to take up lines of discussion again. In which areas? There are many areas where that would be possible. Like joint crisis management in Syria. If Russia makes a visible effort to change there, then we can think about the relaxation of individual sanctions, even if the Crimea problem is not yet solved. If it is clear that Russia is not responding we must become more concerted than now and even toughen sanctions somewhat. Then projects like the NordStream 2 pipeline would have to end or at least lose the government’s support, because to do otherwise would be inconsistent. But won’t that worry people in Estonia or Lithuania? Hearing that the Crimea conflict should be frozen, won’t they fear that it could embolden Putin to do the same to their countries? No, now we are talking about NATO partners. Ukraine was not one. If a NATO partner gets into a conflict with Russia that situation has a different quality to the one we have in Ukraine, which is itself internally instable. I see a difference in how the Western community should react. Moreover, there are historical examples of what I am proposing here. Nato’s Double-Track Decision [of 1979] followed the same principle: combining the stick with a willingness to talk. The stick, back then, was to upgrade the middle-range nuclear weapons. The willingness to talk was the offer not to do so if Russia did without the deployment of the SS-20 missiles [in Warsaw Pact countries]. On Germany and Brexit Thank you. Now Britain. The FDP is seen as pro-British both in Britain and here. I think that’s correct. What exactly should the German government do differently on Brexit? It is unfortunately the British government which must be criticised. Our answer as Europeans must be to manage Brexit fairly. I favour neither a hard nor a soft Brexit—it must be fair for both sides. We have no interest in a weakened United Kingdom, because it remains an important partner and friend, even if it has unfortunately decided to leave the European Union. You talk of a fair Brexit. Among many Brexiteers and Tories in Britain a “fair Brexit” means Britain staying in the Single Market without free movement. That is an illusion. Is that unfair? Some say it is right and fair if Britain stays in the Single Market. That it would be good for Britain, good for Germany and German companies, and that it’s impossible for Britain to accept free movement. Perhaps a compromise can be reached? There can be no such compromise, as the Single Market is not a customs union. The Single Market is a European space of freedom without borders, in which people can move. The fundamental freedoms are part of this. And in Britain the free movement of interested parties is consciously attacked by Brexiteers. Europe is about free movement of workers, not welfare tourism. Would a strong FDP in opposition or in government meaningfully change German’s policy on Brexit? No, I don’t get the impression that the German government is taking a different approach on this issue. I don’t see that from the European Commission either. At the start there was a sense that a cautionary tale should be made of Britain. I don’t see that any more. I don’t think that the the attitude in London has changed or that many realise that what was promised about Brexit was actually crude demagogy and that Britain has benefited more strongly from the EU than was thought. One last question on this subject. In terms of the sequence of talks in Brussels, Mr Barnier wants agreement about the Irish border and Britain’s financial commitments to the EU before really tackling a new relationship. Do you agree with that? Is that sensible? Yes. I agree and consider this sensible. On Germany and the Euro zone Now France. Some experts have said that a strong FDP would be bad for France. Is that correct? We emphatically support some of his [Emmanuel Macron’s] demands for changes to the European Union and the Euro zone. The federal government should support his proposal to secure the Mediterranean route and humanely accommodate refugees in camps in North Africa. If he means a European finance minister who ensures that the rules of the currency union are strongly heeded and are independently endorsed, then we support that too. By contrast a Eurogroup budget, into which is paid and out of which the deficits of national economic policies are corrected, is not endorsable for the FDP. We don’t want finances to be equalised automatically; that must continue always to be decided politically. If money for investment and innovation in Europe is needed, the FDP is always ready to discuss how this financing can be improved. Given the ECB’s money glut, however, I see no such deficit. So Mr Macron must see that the FDP is like him and how he fought his election campaign. In his campaign he always said that sweet and sour are connected in every demand you make. That’s how it is with his reform proposals too. He cannot just get sweets; he has to swallow some sour too. You are against mutualising existing debts. Would you completely rule out theoretically creating new common debts, for example to finance worthwhile investments? We could discuss a purposeful and independent investment fund like the post-war Marshall Plan. But we must decisively reject any automatic transfer mechanism or commonly held debts for consumption spending by countries incapable of reforming their welfare states. The FDP would not go along with that. But something like a Marshall Plan could include common debts? The Marshall Plan refinanced itself. Common debts for consumption spending etc—that is not conceivable. So any budgetary help to, for example, refinance debts is completely out of the question. I think would be sensible actually to implement the Juncker-Plan. It envisages many private investments that can then be leveraged by European Investment Bank programmes. So if capital is needed to finance private ventures or infrastructure works, I’m prepared to look at the proposals. But I would look at or support no proposals involving direct budgetary support or direct mutualisation of debts. That is a red line for the FPD. Thank you. You have called for Greece’s exit from the Euro zone. Do you still think that? Should that happen now? We defined clear criteria for the assistance programme in 2010. The IMF was always part of this and contributed expertise and capital. The Troika was formed around that time to ensure optimal management of the stability programme. Since 2015 the IMF has no longer been there to finance Greece. At the same time, in summer 2015, European finance ministers unanimously agreed that Greece should leave the Euro zone and were blocked by the heads of government the next day. But the technical financial assessment was that Greece should leave the Euro zone. To this day I’m of the opinion that it would be more humane and promising if Greece stayed in the EU but with a new Drachma, enabling an external devaluation of the currency. Then the money from Brussels would no longer flow as an assistance loan nobody still thinks will be paid back but as direct support that would have to be deployed for administrative modernisation and business and infrastructure finance. You are talking rather theoretically. How would you do that in practice? It would be a huge shock to the system, however good the reasoning. I doubt that Greek economic risk would unleash another shock. And in any case we have made ample progress in other areas and have found mechanisms that would make a Greek exit more of a symbolically positive decision showing that rules are now being kept again. My goal is not that we misunderstand each other nor that Greece exits, but that there be clear rules. Greece must hit its reform targets, Greece must fulfil the facts and figures in its budget. And the IMF must say that the programmes will lead to a manageable debt burden. And all three are missing. If that changes, Greece can remain in the Euro zone. If not, we need to think about a new strategy. The IMF proposes a haircut. In my assessment you can only have this haircut as part of a package under which Greece leaves the Euro zone. If Greece does not fulfil these conditions, which you have said is not currently the case, should the German government actively demand its exit from the Euro zone? At any rate the FDP would not approve a Bundestag vote on further German participation in assistance programmes for Greece. On the FDP Now let’s finally talk about the FDP. What did the party do wrong in the last government? What did the FDP do wrong? In its goals and demands of the federal government the FDP did not fulfil the demands on a liberal party. In particular we did not sufficiently use our government responsibilities and ministries to advance our agenda from the years before 2009. For example, a party that has wanted to reform the tax system for years must claim the finance ministry, which is responsible for that. So put up the finance minister? Is it still the case, that this would be a priority for the party? The FDP has broadened itself thematically. Education, digitalisation, economic renewal, also finance, energy and immigration, now mark our agenda. For that reason the situation today is no longer comparable with the one in 2009, when the FDP put a single project front and centre. How have you renewed the FDP? We answered the question: why does this party exist and why is it still needed? Why did we become members of this party and not joined the Social Democrats or the conservatives or the Greens? The answer is that the FDP cherishes a recognisable individualism. As such we are the most Anglo-Saxon party in Germany, because others think more in groups and we think more in individuals. We trust people to take responsibility for themselves. We trust them to be solidaristic, tolerant and open. So our image of the state is different from those fostered by our competitors. We see it as a sort of partner and arbiter. A partner who lowers hurdles so people can live their lives as they want and an arbiter who ensures fair economic competition and prevents any player from becoming powerful enough to dictate the rules to others. By contrast the other parties want to make the state a controller, a watcher-over of people’s lives, because they think little of the individual. Your goal is to become the third-largest party in the Bundestag. Why is that so important? It comes down to who, in the event of a grand coalition like the current one, would head the opposition. In the group of smaller parties we would then be the most important. Of course that also has a significance in the event of coalition soundings. Then we could bring our own proposals to bear more forcefully. There are rumours that you would prefer to be leader of the FDP Bundestag group, even in the event of FDP coalition participation. Whether or not that is so, you are the most prominent figure in the party. And it’s a party that has had only limited involvement in state governments until recently. Does the FDP have enough experience and personnel to discuss possible participation in a government? We have many experienced personalities, who in recent years have held responsibility in the federal governments and in state parliaments; including some who have already been ministers. For example? Nicola Beer, our general secretary. Moreover I see it as an advantage: now we can also bring new personalities from the business, science, culture and media worlds into politics. Like Macron, almost? In what some call a flaw I see a great advantage, as there is too little movement in and out of politics in Germany. The FDP could now change that. Where are there areas of agreement between the Greens and the FDP? In the field of citizens’ rights and how they must be balanced with security efforts there are certain points of contact. Moreover we have common goals, like making the education system better and reaching environmental goals. But we are a long way apart in how we see society and people. On the big questions of the day, particularly on immigration policy, I lack the powers of imagination to see how we could come to a common governing project. Securing the Mediterranean route, sending illegal migrants home and a rigorous integration policy—all that is barely conceivable with the Greens. They are still living in 2015. And Boris Palmer? [a Green mayor who has written about the difficulties of integration] And the shit storm Boris Palmer got from his own party… Christian Lindner, many thanks. Thank you.Tony Abbott was on the verge of schadenfreude overdose after question time. Credit:Andrew Meares He stuffed it up big time. And in typical Turnbull style he blamed everyone but himself. Bill Shorten reneged on his promise to be a constructive opposition leader in favour of "schoolboy tricks"; frontbenchers Peter Dutton, Christian Porter and Michael Keenan were guilty of "complacency" for leaving Parliament early; the government whips clearly didn't crack the whip hard enough; the media was making a mountain out of a meaningless, procedural molehill. It was all very reminiscent of his graceless election night speech. Shorten was a big liar; Labor sent out tricky text messages; the Australian people were too dumb to see through the Mediscare campaign. Malcolm Turnbull has one job to prove last week. He stuffed it up big time. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen The result had nothing to do with his dull and lacklustre campaign. Or his uninspiring and threadbare agenda. Or the previous nine months of backflips, thought bubbles, scandals and sellouts. It wasn't until days later he finally shouldered some of the responsibility for the disaster. But make no mistake, here too the buck stops with Turnbull. He's at the top of a government that was careless and sloppy. Bill Shorten is now following Abbott's playbook. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen Whenever Gillard's Parliament descended into farce – and it certainly did from time to time – Abbott didn't blame whips or frontbenchers or backbenchers or anyone else. It was all Gillard's fault, all the time. The PM's authority – already at its lowest ebb after July's humiliating result – has taken another knock. Labor's line – "If you can't run the Parliament you can't run the country" – is both accurate and effective. The PM can't blame Tony Abbott for this stuff-up. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen And Turnbull can't blame Abbott for this stuff-up, as Gillard could so often blame Kevin Rudd. Except in that Shorten is now following Abbott's playbook. From Abbott, Labor learnt all it needs to know about how to destabilise a weak government and prime minister. Abbott helped Labor sharpen and hone its parliamentary tactics. Labor is good at this stuff because up against Abbott, it had to be. Turnbull called last week's debacle a "wake-up call". But what sort of government needs a wake-up call three days into a new Parliament after coming within a whisker of losing power? If July 2 didn't wake them up, nothing will. No, the Australian people don't care about Parliamentary procedure. But they know chaos when they see it. They've seen a lot of it, after all. And so now the tone is set. Turnbull and his team wanted the first week to be all about economic management and budget repair, with a side serving of union-bashing. They introduced 26 bills in a bid to reassure Australians that they have a plan and they're executing on it. (Just what they plan to do once these 26 bills are passed – or perhaps more likely stalled in the Senate – remains something of a mystery. Like I said: uninspiring and threadbare agenda.) Instead, the first week raised serious questions about Turnbull's competence and his government's longevity. So what now? Turnbull has to work twice as hard to convince us he knows what he's doing. If he gets stuck in the same cycle of endless stuff-ups that ensnared both Gillard and Abbott, he's finished. One way or another, leaders who lose authority lose their jobs. If his party doesn't tear him down, the voters will. In the short-term Turnbull has a couple of things going his way that could help him regroup. First, Parliament's barely sitting; it will convene for just four of the next 35 days. So not much opportunity for more stuff-ups. Second, it's summit season. For the next couple of months Turnbull will spend a great deal of time outside of the domestic fray, looking important and prime ministerial on the world stage. The benefits of such trips often prove ephemeral – just ask Julia Gillard – but they can be a useful circuit-breaker when things are going awry. Loading Of course his number one asset – apart perhaps from that $50 million harbourside mansion – remains that he has no obvious internal challenger, unless Kevin Andrews finally decides to have his tilt. But that won't necessarily last. Nature abhors a vacuum and politics abhors a power vacuum. If Turnbull can't start providing leadership someone else will.Comet Catalina (C/2013 US10) moves past Kemble's Cascade during the last week of February 2016. Visible with binoculars and small telescopes from northern and tropical latitudes. Despite moving away from Earth as it heads towards the outer reaches of the Solar System comet Catalina remains well placed from Northern Hemisphere and tropical locations during February. At the start of the month the comet shone at magnitude +6.9 and beyond naked eye visibility but easily within binocular range. Unless something now dramatic happens it's expected to fade by another two magnitudes by months end, becoming increasingly difficult to spot with binoculars. At this level of brightness a small size telescope - preferably larger - is recommended for observing. From mid southern locations Catalina can no longer be seen. From northern locations, Catalina can be seen high in the sky towards the north after sunset. The comet remains circumpolar from many locations and therefore visible all night long. It spends all of February moving on a southerly path through the dim constellation of Camelopardalis. The highlight of the month occurs on February 22nd and 23rd when Catalina passes close by open cluster NGC 1502. This small cluster shines at magnitude +7.0 and normally would be unremarkable except for a long line of mainly 8th and 9th magnitude stars adjacent to it known as "Kemble's Cascade". This superb asterism was discovered by Father Lucian Kemble who described it as "a beautiful cascade of faint stars tumbling from the northwest down to the open cluster NGC 1502". The easiest way to find Kemble's Cascade is to imagine a line connection stars Caph (β Cas - mag. +2.3) and epsilon Cas (ε Cas - mag. +3.4) in Cassiopeia. Then extend the line eastwards by the same distance
the victim as being knocked out during the assault and possibly suffered a broken jaw. FOX 5 confirmed three juveniles were detained as they got off the train, but Metro Transit Police could not identify them as the attackers. The new images comes after FOX 5 requested the transit agency to release surveillance video and images related to the violent assault for the past two weeks. Metro declined our initial request on the day after the attack and said in a statement on Dec. 22 by Metro spokesperson Dan Stessel: “Beyond the fact that the suspect(s) in this case are described by witnesses and victim as being juveniles, it is not uncommon for detectives to withhold images/video until other investigative measures are exhausted. The reason for this is that it helps to preserve the integrity of an eventual ID by the victim. For example: Let's say we were to release images of suspects in this case and they are broadcast widely in the media. That could influence the victim's recollection of the suspect, thereby calling into question the validity of a photo array. Our goal here is to ensure that the eventual charges stick and that those responsible are successfully prosecuted. As I told Matt, we have had great success in the past identifying juveniles through school resource officers.” Anyone who has any information about the assault or are able to identify any of the persons of interest are asked to call Metro Transit Police at 202-962-2121 and reference case #2015-61461. Tips also can be sent by text message to "MyMTPD" (696873).Get the latest from TODAY Sign up for our newsletter Aug. 6, 2013, 8:01 AM GMT By Eun Kyung Kim When Jason Dottley and his husband ended their marriage last year, neither bothered to hire a lawyer because the couple agreed they had nothing to fight over. “Lawyers are what you get when things get difficult,” Dottley figured. He had no idea just how difficult getting a same-sex divorce would be. Dottley, an actor and singer, filed for divorce in April 2012 in California, where the court system was unfamiliar with how to handle his case. He eventually sought an attorney’s advice after growing frustrated with the numerous delays. “The lawyer I hired really couldn’t offer much help,” he said. “His advice was basically, you can either keep plugging away or you can pay me to plug away, but until the courts figure out what they’re doing, I can’t speed this along for you any more than you can.” It’s a story familiar to a growing number of same-sex couples, even as the gay community continues to celebrate the Supreme Court's decision in June to strike down the Defense of Marriage Act. Many hope the ruling will encourage more states to legalize gay marriage, which is currently only legal in 13 states as well as the District of Columbia. In happier times: Dottley and his former husband, Del Shores, in 2010. Today But because gay marriage is relatively new — Massachusetts became the first state to legalize it in 2004 — same-sex couples trying to get divorced have found their attempts come with high price tags and other expensive sacrifices in the few states even willing to grant them. “Gay and lesbian couples have had to be pioneers," said Susan Sommer, director of constitutional litigation for Lambda Legal, an advocacy group devoted to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender legal issues. "Until things get familiar, even in states like New York, where same-sex couples can marry, initially there will be a sense of, 'How do we do this?'” Time together: Reality vs. legality Many same-sex couples were together for years, even decades, before they were allowed to marry. That can be an expensive problem in a divorce, as most courtrooms will only divide assets starting from the time a couple actually got married. “A same-sex couple may have only been married for so many years, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t married in their hearts for much longer — and already co-mingled their assets or bought property together,” said Carolyn Satenberg, a New York-based family law attorney who has worked with many couples in this situation. That’s what happened to Margaret Wenig. The New York-based rabbi got divorced earlier this year from a woman she married in 2008, and with whom she had registered as a domestic partner in 1996. “But for the 17 years prior to our civil marriage, we lived as if we were married,” she said. “We raised children together, we merged our finances, we made each other the beneficiaries of our pensions and life insurance policies and in our wills.” The two women were also executors and health care proxies for each other, and gave each other power of attorney. When they split, however, the court would only divide assets accumulated starting from when the couple married in 2008. “Our divorce has not only been an emotional and financial nightmare for us but for our adult children and members of our extended family as well,” Wenig said. While the cost of divorce varies by city and state, Satenberg estimates that a traditional, heterosexual divorce in New York typically costs in the neighborhood of $10,000; Wenig said her divorce cost her over $120,000. Location, location, location Last week, Minnesota and Rhode Island became the latest of only 13 states to legalize same-sex marriages. Because so few states recognize gay marriages, same-sex couples have often traveled some distance to make their unions official, and don’t live in the states where they got married. Jason Dottley and his former husband Del Shores, pictured in 2008 when they obtained their marriage license. Today Since divorce is usually granted to couples by the state where they live, states that do not recognize gay marriages typically won’t grant a divorce to a couple whose marriage they view as unlawful. That means individuals would have to return to the state where they got married to get a divorce, but that can be a financial and personal hardship, since many of these states have at least a 6-month minimum residency requirement for divorce applicants. Sometimes, the decision over whether to grant divorce is also subjective. Last year in Ohio, for example, where gay marriage was banned by constitutional amendment, a Columbus judge granted two men a divorce. Days later, another judge in the same court denied a divorce to a lesbian couple on the grounds of jurisdiction, pointing to the state’s ban on gay marriage. 'Layers of cost' Sommer said her organization has seen an uptick in requests from courtrooms across the country seeking additional briefs because they want to be sure they’re taking the right steps. But that extra work keeps the meter running for attorneys of couples trying to get divorced. Satenberg estimates that same-sex couples usually pay twice as much for divorces as their heterosexual counterparts. Triple the price if children are involved. “By default, either one or both of the parents are not the biological parent. And that brings in an entirely new set of legal problems if the couple hasn’t taken the appropriate steps to secure legal standing,” Satenberg said. “Some couples think, ‘Oh, we love each other. We’re going to stay together forever.’ They don’t really think, ‘I should adopt my son, I should adopt my daughter.’” Federal income tax laws also can complicate matters. Same-sex couples splitting property or assets may get zapped with a federal gift tax that doesn’t apply to straight couples. “Heterosexual marriage has been a part of our society for as long as we’ve been a country, and therefore our case law reflects those issues, and divorces and lawyers can navigate through a pretty well defined area of law,” Satenberg said. “But when there are no clear answers, lawyers need to spend more time making motions. They need to craft legal arguments where none have previously existed because this is a new area of law.” Dottley got married in California in October 2008 during the brief window when the state allowed gay couples to wed. But when he started to seek a divorce in 2012, he found himself tangled in paperwork immediately. “They would repeatedly say, ‘Well, wait a minute. We have to create a whole new form to incorporate same-sex marriages into this dissolution process,” he said of his interaction with the legal system. “A good 50 percent of the delays were from the court not knowing how to handle things.” Dottley says he watched as many heterosexual friends experienced a much smoother divorce process. "No else was going through what I did at the time," he said. Finding a lawyer familiar with the specialized practice of gay divorce can be expensive, so it helps to find someone sympathetic to the cause. Ohio attorney Tom Addesa has successfully handled several same-sex divorces in Ohio, and charges a bargain $1,500 flat fee to handle uncontested same-sex divorce cases. He said a straight couple might pay about $5,000 if he were to charge his regular $250 hourly rate, but that a gay couple would pay far more because of additional documents he would need to prepare. Gay couples are also more likely to have their divorce applications rejected, Addesa notes, which can lead to appeals, easily adding another $10,000 to the bill depending on how much work that entails. “Those are layers of cost that straight couples never have to worry about,” Addesa said. The stigma of starting over Elizabeth Schwartz, a Miami attorney who works primarily with gay and lesbian families, said it’s time for the nation to start addressing divorce laws for same-sex couples. Otherwise, some people may start to disregard the law altogether. “What some couples are doing, and it’s really frightening, is saying, ‘Well, I live in Florida, and marriage isn’t recognized here anyway, so what’s the difference? I’m just going to get married in this new relationship. The other one — who cares?’” she said. “Well, I’m sorry, that’s bigamy.” She tells those individuals that if the relationship meant enough for them to get married in the first place, then it was real enough to get out — legally. “I feel like I’m pissing on everybody’s marriage parade when I talk about divorce, but you can’t, as a pragmatic, family lawyer, avoid it,” she said. “Sometimes, a divorce is a beginning of a bright new chapter for people.”Exodus International, the world’s largest ex-gay therapy group, has apologized to the gay community for the harm it has caused and announced it will now close. The apology, written by Exodus International president Alan Chambers, came in a statement issued Wednesday, June 20, under the title “I Am Sorry.” The statement is a personal treatise on Chambers’ evolution that in the past year saw him publicly state that though he had once claimed he was cured of his homosexuality he, as a married man with kids, still has feelings for other men and recognizing that, in the vast majority of cases, a gay “cure” or, in the parlance of Exodus, “reorientation,” is not possible. A small excerpt to give a general impression of the apology appears below: There were several years that I conveniently omitted my ongoing same-sex attractions. I was afraid to share them as readily and easily as I do today. They brought me tremendous shame and I hid them in the hopes they would go away. Looking back, it seems so odd that I thought I could do something to make them stop. Today, however, I accept these feelings as parts of my life that will likely always be there. The days of feeling shame over being human in that way are long over, and I feel free simply accepting myself as my wife and family does. As my friends do. As God does. [...] Please know that I am deeply sorry. I am sorry for the pain and hurt many of you have experienced. I am sorry that some of you spent years working through the shame and guilt you felt when your attractions didn’t change. I am sorry we promoted sexual orientation change efforts and reparative theories about sexual orientation that stigmatized parents. I am sorry that there were times I didn’t stand up to people publicly “on my side” who called you names like sodomite—or worse. I am sorry that I, knowing some of you so well, failed to share publicly that the gay and lesbian people I know were every bit as capable of being amazing parents as the straight people that I know. I am sorry that when I celebrated a person coming to Christ and surrendering their sexuality to Him that I callously celebrated the end of relationships that broke your heart. I am sorry that I have communicated that you and your families are less than me and mine. Chasing this apology came another release just hours later announcing that, after a unanimous board of directors vote, Exodus International will now be closing its doors. The group isn’t entirely dissolving however. The announcement also mentioned that a new ministry will be opening under the banner “Reduce Fear,” though at this stage the exact nature of the ministry remains unclear other than the given broad mission statement that it will “come alongside churches to become safe, welcoming, and mutually transforming communities.” Exodus was founded in 1976 and functioned as an umbrella organization that spawned over 120 ministries in the United States and Canada and over 150 ministries across 17 other countries. It advanced its mainly Protestant, somewhat literal reading of the Bible that homosexuality is sinful and that, if clients are dedicated enough, it is possible that through religious counseling they can “overcome” what they dub the choice to give in to “Same-Sex Attraction.” While the group initially condemned homosexuality as sinful, it moved away from that in recent years to parsing itself as a group simply there to help those who wanted to change their sexuality because of their religious beliefs. This might sound reasonable but there’s a snag: there’s no peer reviewed consensus-backed science to support you can change your sexuality. Moreover, the APA and other medical authorities have all stated that affirming sexuality is the proper way to deal with anxiety surrounding sexuality and that “change” efforts, in this regard, are not supported. As such the ex-gay industry has been fighting a losing battle in recent years. Industry leaders currently face lawsuits from those who have undergone the so-called therapy and have been harmed by their experiences, meanwhile legislators have moved to ban ex-gay therapy for under 18s. Specifically, Exodus’ reported part in the Ugandan conference that spawned the now infamous Kill the Gays bill has also served to expose an agenda that went far beyond just “helping” those struggling with their sexuality. While Exodus may be making a change of direction, many of its affiliated churches will continue to, as the New York Times puts it, “attack gay men and lesbians.” In fact, religious conservatives had already turned on Exodus for its supposed going soft on the issue and this week several commentators have said good riddance while calling for other ministries to rise up and continue the work of peddling the unfounded claim that you can choose to change your orientation. So, while Exodus International’s remodel and redirection certainly can be seen as significant, the religious right’s profiting off this false therapy doesn’t appear to be ending any time soon. Image credit: Thinkstock.We do not share your email address without your permission. We will send you updates on this and other important campaigns by email. If at any time you would like to unsubscribe from our email list, you may do so. Are you? Just click here: Oppose The Montgomery County Curfew Completely over the top: Montgomery County is on the verge of passing a heavy-handed, county-wide curfew. The new law would: 1) Penalize people under the age of 18 who are caught hanging out in public areas after 11 PM on weekdays and 12 AM on weekends -- so no more midnight movie premieres or concerts. Penalties are still being decided, but could range from a fine (of up to possibly $1000) to a felony. 2) Require the parent of a teenager who was detained to attend parenting classes. 3) Hold businesses liable if they have minors in their buildings after curfew hour. We've been in touch with members of the County Council -- it's clear that constituent pressure will make a huge difference as they deliberate. Just fill out the form at right to send an email to the whole County Council. Just fill out the form at right and we'll automatically email the County Council in your name. Here's a recent Washington Post article on the curfew.When i got a job with TFL, back in August '09, i kinda called it a day on exploring the London Underground. The same, possibly delusional fear i had of getting caught while actually exploring the system, now pervading my work... mainly a worry that if i got caught now, id lose my job. So i stopped. And it stayed that way until Winchester and Silent Motion found a way into City Road Tube Station.With a method of entry that offered a physical challenge, but little risk of capture, i ummed and ahhed for a while before giving in and asking Loops to go with me. We got in, down and within 3 minutes of being there, walked nearly headlong into track workers. Beating a very hasty retreat, hoping that they hadnt seen us, we were up and out in as short a time possible. Annoyingly, id spotted them just as id set my tripod up to take my first photo... which i never took.The tube is trackworker hell. Exploring it after hours (usually the only feasible time) you will find that its not so much a case of getting a night with track workers as a night without them. Anyone who has spent any time trying to get into the system after trains stop will testify to multiple failed efforts.The nice thing was, however, that with City Rd, you could get in during service. The upper station lights would be on, while the platform cavities would be nicely illuminated by passing trains. You just had to keep out of the view of their drivers.Doing my exercises.Keeping vigil.Place needs a sweep.Staunch.The platforms at City Road were considerably shorter than those of modern stations. The station closed along with the rest of the line in the 1920's for tunnel enlargement (the original Northern Line having been based on the much smaller King William Street Tube) and platform lengthening. City Road was ignored during these refurbishments and remained closed when the rest of the line reopened.Officers from British Transport police were today searching for a middle-aged woman after an Asian passenger said he was racially abused on board a Tube train. The man had been travelling on a Circle line train between Paddington and Euston Square stations when he says he was subjected to abuse from the woman sitting opposite. Another passenger then intervened, but then himself became the target of further racist insults by the woman, who went on to threaten both of the men, it is alleged. Officers from British Transport police were today searching for this middle-aged woman after an Asian man was racially abused while on board a Tube train British Transport Police have now released a photograph of a woman they want to question over the incident, which happened on the afternoon of Sunday, January 24. 'We have been provided with an image of a woman who I think has important information about what happened,' said PC Sean Dowley. 'Everyone who uses the rail network has the right to do so without fear of intimidation. 'I need to speak to the woman in the photo. I would encourage her or anyone who know her to get in touch.' Anyone with information is asked to contact British Transport Police on 0800 40 50 40, or text 61016, quoting reference 134 of 11/4/16. Information can also be passed anonymously to the independent charity Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111.The first wave of 2017 flagship Android phones is finally upon us. It's been hard to make a solid recommendation for the last few months with so many phones just on the verge of release. Now, you've got your choice of the best from 2016 and the latest and greatest from Samsung and LG. Which phone is the best for you, though? Let's break it down. Carrier Phones: LG G6 vs. Samsung Galaxy S8 The LG G6 is fully on sale and Samsung Galaxy S8 is up for pre-order. By my own self-imposed rules, that means both are eligible for consideration in this guide. Let's start with the LG G6, which is a huge improvement over last year's LG G5. LG really did what it had to do in order to come back from that disaster. It ditched the modular system, improved its build quality, and kept the price a bit under Samsung's. The LG G6 has a 5.7-inch LCD display, but it's very different than past LG displays. The phone's bezels have been shrunken way down, and the screen has rounded corners. The display as an 18:9 ratio and a resolution of 1440 x 2880, so it's taller than most phones. That allows for more screen area without making the phone as wide. It makes a difference, too. The G6 is very comfortable to hold, and you can use it fairly well with one hand. That's not something you can usually say about phones with a 5.7-inch display. Gone is LG's trademark removable battery—the G6 has an aluminum and glass frame with a sealed-in battery. It's a little larger than past LG phones with a capacity of 3300mAh. It makes it through the day with no trouble. One upshot of the design is that this phone is now IP68 water and dust resistant. It does feel like a very solid device. On the back is a fingerprint sensor that doubles as the power button. It's fast enough, but I wish the volume buttons were still back there. I miss when LG phones did that. There are also two cameras on the rear, just like the V20. One is a standard 13MP shooter and the other is a 13MP wide-angle sensor. The G6's photos are good, but not as good as what I've seen from Samsung and Google lately. The processing has a tendency to lose detail. For most applications, it should be more than good enough. On the software side, the G6 ships with Android 7.0 Nougat. It has LG's usual UI tweaks, which aren't as bad as they used to be. It lacks a certain elegance, though. The value-add features like Knock Code and Capture+ are still included. I can cope with LG's software, but it's not as slick as stock Android, or even what Samsung is doing these days. The best thing about the G6's software is that it's fast. This phone isn't quite Pixel-fast, but it's close. This is definitely a place where LG has Samsung beat, despite still running on the Snapdragon 821. The GS8 will probably run a little longer on a charge with the more efficient Snapdragon 835 on-deck. It's a little weird that LG still only has 32GB of internal storage in the G6, though. The bottom line is that the G6 is a good phone. It's a fine purchase right now, but the Galaxy S8 is shipping in a couple weeks, and you can buy that one now. The G6 is available on all carriers for around $650 total. That's less than the Galaxy S8, but that might be a better purchase for most people. The Galaxy S8 is a clear evolution of the design Samsung has been pushing over the last few years. There's no "flat" version of the phone this year. Both the Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus have curved AMOLED displays. They also have rounded corners and extremely slim bezels. The GS8 is 5.8-inches and the Plus is 6.2-inches. Both have a resolution of 1440 x 2960 pixels. So, like the G6 they have a ton of screen real estate without inflating the size of the phone too much, They're similar to last year's devices; just a bit larger. They are still IP68 rated, too. Samsung's AMOLED displays are still a big selling point. DisplayMate confirms that Samsung's GS8 panel is the best anyone has ever produced. It has the best brightness, most accurate colors, and sharpest lines. This should come as no surprise. Although, Samsung needs to be careful with its palm detection features. This has always been a pain point on the Samsung edge phones. Samsung's drive to minimize the bezels of the Galaxy S8 means the iconic navigation buttons are going away. Now they're all on-screen. Thankfully, that means you can change the order to the "correct" one. Additionally, the screen has a pressure-sensitive region where the home button pops up. Even if the button is hidden, you can hard-press that area to trigger the home button. The Galaxy S8 will have the first Snapdragon 835 chips in any consumer device. Despite the added power, Samsung again has tuned them conservatively to save power—the GS8 and S8 Plus will ship with small-ish 3000 and 3500mAh batteries, respectively. Expect more battery life overall compared to the G6, but without the same zippy performance. Samsung only has one cadmera sensor on the back of the Galaxy S8, but early impressions are that it'll be better than the camera on the LG G6. Samsung just has better image processing than LG, and the hardware will be more than capable. I'd say if photos are a primary concern for you, the Galaxy S8 should be your first stop. Just like the G6, the Galaxy S8 will ship with Android 7.0 Nougat. The interface is very similar to the "Grace" version of TouchWiz that debuted with the Note 7. It's cleaner and more consistent with stock Android than it once was, but still not as good. In general, I think TouchWiz is better than the LG UI currently. The Galaxy S8 is available on all carriers for around $750 and the S8 Plus is $100 more. Even though it's more expensive, I think the style and camera of the Galaxy S8 will make it a slightly better choice for most people. The LG G6 is a very good phone, though. Unlocked phones The unlocked phone lineup hasn't changed too much this month. The G6 and GS8 will have unlocked variants, but neither company has shown much interest in updating the unlocked variants reliably. That leaves us with the Pixel as far and away the best unlocked phone you can buy. Frankly, I still think this is the best phone overall. There are two versions of the Pixel: a 5-inch 1080p model and a 5.5-inch 1440p one. The smaller of the two has the same specs, which is unusual. Many OEMs treat smaller phones as budget devices. They including a Snapdragon 821, 4GB of RAM, and 32 or 128GB of storage. This is last year's hardware, but it's used to great effect in the Pixel. These phones are as fast as any Android phone I've used, and they stay that way even after extended use. On the battery front, the Pixel XL has a 3420mAh battery and the regular Pixel is 2770mAh. Making it through a day is no problem, and some people will even be able to get through a second with the XL. The improved Doze Mode in Android Nougat means these phones use almost no power while sitting at night. Google also has very speedy fast charging built-in. I don't even bother charging at night because a few minutes on the charger in the morning and they're all set. The Pixels have an aluminum unibody with a glass inlay on the back around the camera. It seems like glass frames are the thing right now, so I appreciate that I can use the Pixel without leaving fingerprints all over it. It's not really attractive or unattractive—the Pixel just is. The Pixel is not IP68 certified, which is one of the more disappointing things about it. The fingerprint sensor is on the back of the phone, perfectly placed to tap with your index finger when you pick up the phone. It's as fast as the Nexus 6P was, which is to say it's fine. Some phones have since surpassed it in terms of speed. The Pixel is currently running Android 7.1 Nougat, and it'll continue to get timely updates for couple years. This is one of the main reason you buy a Pixel. Google updates it every single month, so you're always running the best pure Android software. It'll be among the first devices to get Android O later this year, and there's a developer preview now. The Pixel is spendy with a starting price of $650 and the Pixel XL is $760. Both these phones only have 32GB of storage and no microSD expansion. That's a bummer. However, you can get the phones on a payment plan from Google, which is rare with unlocked phones. If you're on Verizon, the carrier sells the Pixel directly. That's definitely the way to go on that carrier. If you want something a little less expensive in the realm of unlocked phones, there's the OnePlus 3T. That's still the best "budget flagship" phone on the market. The OP3T has an aluminum unibody frame with a gunmetal finish. There is a hardware alert slider on the left side, allowing you to set the notification mode without waking up the device. At the bottom of the front panel is a fingerprint sensor that doubles as the home button. It's one of the fastest and most accurate I've ever used. Seriously, bravo on this one OP. The capacitive buttons on either side of the home button aren't my favorite, though. They're just small glowing dots. The OnePlus 3T has a 5.5-inch 1080p AMOLED display. This is a good panel, as long as you make some tweaks. For example, enable sRGB mode. The viewing angles are good, but you'll see a little PenTile blurring around text. The 16MP camera on this phone is impressive for the price. It won't stand up to the Pixel, but it's better than other $400-ish phones. The Snapdragon 821 and 6GB of RAM in the OP3T make it a very fast phone. I don't think it's quite as snappy as the Pixel, but it's close enough that you won't find yourself waiting on the OP3T. The 3300mAh battery is alright—it's certainly an improvement over the 3000mAh cell in the OP3. You'll make it through a day, but not much more. The OnePlus 3T is one of the few non-google devices with Android 7.1. That's a significant improvement over OP's update performance last year. The OP2 hadn't even been updates to Marshmallow by this point. The phone has all the basic Nougat goodies, and there are a few cool additions from OP. I particularly like the dark system UI mode and the screen-off gestures. The OnePlus 3T is a good value at $440. You'd have to spend $200 more for the base model Pixel. I think that's a better phone, but it's fine to get the OP3T instead. Wrapping Up It's difficult to make a firm pronouncement about which carrier device you should get right now. The Galaxy S8 is still a pre-order, and he early opinions of the device aren't very in-depth. That said, the GS8 looks great and has an amazing screen. The LG G6 is a very strong showing, though. You'll be happy with either, but I'd give a slight edge to the Galaxy S8. The one exception to that is if you're on Verizon. You can get the Pixel direct from Big Red, and it's still a fantastic phone. If you're buying unlocked, the Pixel is definitely the best you can get.A staff adjusts European Union and Turkish (L) flags ahead of the arrival of Turkey's Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan (not pictured) at the EU Commission headquarters in Brussels January 21, 2014. REUTERS/Francois Lenoir BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Union on Wednesday criticized Ankara for summoning Berlin’s envoy over a song mocking the Turkish leader on German TV, a friction at a delicate time when the bloc counts on Turkey’s help on migration under a controversial deal. Turkey’s Foreign Ministry summoned Germany’s ambassador over a satirical broadcast by German television station NDR, which ran a two-minute satirical song mocking Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan earlier this month. “This move doesn’t seem to be in line with upholding the freedom of the press and freedom expression, which are values the EU cherishes a lot,” Mina Andreeva, a spokeswoman for the European Union’s executive arm, told a daily news briefing. The spokeswoman added the European Commission’s head Jean-Claude Juncker “believes this moves Turkey further (away) from the EU rather than closer to us.” Right groups and the West regularly criticize Ankara for its track record on human rights but the 27-nation EU has still sealed a deal with Ankara on March 18 to return all migrants and refugees reaching European shores from the Turkish coast. Berlin, the key driving force behind the Turkish deal, has said press freedom was non-negotiable in its ties with Ankara. The EU hopes the migration agreement, badly criticized by rights groups, would give it breathing space as it struggles to control an influx of people fleeing wars and poverty in the Middle East and beyond.Deputy editorial page editor A mere allegation. If true. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, she who has encountered no argument too weak to embrace, had this to say about allegations that Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore molested a 14-year-old girl: "Like most Americans, the president believes we cannot allow a mere allegation, in this case one from many years ago, to destroy a person's life. However, the president also believes that if these allegations are true, Judge Moore will do the right thing and step aside." So many things to unpack in these 46 words. Let's start with the elephant in the quote, the uncomfortable fact that President Trump was himself the target of such years-old "mere" allegations, more than a dozen, from women who claimed he sexually assaulted them. These were, as then-candidate Trump assured us — and as Sanders, ever willing, reasserted just last month — all "horrible liars," who would be duly sued after the election. Still waiting, Mr. President. Trump's conveniently flexible standard on accusations — and he is not alone — boils down to: If the accuser points a finger at a Democrat — Bill Clinton, Harvey Weinstein — her word is to be trusted, automatically. If she complains about a Republican, Trump's otherwise dormant devotion to due process kicks in. How can claims from "many years ago" be allowed to "destroy a person's life"? Some answers: Because they are entirely credible. Because the girl, now a woman, has no conceivable ax to grind — she is a longtime Republican, a Trump voter even — and nothing to gain from coming forward. Because three other women related similar, although less disturbing stories, underscoring Moore's interest in younger girls. Because the presumption of innocence, while essential in the legal realm, does not mean the elimination of common sense outside it. (Thank you, Mitt Romney, for saying that.) The willing suspension of disbelief has its limits, or should. Unless, that is, you are a politician dealing with a story you wish would go away. Then you turn instinctively to if-then-ism. "If these allegations are true..." said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), leading — or not — his prove-it caucus. Disappointingly, among them were women senators who ought to know better. "If it's true..." said Alaska's Lisa Murkowski. "If the allegations..." said West Virginia's Shelley Moore Capito. "If there is any truth at all to these horrific allegations..." said Maine's Susan Collins. Seriously, have you read this article? How can you think about serving alongside this man? The correct response came from Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who — without hedging — termed the allegations "deeply disturbing and disqualifying" and called on Moore to withdraw. If-then-ism is the rhetorical cousin of what-about-ism, a bid to deflect attention by questioning whether those complaining about "x" were equally inflamed by "y," when "y" involved someone on their side. If-then-ism represents a similar effort to avoid casting a politically inconvenient judgment. It is better, sure, than the jaw-dropping alternative: so-what-ism, remarkably flagrant among Alabamians in response to the Moore report. "Much ado about nothing," State Auditor Jim Zeigler told the Washington Examiner. Joseph did it with Mary, he observed. Except, um, minor theological point here — did he? Still, there is something clarifying in the brutal honesty of so-what-ism. A 32-year-old Moore could put a 14-year-old girl's hand on his erect penis and touch her over her bra and underpants. Trump could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue. It would not deter their supporters. Okay, at least we know where you're coming from. Your moral parameters are clear in their absence. If-then-ism, by contrast, is pure cowardly dodge. There are some situations where the fact pattern may be too murky to pass judgment. Not here. What more information do the if-then-ers want? What would be the forum for this factual discovery to take place? One last strategy — blame the messenger — has come into play here, deployed by Moore and supporters such as former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon. "The Bezos Amazon Washington Post that dropped that dime on Donald Trump is the same Bezos Amazon Washington Post that dropped the dime this afternoon on Judge Roy Moore," Bannon said, referring to Post owner and Amazon chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos and the "Access Hollywood" tape. "Now is that a coincidence?" No, it's not. Good reporting breeds good reporting. My newsroom colleagues did an incredible job with those stories, as they did in helping break the Monica Lewinsky story two decades ago. Blaming the messenger is always easier than hearing an unwelcome message. It does not make that message any less true. Read more from Ruth Marcus's archive, follow her on Twitter or subscribe to her updates on Facebook.2. Things you need to know about this release Corrections to be aware of We informed users on 25 November 2016 that, following a quality review, a processing error had been identified in the compilation of the estimates for the rail transport industry (49.1-2), which affects the period Quarter 1 (Jan to Mar) 1997 to Quarter 2 (Apr to June) 2016. In line with the National Accounts Revisions Policy, this error has been corrected in the Index of Services and Quarterly National Accounts published on 23 December 2016 for data from Quarter 1 2015. Data prior to 2015 will be corrected when next open for revision with Blue Book
She admitted to “erasing” tens of thousands of emails, but simply hitting the delete key was obviously not all that happened. As Professor Jacobson at Legal Insurrection points out, there was a whole lot of scrubbing going on. And yet, he sees possible signs of hope. The server has been wiped clean, according to Hillary’s lawyers. But that may not be the last word on it. The feds are extremely good at overcoming all but the most sophisticated wipes. The inspection also may reveal the timeline when the document destruction took place. I suppose that’s possible. What’s to be found – assuming a vigorous search is going to take place and the results are ever made public – could run the range from zip to… something. Perhaps fragments of the deleted emails still exist, assuming that drives have not been entirely replaced with the originals destroyed. Even if you can’t reconstruct the original data, can you establish a timeline for when things were erased and how vigorous the cleaning process was? I’m not deep enough in the geek weeds to say. But I still maintain that so much time has gone by that the results will be suspect at best. This is like an episode of The Sopranos where the cops show up at Tony’s sister’s house to look for the body after the boys have had six months to soak the bathroom down in Clorox and drop the trash bags in the ocean.When an unplanned stop on a deserted island gives Takashi, Saeko and the rest of the ragged band of survivors a chance to expose themselves to something other than zombie bites for a change, they're more than ready to take a break and let their hair down. Discovering the remnants of an old beach store, the entire group strips to swimsuits and sets out to make the uninhabited island inhabitable, but they're unaware that this seeming paradise is actually just the dead calm before the storm. Because sometimes the recently deceased aren't the only problems that can lie buried in the sand, and as the swimwear comes off and the inhibitions come down, a kink in the island's food chain sets a truly shocking series of events into motion! You won't believe what comes out next, but suffice it to say that the deserted island may not be so deserted after all! It's an extra special H.O.T.D. that's even hotter than usual as the naked and the dead come together like never before in HIGH SCHOOL OF THE DEAD - DRIFTERS OF THE DEAD!Scientists have built a tiny, long-term memory cell that can both store and process information at the same time, just like the human brain. This is one of the first multi-state electronic memory cells, and it represents a crucial step towards building a bionic brain. Not only does this new cell - which is 10,000 times thinner than a human hair - open up the potential to store and process way more data than ever before, scientists are even more excited about the fact that it has'memristive' abilities. This means that it's able to retain remember and be influenced by information that has previously been stored on it - something that our current storage devices aren't capable of. "This is the closest we have come to creating a brain-like system with memory that learns and stores analog information and is quick at retrieving this stored information," project leader Sharath Sriram, from RMIT University in Australia said in a press release. "The human brain is an extremely complex analog computer... its evolution is based on its previous experiences, and up until now this functionality has not been able to be adequately reproduced with digital technology." The cell's new abilities add another dimension beyond the on/off memory cells we currently use to store our data on conventional devices, such as USBs, which are only capable of storing one binary digit (either a 0 or a 1) at a time. The researchers are comparing this to the difference between a regular light switch, which either turns the light on or off, and a dimmer switch, which gives you access to all the shades of light in-between. "It can give you much more flexibility in terms of what information you store and what functionality you get," one of the researchers, Hussein Nili, told Jessica Kidd over at ABC News. Publishing in Advanced Functional Materials, the researchers explain that the cells are made out of a functional oxide material in the form of an ultra-thin film. The team created the material last year, and demonstrated that it was highly stable and reliable. But they've now successfully introduced controlled defects into the film, which allow the cell to be influenced by previous events. "We have now introduced controlled faults or defects in the oxide material along with the addition of metallic atoms, which unleashes the full potential of the'memristive' effect - where the memory element's behaviour is dependent on its past experiences," Nili explained in the release. All this means that the cells could one day be used to build an artificial system that mimics the extraordinary abilities of the human brain, which is extremely fast, requires very little energy input, and has almost limitless memory storage. While the benefits to artificial intelligence and computing are obvious, such a 'bionic brain' could also greatly help human health by allowing researchers to create and study diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's outside of the body. "In terms of those diseases, there are two problems: it is very hard to read what is going on inside a live brain, and the ethical aspect - you cannot experiment on live subjects without repercussions," Nili told Ariel Bogle from Mashable. "If you can have a bionic brain and you can replicate those kinds of [diseased] brains... it will make research much easier and accessible." We're pretty excited to see what these little cells can do.Call it Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s secret stash. A new report from CIBC World Markets says Canada’s federal and provincial governments could reap as much as $5 billion annually in tax revenues from the sale of legal marijuana. CIBC economist Avery Shenfeld crunched the numbers using current estimates of Canadian recreational pot consumption, the revenue experience in U.S. states that have legalized, and other factors – such as prevailing “sin tax” rates on alcohol and tobacco. The Liberal government has promised to legalize, tax and regulate marijuana and has made MP Bill Blair, the former Toronto police chief, the lead on investigating a new regulatory model. Trudeau maintains that legalized pot will not be a cash cow, and that all revenues will be used to address public health and addictions issues. The bank report suggests there will be a sizeable bump in government revenues from the eventual legal sales, but says the cash will not enough be to make government deficits simply go up in smoke.A woman was killed in the Ballito Junction regional mall this afternoon when her ex boyfriend attacked her with a knife and cut her throat. Shortly before 5pm this afternoon (Wednesday) the woman – an employee at Turn and Tender – was sitting on the couch in the restaurant talking to her current boyfriend. Also read: Eyewitness account: Ballito pastor arrests and then prays for alleged Junction murderer According to Umhlali SAPS spokesperson Captain Vinny Pillay her ex saw the pair together and this was believed to be what set him off. Eyewitnesses at the mall said she went to the bathroom and was followed in by her attacker. “We just started hearing terrible screams coming from the ladies toilet,” said one witness, who asked to remain anonymous. IPSS Medical Rescue’s Paul Herbst confirmed that the woman was found dead in the bathroom. Her attacker was detained by the pastor of a local church, who did not want to be identified, until he was handed over to the police. The brutal attack attracted a large crowd, who had to be kept away from the police car where the man was locked up in order to prevent them from trying to take the law into their own hands. However, this did not stop onlookers from booing and heckling the man from nearby. Entrance three to the Junction was closed after the attack while plain-clothes detectives, uniformed police, paramedics and forensic pathologists worked on the crime scene. WATCH: Journalist Allan Troskie live at the scene earlier today. Some information in the videos may reflect initial reports, which have since been updated. Allan Troskie is live at the Ballito Junction, where a woman's throat was cut in a domestic dispute. UPDATE: New information has indicated that it was the victim's EX boyfriend who attacked her, not her current boyfriend as stated in the video. Posted by North Coast Courier on Wednesday, 18 October 2017 The Courier is live outside the Ballito Junction where a woman was attacked and her throat allegedly slit. UPDATE: The victim was reportedly an employee of Turn n Tender and not Tashas, the two restaurants are opposite one another. She has been confirmed dead. RIP. Posted by North Coast Courier on Wednesday, 18 October 2017 >> Ready to say ‘I Do’ on the Dolphin Coast? Meet the team ready to advise, help and deliver on your big day. >> Visit our Education feature for a collection of all the best schools, tutoring systems, and even some colleges and training facilities on the North Coast. Do you want to receive news alerts via WhatsApp? Send us a WhatsApp message (not an sms) with your name and surname to 061 718 4438. Please read our WhatsApp broadcast list disclaimer. Join us on BBM at 59015786 Join the conversation on Facebook, Twitter and InstagramSearch Gallery Daria Daria theELFknownasErinlee 69 Advertisement Advertisement Daria and Jane colored theELFknownasErinlee 180 Daria and Trent colored theELFknownasErinlee 152 Jane Lanes Desk theELFknownasErinlee 188 Jane Lane and Tom Sloane color theELFknownasErinlee 69 Monique theELFknownasErinlee 49 New portrait Daria theELFknownasErinlee 37 New portrait Jane theELFknownasErinlee 31 New portrait Trent theELFknownasErinlee 27 New portrait Tom Sloane theELFknownasErinlee 18 New portrait Trent inks theELFknownasErinlee 14 New portrait Tom Sloane inks theELFknownasErinlee 8 New portrait Jane inks theELFknownasErinlee 9 New portrait Daria inks theELFknownasErinlee 17 Tom Sloane and Jane Lane Hugging theELFknownasErinlee 45 Daria and Others theELFknownasErinlee 34 Jane theELFknownasErinlee 39 Daria theELFknownasErinlee 178 Tom Sloane theELFknownasErinlee 45 Daria and Jane theELFknownasErinlee 19 Trent Lane theELFknownasErinlee 115 Tom Sloane and Jane Lane theELFknownasErinlee 41 Daria and Trent theELFknownasErinlee 170 daria and trent 2 theELFknownasErinlee 43Northern Ireland MLAs to get pay rise despite no work and call to halt salaries BelfastTelegraph.co.uk THE Government will consider stopping MLAs' pay to put pressure on the parties to reach a deal, the Secretary of State has warned. https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/northern-ireland-mlas-to-get-pay-rise-despite-no-work-and-call-to-halt-salaries-35573191.html https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/article35573190.ece/5a5d1/AUTOCROP/h342/2017-03-29_new_29861023_I2.JPG Email THE Government will consider stopping MLAs' pay to put pressure on the parties to reach a deal, the Secretary of State has warned. James Brokenshire's declaration came as it was revealed Stormont politicians were set to get a salary rise - on April Fool's Day. Their pay will increase by £500 this Saturday to £49,500 despite the Assembly being mothballed because of the political crisis. The wages hike takes effect automatically under rules laid down by the independent body that set MLAs' salaries and expenses. Addressing the House of Commons yesterday, Mr Brokenshire said he would keep "all options under consideration" in his efforts to see a new Executive formed, and he agreed that withholding politicians' pay "might crystallise minds." That view is overwhelmingly shared across Northern Ireland, with a Belfast Telegraph poll yesterday showing 93% public support for stopping MLAs' pay while Stormont is in deadlock. At Westminster, former Northern Ireland Secretary Owen Paterson asked Mr Brokenshire if "one measure that would put pressure on the parties to come back to the talks and might crystallise minds" would be warning them that, if a deal wasn't reached, MLAs' "salaries and expenses will not be paid from the public purse." Mr Brokenshire replied: "Certainly, we will be keeping all options under consideration, but the focus has to be on looking to the positive, looking to that outcome that sees parties coming together and getting the devolved government back on its feet at the earliest opportunity." The Secretary of State told MPs that the intensity of negotiations must increase urgently. He said that, if the talks succeeded, he would move legislation to allow an Executive to be formed without the need for another election. But Mr Brokenshire warned that while the Government did not want a return to direct rule, it would be forced to consider it if the negotiations failed. "In the absence of devolved government, it is ultimately for the UK Government to provide for political stability and good governance", he said. "We do not want to see a return to direct rule. As our manifesto at the last election stated, local policies and local services should be determined by locally elected politicians through locally accountable institutions. "But should the talks fail in their objectives, the Government will have to consider all options." Sinn Fein reacted angrily to Mr Brokenshire's warning, with the party's Stormont leader, Michelle O'Neill (right), declaring a return to direct rule would be "an act of bad faith", breaching previous agreements. Writing in today's Belfast Telegraph, Ms O'Neill said: "Sinn Fein has made it clear that all the outstanding issues can be resolved. "We have no objection to the British Secretary of State leaving some time for that to be done, but we are totally opposed - and we would look to the Irish Government to oppose - any new legislation to bring back direct rule." Ms O'Neill claimed the only option Mr Brokenshire was entitled to take was to call another Assembly election. "There is no legal basis for any other course of action", she said. "While parties may or may not want an election, the fact is if the British Secretary of State brings in new legislation to restore direct rule, that will be an act of bad faith and a clear breach of an agreement between the Irish and British Governments in 2006." Ms O'Neill insisted that Sinn Fein was committed to re-engaging in dialogue with the other parties. "We now need the necessary political leadership from the DUP and British Government to get the job done and allow our society to move towards a more prosperous and progressive future", she said. However, DUP MP Nigel Dodds (left) claimed that Sinn Fein had decided the time for devolution was over and that the party's main ambitions "lie southwards" amidst fresh talk of a united Ireland. Mr Dodds said: "Whilst we want devolution to work in partnership with Sinn Fein and others, we need a partner who is willing to work realistically within the parameters of a Northern Ireland with devolved government, within the UK, within the institutions as agreed, and with Brexit a reality. "Some of us fear that Sinn Fein has now decided that the time for devolution is over, and they're moving on to a different phase where their main ambitions lie southwards." Ulster Unionist MLA Andy Allen said that Sinn Fein had walked away from devolution "with total disregard for frontline public services and the people who rely on them - often the most vulnerable in society who Sinn Fein claim to be concerned about". Mr Allen claimed it was disgraceful that after an "unnecessary" Assembly election that cost taxpayers £5m, we now had a political vacuum and a lack of leadership at Stormont. Meanwhile, the former Labour Secretary of State, Lord Hain, urged Theresa May to play a direct role in trying to break the political deadlock. Lord Hain, who was in office in Northern Ireland from 2005 to 2007, said he was "puzzled" as to why she had not been more directly involved in the process. "At times in the past, a Prime Minister's direct involvement - calling a summit in Hillsborough Castle or wherever it may be, together with the Taoiseach - has been crucial in breaking the gridlock", he added. "The Prime Minister may be busy on other things, like Brexit, but there's nothing more important, I would suggest, on her agenda than keeping the peace process in Northern Ireland moving forward. "If it stalls, and if it goes in any sense into reverse, that could be very dangerous indeed." Lord Hain added a return to direct rule would be "a massive, possibly irreversible setback." Belfast TelegraphAs the son of a multi-millionaire, hereditary Labour MP Anas Sarwar has probably never had to think very much about money in his life. We’re not sure that’s an excuse for the mind-numbing arithmetical stupidity of what he says in the Daily Record today. Proposing to “turn up the heat on the SNP by tearing apart some of their main policies”, and more specifically by continuing Labour’s enormously unpopular assault on universal services, Sarwar is reported by the paper as saying: “there is no point funding free care for the elderly when half the people in the poorest parts of Scotland do not live long enough to take advantage.” Bizarrely – and not for the first time it pains us to be obliged to spell out something so blindingly obvious – it seems to have escaped Mr Sarwar’s attention that dead people don’t require care. Therefore, the policy only requires to be funded for the people who DO live long enough to obtain its benefits, which means that the only financial savings to be made would be those made at the expense of old, sick, but still alive people. (Who, it ought to also go without saying, have spent their whole lives paying tax and National Insurance in the legitimate expectation that the state would uphold its end of the bargain when they came to need its help. The subtext of Mr Sarwar’s comments seems to be that as fewer people in Glasgow survive Labour rule for long enough to benefit from free personal care, the policy is worthless and the old folk of Edinburgh, Dundee, Inverness, Perth and Aberdeen should be left in pain and misery.) Astonishingly, then, Mr Sarwar appears to be suggesting that Labour will abandon all the elderly people in Scotland who DO need care, on the grounds that some other people die young (a statistic likely to rise if Labour’s plan to also end free prescriptions comes into effect), in order that he might put the SNP under political pressure. We’ve re-read his comments several times to check, because it defies belief that anyone could either be that galactically stupid or assume the electorate was, but we can find no other interpretation. We suspect not even Willie Rennie holds the intellect of voters in such total contempt that he’d demand the cancellation of a widely-supported policy in order to save money that it doesn’t actually cost. But Labour surrendered all grip on reason in their tribal hatred of the SNP many years ago. Only if the Scottish people do the same will catastrophically witless and venal trough-grubbers like Anas Sarwar still have a career in politics after 2014.Click here to start learning Norwegian for free. No matter which country you come from there are festivals to celebrate. You also celebrate birthdays, weddings, etc with your family and friends. Today we will learn some vocabulary and phrases about celebrations in Norwegian. The most important festivals that I have seen in Norway were Christmas, New Year, Easter and The National Day. During Christmas, Norwegians have around a week off where they celebrate with family and friends. Norwegians also enjoy holidays during Easter where many of them spend time with their family and friends in the mountain cabins. The National Day (or Constitution Day) is celebrated on 17th May where there is a children’s parade in most cities of Norway. To begin with here are some words to add to your Norwegian vocabulary. And here are a few phrases to help you understand the vocabulary better. (Visited 428 times, 1 visits today)GUWAHATI: India ramped up its air capability on the eastern frontier on Friday as three Sukhoi-30 MKI air dominance fighter aircraft made their maiden landing at a refurbished advanced landing ground (ALG) at Pasighat in Arunachal Pradesh, barely 100 km from the Chinese border. This is the first ALG for fighter aircraft in India.The IAF's Russian-made frontline fighter jets touched down on the plains of Pasighat in a `historic first'.The ALG in Pasighat, in the predominantly hilly state, is now the closest to China. Pasighat will also be used by the US-built C-130J Super Hercules aircraft.Pasighat is the fifth reconstructed ALG in Arunachal Pradesh. The strategically located ground was built during the Sino-India war of 1962 and remained unused after the war. After the bitter war, that saw huge casualties on the Indian side, China often claims Arunachal Pradesh as part of its territory. China has as many as 15 such ALGs along the McMahon Line, the imaginary line dividing the two countries. China refuses to acknowledge its validity.This line is now known as the Line of Actual Control.The IAF said, “The ALG at Pasighat will facilitate air connectivity with the rest of the country and boost tourism in Arunachal. The pristine and picturesque landscape of Pasighat, on the banks of the river Siang, will be accessibleto the rest of the world.“Perth's unquenchable thirst for beer preserved in malt house redevelopment Posted Western Australia's thirst for beer has always required a steady supply of malt, much of which was produced in Northbridge for almost 100 years. The story of how the large red brick warehouse and malt silos came to be on Palmerston Street starts with a young Perth brewer and businessman named David Harwood. Mr Harwood was a prominent citizen in Perth. In his lifetime he held the position of chief brewer for Swan Breweries, and he was also a Perth city councillor and chairman of the Perth Roads Board. "David Harwood bought the Stanley Brewery in 1877 and ran it until 1882, when he sold it on," Richard Offen from Heritage Perth told 720 ABC Perth. "He also bought this block of land on the corner of Palmerston and Stuart streets." In the late 1890s Mr Harwood founded a new brewery in West Perth, and in 1903 set up the Perth Pneumatic Malting Company on his Palmerston Street land. "Malt is basically germinated cereal grains, usually barley, which has been dried by a process known as malting, and the product is used in the production of beer and whisky," Mr Offen explained. "With the growth of the brewing industry in Perth during the first gold rush, there was demand for specialised malting. "Lots of the early breweries did it themselves, but as beer production went up it became a more specialised process. "It seems to have been an extremely profitable concern for Harwood." Tragedy strikes Harwood family In 1906, the original malting building was destroyed by fire and rebuilt in what Mr Harwood described at the time as "the most complete and up-to-date establishment erected". In 1907, Mr Harwood's brewery also moved to the Palmerston Street site. Then, in 1910, tragedy struck. "There was a dreadful accident in the brewery, when David's brother Sam, the brewery's engineer, was very bad scalded," Mr Offen said. "While attending to the vat, a steam pipe burst. Sadly, Sam died of his injuries two weeks later." From that point forward the business appeared to decline, and in 1917 it was taken over by the Union Brewery of Kalgoorlie. In 1928, it was sold again to AO Barrett, who made a deal with Swan Breweries to cease brewing and concentrate on malt production. Plant buildings now on heritage register "By the late 1940s a fourth malt house and a third kiln were completed, signalling an increase in demand and production," Mr Offen said. "Between 1972 and 1981, what was called a flexi-malt plant was constructed here. "This operated alongside the slower, traditional plant, but provided a much faster process for making the malt. "Then in 1986 the property was purchased by a Victorian malting company, and in the late 1990s malting ceased and the company vacated the site." In the early 2000s the site was redeveloped into more than 100 apartments and townhouses using some of the original plant buildings, which are now listed on the state heritage register. "It was one of the earlier adaptive re-uses of an old building here in Perth and a lovely reminder of having a beer," Mr Offen said. Topics: history, 20th-century, human-interest, urban-development-and-planning, perth-6000UPDATE: Since releasing this post, we’ve published a full RebelLabs report entitled Java 8 Revealed: Lambdas, Default Methods and Bulk Data Operations. Click on the button below to get the full report! [publication id=”65″ label=”Get the complete RebelLabs report”] Project Lambda is the major theme in the upcoming Java 8 and probably the most awaited one among Java developers. There’s one interesting feature that is being added to Java along with lambdas – the defender methods. In this blog post my intention is to look under the covers – to see how lambdas are represented by the runtime and what bytecode instructions are involved during method dispatch. Although Java 8 is yet to be released it is still possible to get a taste of what it will look like by downloading the early access binaries for all the target platforms. So you want to use lambdas, huh? If you are familiar with other languages that include lambda expressions, such as Groovy or Ruby, you might be surprised at first that it is not as simple in Java. In Java, lambda expression is “SAM type”, which is an interface with a single abstract method (yes, interfaces can include non-abstract methods now – the defender methods). So for instance the well known Runnable interface is perfectly suitable for serving as a SAM type: Runnable r = () -> System.out.println("hello lambda!"); Or the same could be applied to the Comparable interface: Comparator<Integer> cmp = (x, y) -> (x < y)? -1 : ((x > y)? 1 : 0); The same can be written as follows: Comparator<Integer> cmp = (x, y) -> { return (x < y)? -1 : ((x > y)? 1 : 0); }; So it seems like the one-liner lambda expressions have implicit return for the statement. What if I want to write a method that can accept a lambda expression as a parameter? Well, you have to declare the parameter as a functional interface, and then you can pass the lambda in: interface Action { void run(String param); } public void execute(Action action){ action.run("Hello!"); } Once we have a method that takes a functional interface as a parameter we can invoke it as follows: execute((String s) -> System.out.println(s)); Effectively, the same expression can be replaced with a method reference since it is just a single method call with the same parameter: execute(System.out::println); However, if there’s any transformations going on with the argument, we can’t use method references and have to type the full lambda expression out: execute((String s) -> System.out.println("" + s + "")); I think the syntax is rather nice and we now have quite an elegant solution for lambdas in the Java language despite the fact Java doesn’t have functional types per se. Functional interfaces in JDK8 As we learned, the runtime representation of a lambda is a functional interface (or a “SAM type”), an interface that defines only one abstract method. And although JDK already includes a number of interfaces, like Runnable and Comparable, that match the criteria, it is clearly not enough for API evolution. It just wouldn’t be as logical if we started using Runnables all around the code. There’s a new package in JDK8, java.util.function, that includes a number of functional interfaces that are intended to be used by the new API. We won’t list all of them here – just do yourself a favour and study the package yourself :) It seems that the library is evolving quite actively as some interfaces come and go. For instance it used to provide java.util.function.Block class which isn’t present in the latest build that I have at the time of writing this post: anton$ java -version openjdk version "1.8.0-ea" OpenJDK Runtime Environment (build 1.8.0-ea-b75) OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM (build 25.0-b15, mixed mode) As I discovered it is now replaced with Consumer interface and is used for all the new methods in the collections library. For instance, the Collection interface defines the forEach method as follows: public default void forEach(Consumer<? super T> consumer) { for (T t : this) { consumer.accept(t); } } The interesting bit of the Consumer interface is that it actually defines one abstract method – accept(T t), and a defender method – Consumer<T> chain(Consumer<? extend T> consumer). It means that it is possible to chain the calls using this interface. I’m not quite sure how it will be used since I couldn’t find chain(..) method usages in the JDK library yet. Also, I noticed that all the interfaces are marked with @FunctionalInterface runtime annotation. But aside its runtime presence the annotation is used by javac to verify if the interface is really a functional interface and there’s no more than one abstract method in it. So if I try to compile code like this @FunctionalInterface interface Action { void run(String param); void stop(String param); } The compiler will tell me: java: Unexpected @FunctionalInterface annotation Action is not a functional interface multiple non-overriding abstract methods found in interface Action While the following will compile just fine: @FunctionalInterface interface Action { void run(String param); default void stop(String param){} } Decompiling lambdas I’m usually not as curious about the syntax and language features as I am about the runtime representation of those features. That is why one natural thing for me was to grab my favourite javap utility and start reading the bytecode of the classes that include lambdas. Currently (as of Java 7 and before), if you wanted to emulate lambdas in Java, you have to define an anonymous inner class. This results in a dedicated class file after compilation. And if you have multiple such classes defined in the code they just get a number suffix in the name of the class file. What about lambdas? Consider code like this: public class Main { @FunctionalInterface interface Action { void run(String s); } public void action(Action action){ action.run("Hello!"); } public static void main(String[] args) { new Main().action((String s) -> System.out.print("" + s + "")); } } The compilation produces two class files: Main.class and Main$Action.class, and no numbered class which would usually appear for the anonymous class implementation. So there must be something in Main.class now that represents the implementation of the lambda expression that I’ve defined in main method. $ javap -p Main Warning: Binary file Main contains com.zt.Main Compiled from "Main.java" public class com.zt.Main { public com.zt.Main(); public void action(com.zt.Main$Action); public static void main(java.lang.String[]); private static java.lang.Object lambda$0(java.lang.String); } Aha! There’s a generated method lambda$0 in the decompiled class! The -c -v switches will give us the real bytecode along with the constants pool definitions. The main method reveals that invokedynamic is now issued to dispatch the call: public static void main(java.lang.String[]); Code: 0: new #4 // class com/zt/Main 3: dup 4: invokespecial #5 // Method "<init>":()V 7: invokedynamic #6, 0 // InvokeDynamic #0:lambda:()Lcom/zt/Main$Action; 12: invokevirtual #7 // Method action:(Lcom/zt/Main$Action;)V 15: return And in the constant pool it is possible to find the bootstrap method that links it all at runtime: BootstrapMethods: 0: #40 invokestatic java/lang/invoke/LambdaMetafactory.metaFactory:(Ljava/lang/invoke/MethodHandles$Lookup;Ljava/lang/String;Ljava/lang/invoke/MethodType;Ljava/lang/invoke/MethodHandle;Ljava/lang/invoke/MethodHandle;Ljava/lang/invoke/MethodType;)Ljava/lang/invoke/CallSite; Method arguments: #41 invokeinterface com/zt/Main$Action.run:(Ljava/lang/String;)Ljava/lang/Object; #42 invokestatic com/zt/Main.lambda$0:(Ljava/lang/String;)Ljava/lang/Object; #43 (Ljava/lang/String;)Ljava/lang/Object; You can see that MethodHandle API is used all around but we won’t dive in this right now. For now we can just confirm that the definition refers to the generated method lambda$0. I was curious, what if I define my own static method with the same name – “lambda$0” is a valid identifier after all! So I defined my own lambda$0 method: public static Object lambda$0(String s){ return null; } With this compilation failed, not allowing me to have this method in the code: java: the symbol lambda$0(java.lang.String) conflicts with a compiler-synthesized symbol in com.zt.Main At the same time, if I removed the piece of code that defined lambda expression, the code compiled just fine. It actually tells us that lambdas are captured before the other structured in the class during the compilation, but that’s only my assumption. Please note that in this example the lambda did not capture any of the variables and did not refer to any methods of the enclosing class. That is why the generated lambda$0 method is static. If the lambda refers to any of the enclosing context variables or methods, then a non-static method is generated. So don’t be mislead by the simple example – lambdas can capture enclosing context just fine! Summary We can definitely say that lambdas and the accompanied features (defender methods, collections library improvements) will have a great impact on Java very soon. The syntax is quite nice and once developers realize that these features provide value to their productivity, we will see a lot of code that leverages these features. It was quite interesting for me to see what lambdas are compiled to and I was very happy when I saw the total utilization of the invokedynamic instruction in action without any anonymous inner classes involved at all. [publication id=”65″ label=”Get the complete RebelLabs report”]MIAMI — Representatives of Cuba and the United States will meet on Tuesday in Havana to begin negotiations on settling decades-old outstanding property claims for the thousands of American citizens and companies whose assets were confiscated after Cuba’s revolution, according to several people briefed on the coming talks. The meeting is considered a major step because the United States’ trade embargo against Cuba was initially enacted after Fidel Castro, the Cuban leader at the time, expropriated land from American companies. Nearly 6,000 people and corporations lost homes, farms, factories, sugar mills and other properties totaling $1.9 billion. Now, for the first time, Cuba has agreed to meet to consider settling those losses. The State Department is expected to announce the meeting on Monday. A Cuban Embassy spokeswoman declined to comment. “This meeting is an enormously big deal,” said Mauricio J. Tamargo, the former chairman of the Foreign Claims Settlement Commission, an agency within the Justice Department that adjudicates claims against foreign governments. “The Cubans have up till now never recognized these claims as legitimate or something they are even prepared to discuss. It has never happened in 56 years since the revolution began and they started confiscating American property.” When Mr. Castro declared victory in 1959, many Americans were forced to flee their homes and give up their land. His government later started expropriating large companies, and eventually nearly 900 corporations filed claims.Planned Parenthood Federation of America has just announced a new insidious Internet presence referred to as “mobile interactive tools to help teens make healthy decisions.” STOPP’s national director, Rita Diller, joined ALL’s Jim Sedlak on his Radio Maria “Armed for Battle” broadcast November 1 to warn about what lurks within the many webpages of this new “tool” for indoctrinating both children and parents. “By ‘mobile interactive tools,’ Planned Parenthood means it is on its website so that kids can access this stuff from their smart phones or their computers when their parents aren’t looking,” Diller said. “And by ‘helping teens make healthy decisions,’ that’s Planned Parenthood speak for teaching kids to use condoms and birth control to avoid pregnancy at all cost, while having lots of fun with sex.” “And while Planned Parenthood says that the ‘tools’ are focused on teens—which many of them are—much of it addresses younger children—elementary and even preschool,” she continued. “And what I found when I started looking through the website was absolutely shocking, even by Planned Parenthood’s standards.” On the Tools for Parents page of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America website are specific answers to questions that Planned Parenthood says preschoolers ask about sex. It is here that Planned Parenthood coaches parents on exactly how to respond to preschoolers whom they say are asking questions about sex. Plannedparenthood.org advises parents that when a preschooler asks, “How do babies get in your tummy?” that parents answer in graphic detail, naming the anatomical parts of the body involved and the mechanics of sexual intercourse. PPFA then suggests to parents that they respond to a little boy who asks why his private body parts are different from his mother’s by describing his outer genitalia and hers using anatomical names. “This is some horrifying stuff,” Diller said. “These are preschoolers. This is the sex education Planned Parenthood wants them to have—is fighting for them to have.” Jim Sedlak followed up with the scientific facts about how early sex education harms children by disturbing their sexual latency period or, as the Church says, violating the age of innocence. The
terrorist organization in the world (after the Iranian regime), and must be relentlessly pursued in Iraq and Syria until it is effectively destroyed as a symbol of Islam’s resurgence. This will require a sustained air campaign coordinated with our special forces, and hopefully, our allies. We must assume the Islamic State, al Qaeda and others have established sleeper cells in the United States. Accordingly, our readiness posture must be significantly increased. In that context, our military and law enforcement agencies must be retrained so that they can effectively recognize and defeat the threat. Congress must take the lead and prevent any further drawdown of our strategic and conventional forces. They must also take the lead in purging all Muslim Brotherhood front organizations from our government agencies. Regrettably, based on past performance, we should be under no illusion that this administration will aggressively implement these urgent actions. James A. Lyons, a U.S. Navy retired admiral, was commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet and senior U.S. military representative to the United Nations. Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.This is a Lenten letter from Maronite Archbishop Samir Nassar in Syria, translated by Sr. Margaret Charles Kerry, FSP. May we keep these suffering people in our prayers and offer sacrifices for them this Lent. – Sr. Theresa Aletheia VIGILANT SERVANTS It was Tuesday March 26, 2013, at 11 A.M. when shrapnel killed Deacon Camille on road to the church. Following his death, the parents of the priests were eager for me to leave, to leave Damascus. They were afraid for safety of their children. I proposed that the priests leave if they wanted to. The diocese does not have the right to keep them here under these conditions. They have all answered: “YOU REMAIN, WE REMAIN” Providence has since protected us. Our deacon martyr had the role of distributing bread to the poor. The priests took over and each of them has become a social worker, good Samaritans who watch over the charitable activities in their parish. This is necessitated by the intense fighting in Syria and the waves of refugees that unfortunately arrive each day. 2015 was quite hard for the diocese: Two shells caused significant damage in the historic cathedral, the roof of the library caught fire and collapsed, the old sanitary facilities, built in 1958, succumb to the fire, and the room of Father Jean caught fire. The heavy restoration work was carried out by priests during my absence (health problems). They gave up days of rest in order to complete the work. In a gesture of rebellion against death and destruction, these courageous priests launched the construction of three chapels in the modest suburban districts, mobilizing the faithful around these three projects which are a sign of hope and faith in the future of the Church in Syria. This vitality highlights their pastoral proximity during this year of mercy and great suffering. The first chapel, dedicated to the Martyrs of Damascus (1860), was inaugurated on January 8, 2016. Two other chapels will follow. This first one is a step on the path of reconstruction. Only the Lord gives peace. The Church and our Good Shepherd are proud of these priests, vigilant servants who cling to their mission under the bombs. They are the strength and future pledge of a martyred Christianity that refuses to die. From Damascus, February 14, 2016. +Samir NASSAR Maronite Archbishop of DamascusUS President Donald Trump has ordered a wall built along the nearly 3,200km US-Mexico border. PUERTO VARAS - Mexican presidential hopeful Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador filed a complaint with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights on Wednesday against US President Donald Trump's planned border wall and his administration's treatment of immigrants. Lopez Obrador, a fiery leftist who has led recent polls for the 2018 election, said he expects the commission to "speak out in accordance with the law to protect immigrants from the harassment they are suffering since Trump took office." Trump has ordered a wall built along the nearly 3,200km US-Mexico border, has moved to strip federal funding from "sanctuary" states and cities harbouring illegal immigrants, and expanded the force of US immigration agents. During his election campaign, Trump described Mexican illegal immigrants as rapists and criminals and insisted that Mexico would pay for the wall. That caused simmering diplomatic tension and angered everyday citizens south of the border. Lopez Obrador, a former Mexico City mayor and two-time runner-up for the presidency, said he hoped the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights would view Trump's moves as a "violation of human rights and discriminatory." The commission, an autonomous organ of the Organisation of American States (OAS), is tasked with promoting and protecting human rights in the American hemisphere.A (Long) Review of Athol Kay’s Married Man Sex Life I didn’t expect to find Athol Kay’s book, Married Man Sex Life particularly interesting. I’ve read enough books, blogs and forums to say that I understand game and evolutionary psychology pretty much from ass to elbow. Furthermore, Athol’s specialty is relationship game – i.e., getting girls to treat you like gold – which is a skill set I have mastered more than any other. Roosh, Krauser, et al. are probably more effective than I am in the club or on the street, but when it comes to juggling close, loving, but non-monogamous relationships, I’ll go toe-to-toe with them or anyone else, any day of the week. So while I think Athol’s a great writer, and I’ve always had a lot of respect for his work, I wasn’t expecting to pick up MMSL and have my mind blown. To an extent, I was right. I learned very little from Athol about Game and the biological origins of human behaviour. Most of my readers probably won’t either, as MMSL derives much of its content from principles that are common knowledge within the Roissysphere. (To his great credit, Athol acknowledges the impolite and un-PC Roissy extensively, even though he probably could have saved himself many headaches by limiting his citations to more palatable sources.) But whether I learned a lot or a little from MMSL is not a fair test of the book’s quality, because Athol is not writing for jaded twenty-five year old rogues for whom marriage is out of the question. Rather, as the title suggests, he is writing for the married man. And for the most part, he is writing for the beta-ized married man, who needs to step up and inject some Alpha into his relationship. So let’s talk about my Dad. My father is without question my #1 hero and role model in life. I will resist the urge to turn this book review into a 20,000 word post on why. But per the zeitgeist within which he was raised, he is imbued with a strong and irrational desire to pedestalize and submit to the women he dates. He is what the PUA community would call a natural, but his instincts have always been to address problems in a relationship with conciliation. Athol would have no trouble identifying him as a man with excellent game, but who sabotages his relationship with women via excessively beta “Nice Guy” behaviours. When I started reading Roissy, Roosh, Fast Seduction, and the major texts of evolutionary psychology, I also made a hobby of proselytizing my newfound truths to those close to me. I sent my father many Roissy posts; I left Sperm Wars at his reading table; I did my youthful best to explain to him the principles of game, the Alpha/Beta dichotomy, and my relationship management strategies. My favourite analogy to draw was from our recent foray into Cesar Milan and his dog training philosophy of becoming the pack leader. His reply: “So you’re saying we should treat women like dogs?” Marketing was not one of my earlier strengths. More recently, I started sending him posts from Athol’s blog. My father never told me, outright, that he had read them. But one day, he made a comment that I recognized as straight from the MMSL playbook. We weren’t even talking about women. Our dog was misbehaving, and he grinned and said, “Maybe I need to be acting more alpha, less beta with him.” I called him out on actually reading something I’d sent him, and he admitted it. We had a long talk about Game, Alpha behaviours, and de-pedestalizing women. When Athol sent me a review copy of MMSL, I gave it my Dad. He read it cover to cover. He had barely looked at anything I’d sent him about Game before that. Since then, we’ve had conversations in which he’s confessed to doubting some of his longest-held beliefs. He admits the harm his irrational desire to serve women has caused him in his past. He is more comfortable about acknowledging the legitimacy of pursuing his own happiness within his relationship, rather than just his partners. And he has acknowledged that yes, my very not-nice approach towards getting and keeping women might be a valid one. But while progress can be made, there are some habits that can never be unlearned. My father will never be me. He will always be 90% Nice Guy. But Athol Kay did more to encourage that crucial 10% of change with one book, than I have in a near-decade of haranguing, book-buying and link-forwarding. So why did MMSL succeed where so many before have failed? The distinguishing feature of Athol’s book and blog, is his inherent relatability to men with Nice Guy syndrome. There are a lot of men in the world who are instantly repelled by the teachings of the Roissysphere, even though they desperately need its advice. Athol Kay is the ambassador who is distilling those truths into a medium that can be digested, even by men still firmly ensconced in the matrix. His most remarkable achievement is that he has somehow done so without watering them down with pretty lies. Athol succeeds at delivering his message because is not a smooth pickup artist. He’s just a regular nice guy – who also has a great family and bangs his wife eight days a week. Recovering nice guys will listen to Athol, because they see themselves in him – a better version of themselves. When I came of age, I had the realities of Roissy, Style and Tucker Max to compare against the conventional wisdom that men should be nice, and if that’s not enough, well gawsh, they just need to be nicer. I easily concluded that the latter philosophy was crap, and the former had the answers I needed. I faced no obstacles to becoming the cynical realist that I am today. My father was raised in an era without such resources. He drank the feminist Kool-Aid, and sought to create an equal partnership in his relationships, and eventually marriage. The results would not have surprised Athol, Roissy, or myself circa 2011. But they surprised our family, as we went through a decade of experiences that read like a Men’s Rights Advocacy pamphlet. Thankfully, our story ends with my father, my siblings and I living healthy, happy, successful lives. But while reading Athol Kay’s Married Man Sex Life, I caught myself wondering: What if Athol had published his book twenty years ago? And my father had found it then? For many of my readers, the idea of marriage ranges from unthinkable to unlikely. But we are a rare minority in a world full of men and families who will be destroyed by their failure to implement the ideas in MMSL. I think Athol’s book is going to save thousands from the fate that my family suffered. I suggest you search your life for people you care about, and add their names to that list. Buy Married Man Sex Life at Amazon, or visit the website here.New Stretch Goals Announced! Plus, get free bonus rewards for sharing this project---full details below! Hello Kickstarter! We are so excited to tell you about our two new sauces and chili pepper CSA, where we ship 18 rare varieties of peppers from our farm to you! But first, meet Mix Tape and XXXXX Scorpion--two ridiculously flavorful hot sauces featuring peppers grown by us! Both are organic, vegan, non-gmo, paleo, and naturally low in calories but seriously high on flavor. Our two new recipes are great for the grill, for use in marinades, or as straight up hot sauce (we put them on everything!) Unlike other hot sauces, we grow what we make, and are dedicated to growing the hottest, most flavorful peppers around. Everything is organically grown at our farm, pesticide-free and non-gmo. And, as one of our rewards for this campaign, you can even get a share of this year's pepper crop and try out 18 rare and exotic chili peppers picked right from our farm! You'll get three monthly boxes along with recipes, storage tips, the history of each pepper and more. Since we launched on Kickstarter in 2013, we have grown more than 12,000 pepper plants on a beautiful 3 acre, Certified Naturally Grown field in Kutztown, PA. After two years of trying out recipes, growing countless varieties of peppers, and testing out Mix Tape and XXXXX Scorpion at our NYC farmers markets, we have fine tuned our two new recipes, and are ready to launch them exclusively on Kickstarter. Meet XXXXX Scorpion: Featuring one of the hottest peppers in the world, The Moruga Scorpion. This hot sauce is no joke (we even put a warning label on it!) It is great on so many things---and perfect for the person who loves it really hot. Unlike other super hot sauces that use extracts, we use only fresh Scorpion Peppers which give XXXXX Scorpion its bright atomic orange color (and its amazing flavor!) Meet Mix Tape: A medium range hot sauce that is mild enough to use on everything, but still packs a smoky punch. This amazing mix of hot, sweet and chipotle peppers is phenomenal on eggs, soups, burritos---you name it. It's also a fantastic marinade for the grill. Sweetened with organic apple instead of sugar, Mix Tape is seriously high in flavor without the added calories. Our sauces are powered by Chia, not chemicals, gums or preservatives. You won't find any xanthan gum, sodium benzoate, or anything else from a lab in our sauces---just real food. We are the first hot sauce to use chia seeds as a natural thickener and preservative. All of Our Peppers are Certified Naturally Grown and Pesticide-Free (can your current hot sauce guarantee that? we can!) Check out our field: Healthy Soil= Healthier (and Tastier) Peppers! Time to geek out on farming a bit---At Homesweet Homegrown, we use only biodynamic growing methods to encourage robust soil microbes, for the healthiest soil and pepper plants possible. We choose cover crops over chemicals to keep our plants healthy and happy. And, unlike the majority of farms which use black plastic mulch (a petroleum-based product that leeches god-knows-what into the soil) we use an organic paper mulch called Weedguard Plus. This is a biodegradable alternative that actually adds nitrogen and organic matter back into the soil, and allows the peppers to have a breathable soil surface, reducing the chance of disease, and boosting our crop production by an average of 25%. See the difference: We are one of the only pepper farms using this method today. At pepper harvest time, people from our small college town pitch in to help pick the peppers that will become your new favorite hot sauce! To help kickstart these two new sauces, we have some fun rewards for you guys, including the first bottles of Mix Tape and XXXXX Scorpion, as well a share in the world's first Hot Pepper CSA! What is a Hot Pepper CSA? CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture---through this Kickstarter, you can have a share of our pepper harvest shipped from our farm to you, at a discounted price for paying it forward. CSA members will get the chance to experience 18 of the most unique chili peppers on the planet, picked fresh from our farm in Kutztown, PA and delivered right to your door. Throughout the harvest season (August, September and October), CSA members will receive a monthly box bursting with different chili peppers of all levels of the Scoville scale, ranging from the mild and flavorful Aji Dulce to the blazing hot Carolina Reaper (the hottest pepper in the world). Pepper varieties include Aji Limon (aka Lemondrop), Moruga Scorpion, the Carolina Reaper, Piri Piri, Chocolate Habanero, Fatali, Brazilian Starfish, Ghost Pepper, Hatch, Scotch Bonnet, Datil, Aji Dulce, and many more! Since peppers freeze really well, you can stock up and enjoy them all year long. We'll include complete instructions for storing and freezing your peppers, as well recipes to make your own hot sauce, pickled peppers, smoked peppers and more! Each monthly pepper box includes: 6 different types of peppers (18 total) History, Scoville Scale and flavor profile of each pepper Recipes ideas for making your own hot sauce, infusions, dried peppers and more. Storage instructions for freezing, dehydrating and pickling your peppers so you can enjoy them all year long. Tips for saving hot pepper seeds, so you can grow your own peppers at home! Note: Hot Pepper CSA Shares are limited---so reserve your spot now for shipment this summer! These also make a great gift, and we can send gift CSA shares anywhere in the US with a personal note from you! Other rewards include: Bottles of our original hot sauces---Aramingo, Orange Crush, and Punch Drunk. Homesweet Homegrown takeout grow kits (available in ghost pepper, habanero, scorpion pepper, basil, cilantro, garlic chives, kale, nasturtiums, cucumbers, cherry tomatoes, and tom thumb peas). Signed Copies of Homesweet Homegrown: How to Grow, Make and Store Food No Matter Where Your Live--your guide to growing, canning, fermenting, storing and more! Our.5 oz sizes of our smoked habanero and smoked ghost specialty salt (so good on popcorn, mushrooms, craft cocktail rims, and more! Thanks again for checking out our Kickstarter! We are raising funds to help cover costs for growing our peppers and bringing these new sauces to you, and hope you'll be a part of it! 40K: Hot Sauce E-Book! Unlocked! Every backer will get a free e-book filled with recipes to use all of our sauces, as well as recipes to make your own hot sauce at home! I will also throw in a few recipes for spicy pickles, and share tips for drying and smoking your own peppers, and making hot pepper cocktails and such;) 50K: Organic Certification for our Sauces If we hit 50K, we will have enough funds to get Organic Certification for our sauces! We already use organic ingredients and grow our peppers organically, but this stretch goal would mean we can cover the cost to go through the USDA Organic Certification process and use their logo on our labels and be straight up legit. There aren't many sauces that are organic out there, and since we are, but just don't have the official certification, it would be so great to do this! 65K: A NEW Limited Edition Flavor for Backers only! We will unveil a NEW Flavor that will be a Kickstarter exclusive and available to backers only! This will only be unlocked if we hit this goal… Share This Project, Get a Free E-Download of Homesweet Homegrown! Show your support for our project and get a free e-book copy of Homesweet Homegrown: How to Grow Make and Store Food No Matter Where You Live! My book is filled with gardening tips, guides, recipes and more. Learn how to make your own hot sauce, pickle, ferment, can, and grow your own food anywhere! Share this project, email us, and we'll email you your free copy right away! This offer is open to everyone reading this who wants to support our project and mission---you don't have to be a backer to get a free download of my book. (But all backers will automatically receive an e-copy as well!) Here's how it works: Share our campaign on Facebook or Twitter Email a screenshot of it to us at homesweethomegrown@gmail.com Get a free e-download of Homesweet Homegrown emailed to you as a thank you! Thanks again for checking out our project!In the rugged terrain of the Taliban heartland in southern Afghanistan, the fight against the Kabul government has become a war for control of key stretches of main roads and highways as the insurgents use a new tactic to gain ground. First they storm a checkpoint, kill all the policemen, seize their weapons and equipment and effectively cut off the main road to a remote village. They raise the white Taliban flag and plant roadside bombs to prevent cars from coming through the checkpoint. Any vehicle that attempts to pass through is either blown up or attacked, residents and local leaders say. Then they wait. Faced with shortages of basic food items and price hikes as their supplies dwindle, the villagers are eventually forced to abandon their homes and to move to a place where they can afford to eat and live. Most sneak out on foot or on donkeys through backroads and mountain paths, leaving many of their belongings behind. The new tactic has helped the Taliban gain ground, albeit at a slower pace than a deadly, surprise raid on an entire village. For the insurgents, starving a population out is less costly than forcing them out at gunpoint, and risking armed resistance. The Taliban are seeking to expand their footprint in the war against the state at any cost — even if that means raising their flag over empty villages. The Taliban have been waging war against Kabul since 2001, when their regime was overthrown in the U.S.-led invasion. Since the international combat troops pulled out of Afghanistan at the end of 2014, leaving behind only a largely training and advising contingent, the insurgency has intensified as Afghan forces struggle to take the lead in the battle. The Taliban are now refocusing their attention mostly on the southern provinces of Helmand, Kandahar and Uruzgan, U.S. and Afghan military officials say, although the insurgents have also struck elsewhere, such as the northern Kunduz province where they briefly overran and held the provincial capital for a few days last fall. The results have been daunting — the United Nations says 3,545 Afghan civilians were killed and 7,457 wounded in the war in 2015, most of them by the Taliban. In the south, one of the worst hit areas is Uruzgan province where the Taliban have been putting pressure in recent weeks on Afghan forces around the provincial capital of Tirin Kot, said the U.S. military spokesman in Kabul, Brig. Gen. Charles Cleveland. "The Taliban's main focus in the south is now Uruzgan" and U.S. forces have been providing assistance and air support as needed, Cleveland said. The director of Uruzgan's provincial council, Abdul Hakeem Khadimzai, described the situation there as the "worst in 15 years." In May alone, he said, "around 200 security forces were killed and more than 300 were wounded" in Uruzgan. The figures are an estimate but Khadimzai insisted that if he were to "include civilians, then they would be doubled." The numbers could not be independently verified as the Afghan government does not release military and police casualty figures. "Every day our forces are stepping back and every day the Taliban are controlling more and more area," Khadimzai said. "Our security forces are trying their best to control the area but they can't because logistics supplies are not delivered on time." Uruzgan residents and local community leaders say the highway connecting Tirin Kot to the city of Kandahar, the capital of neighboring Kandahar province — 101 miles away — has been closed since March. And the road linking Khas Uruzgan district with the rest of the province has been blocked for about a year. With the Taliban gaining ground, the government-controlled area has shrunk. Khadimzai describes Tirin Kot now as an "island of government control disconnected from the rest of the province." The closures have sent the price of staples more than doubling in some areas, he said. In Khas Uruzgan, Dihrawud and Charchino districts, the cost of wheat is now $47 for a sack of 99 pounds, compared to 1,900 afghanis elsewhere in the country. Cooking oil is 540 afghanis for a container of 6lb 9oz, compared to the national average of 260 afghanis. Most fresh produce is grown locally but growers in cut-off areas cannot get to the markets to sell their goods, according to Aminullah Hotaqi, a tribal elder and former Uruzgan council chief. Earlier this year, Noor Muhammad Noori had to shut his store in his hometown in Khas Uruzgan and moved with his family to Tirin Kot where he now runs a general store. He said he just couldn't afford the dwindling supplies that were making it through the blocked highway — nor could his customers. "After the road was cut off for a year... I couldn't get food through for my family, and couldn't afford to pay the prices for in Khas Uruzgan," he said. The U.N. mission in Kabul says that between Jan. 1 and April 30 this year, "117,976 people fled their homes due to conflict" in 24 of the country's 34 provinces. Amnesty International said this week that the number of internally displaced people in Afghanistan has doubled in three years, to 1.2 million. A Tirin Kot taxi driver says the road closures have hit him hard — he no longer has any business taking people outside the city but nor do any other taxi drivers, so the competition inside the city is fierce and his earnings have plummeted. "Now I can't afford to buy fuel; how am I going to feed my children," he said, speaking on condition of anonymity fearing for his safety. Like other residents in the area, he spoke to The Associated Press over the telephone. After a U.S. drone strike in Pakistan killed Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mansour last month, questions emerged on the direction the insurgency would take under Mansour's successor, Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada, a conservative cleric with no battlefield experience. Akhundzada's deputies — Mullah Yaqoub, son of Taliban founder Mullah Mohammad Omar, and Sirajuddin Haqqani, who heads a brutal faction designated by the U.S. as a terrorist group — are expected to escalate the violence as Akhundzada moves to consolidate his position at the helm of the insurgency. The fight in the southern, opium poppy-producing Afghan regions is likely to intensify once the poppy harvest is done. For Uruzgan residents, Kabul seems both far away and unwilling to help. "It's time the government realized the day is not far off when its security forces will try to control the area and they'll find that the civilians are fighting on the side of the Taliban," Khadimzai said.By Tony Phifer Published Nov. 15, 2016 Colorado State University announced today that it has received a $53.3 million gift, the largest in the University’s history, from business icon Walter Scott, Jr. of Omaha, Neb. The commitment will provide wide-reaching support for student scholarships, faculty excellence and research. In recognition of this monumental gift, the College of Engineering will be renamed the Walter Scott, Jr. College of Engineering, becoming the only named college of engineering in Colorado. It is the second of CSU’s eight colleges to be named for a prominent alumnus. In 2005, the Warner College of Natural Resources was named for Edward M. Warner. “We are humbled and incredibly grateful for this remarkable gift from Walter Scott,” said CSU President Tony Frank. “Walter has been a passionate and generous supporter of CSU since he graduated more than 60 years ago, and this gift is truly transformational. It will allow the Walter Scott, Jr. College of Engineering to attract and support the finest faculty and students for years to come. This truly is a great, great day in Colorado State University’s history.”New Hampshire Medical Marijuana Advocates Celebrate House Victory CONCORD, NH — In yet another powerful affirmation that support for medical marijuana transcends partisan boundaries, the Republican-dominated New Hampshire House voted 236-96 today to pass SB 409. Matt Simon, a legislative analyst for the Marijuana Policy Project, praised the House for ignoring Gov. Lynch’s veto threat, which was renewed the day before the vote, and passing the bill with a veto-proof supermajority. “Gov. Lynch has repeatedly shown he is way out of touch on this issue, and since he has been unwilling to support a responsible medical marijuana law for New Hampshire’s most seriously ill patients, the House and Senate will simply have to get this done without the governor’s support.” The bill’s prime sponsor, Sen.Jim Forsythe (R-Strafford), agreed. “The promise to veto medical marijuana by Gov. Lynch shows a disappointing lack of compassion for patients battling illnesses such as multiple sclerosis, cancer, and AIDS,” he said. Article continues after ad Advertisement The bill is expected to be referred to a second House committee for further consideration before returning to the Senate for a concurrence vote. The Senate passed SB 409 March 28 in a 13-11 vote, so support from three additional senators will be necessary to override the expected veto. Sen. Forsythe expressed optimism after the House vote. “We’ve gone from having one Senate Republican in support of this issue a few years ago to now having at least eight Senate Republicans,” he observed. “With this kind of momentum behind SB 409, I believe three additional Senate votes are very possible, and it’s a goal we’ll be working very hard to achieve in the coming weeks.”In a major boost for the KFC Big Bash League, Australia's Test heroes will be available for the early matches of BBL\|05 in the lead-up to the Boxing Day Test. Australia's batsmen, spinner and possibly allrounder Mitchell Marsh are set to play, while the fast bowlers who participate in the Hobart Test against the West Indies will be unavailable. Play: BBL Fantasy! Each BBL club will have at least one match with their Test players in the December 17-20 window, with the possibility of the December 21 Perth Scorchers fixture also fielding Australia's elite five-day talent. The tournament launches with the ninth edition of the Sydney Smash, pitting the Sydney Sixers featuring Steve Smith, Brad Haddin and Nathan Lyon against the Sydney Thunder's Mike Hussey, Jacques Kallis and Shane Watson. WATCH: The drama of the BBL\|04 final in Canberra Injured left-hander Usman Khawaja could make a return in that fixture, with Bupa Support Team Head Coach Darren Lehmann indicating the two Thunder matches (including December 20's clash against the Melbourne Stars) are the first-drop's chances to prove his fitness ahead of Boxing Day. Opening batsman Joe Burns will line-up against Peter Nevill and the Melbourne Renegades at the Gabba on December 19, while Smith and the Sixers host Kumar Sangakkara's Hobart Hurricanes a day later in Sydney. For Scorchers trio Adam Voges, Mitchell and Shaun Marsh, a decision closer to their December 21 showdown with the Adelaide Strikers in Perth based on workload, fitness and travel time will determine their availability, with the Test squad assembling in Melbourne the following day to prepare for the annual Boxing Day Test at the MCG. Along with Australia's Test quicks, dynamic opening batsman David Warner will not play prior to the fifth Test of the summer, opting to take a break from his hectic schedule and be with heavily pregnant wife Candice. International superstars Sangakkara, Kallis, Kieron Pollard, Adil Rashid, Brendon McCullum, Samuel Badree, Darren Sammy, Dwayne Bravo, Chris Gayle, Kevin Pietersen, Luke Wright, Michael Carberry, David Willey, Johan Botha and Andre Russell make up the highest calibre of overseas talent the competition has seen. Australia Test players' availability December 17 Sixers v Stars (Smith, Lyon, Khawaja) December 18 Strikers v Stars December 19 Heat v Renegades (Burns) December 20 Sixers v Hurricanes (Smith, Lyon) December 20 Stars v Thunder (Khawaja) December 21 Scorchers v Strikers (Voges, S. Marsh, M. Marsh possibly)I'm a Red Wing guy but I've been eying these boots for a while now. Compared to my black RW Beckmans, I liked the lower profile toe on these Chippewas... it's less chunky looking. Upon opening the box, I immediately noticed a scratch on the side most likely from mishandling during packaging. Knowing that boots are bound to get scratched up, I decided to shrug it off. I also noticed marring on the leather near the seams due to the walking foot of the sewing machine. (See pic). The markings were fairly uniform so I decided to overlook that as well. The color really got me. The boots definitely pop. I took them out and inspected them as I begun lacing them up. Immediately I noticed a problem: the upper leather and tongue on both boots were assembled with leather that had very loose grain I am a leather worker by trade. I make high quality purses and satchels. Given this, I am familiar with cowhide and what parts of the hide should never be used for high quality items. Loose grain usually occurs at the belly portion of the hide. Belly leather has a characteristic wrinkling and veining at the surface of the grain. It is weaker and stretches easily. This is very different than deeper creases that will occur in a boot as it breaks in over time. Cowhide bellies should never be used in high quality items. The wrinkling in the pictures occurred after lacing the boots up. They hadn't even been worn yet. I am really disappointed because I had high hopes for these. Given the cost, this type of craftsmanship is unacceptable. I've had my Red wings for three years now and the only creases in it are due to the normal breaking in of the leather. This review was originally going to be a comparison of these with my RWs, but given the quality of these Chippewas, that comparison no longer makes sense. I've seen other reviews that mention that one boot had loose grain while the other was fine, so maybe this is a result of poor quality control. I will send these back and perhaps give them another shot. If I do, I'll update this review.Harris County officials have agreed to pay Terry Goodwin nearly half a million dollars for what he was forced to endure at the county lockup. Months before Adrian Garcia resigned as Harris County Sheriff and officially entered the crowded Houston mayoral race, photos surfaced showing Terry Goodwin trapped inside a bug-infested cell at the Harris County jail. There were mounds of trash and feces clogging the toilet, sink and shower drain. We later learned jailers had confined Goodwin to those foul conditions for “several weeks,” something Garcia knew nothing about until a whistleblower tipped off KTRK and the Texas Commission on Jail Standards. Garcia fumed, repeatedly telling reporters he was “damn mad” about what had happened on his watch. Ultimately, the Harris County District Attorney's Office filed charges of falsifying government records, a felony, against the second- and third-shift supervisors on Goodwin's unit (curiously enough, the first-shift sergeant on the unit was never charged), and heads rolled at the sheriff's office. Shortly before retiring, Garcia fired six jail supervisors (including the two already under criminal indictment), suspended 29 jail employees without pay and demoted one jail commander. The chief deputy overseeing jail operations resigned. It's unclear how that kind of baggage might affect Garcia's run for mayor. But we do know the impact the Goodwin affair will have on Harris County taxpayers: $400,000.Page 2 Since I haven't written an NBA column in five weeks, thousands of frustrated basketball fans have been flooding me with e-mails and demanding their hoops fix. All right, maybe it hasn't been thousands, more like hundreds. Or maybe it was just six readers, my buddy House and Marc Stein. But still, it FELT like thousands of readers. That's the important thing. Jonathan Daniel/Getty Images The Sports Guy is forced to watch the college game if he wants to root for the Celtics. Just know that I haven't been ignoring the NBA. I'm just a little depressed because the Celtics stink again. Fortunately, we stink to the point that we're now the leading contenders for the Kevin Durant-Greg Oden Sweepstakes. (Yeah, I know I put Durant first even though Oden is the consensus No. 1. Just know that I factored in the upcoming March Madness tournament when Durant averages a 35-13 for two straight weeks and nearly wins the national title by himself, followed by three straight months of, "Wait, this guy is a rich man's KG, he might be better than Oden!" stories and features. If you don't believe me, watch Durant for a few games. He's going to be very, VERY famous some day. You can say you knew him when.) Now I'm openly rooting against the Celtics and TiVo-ing every game involving everyone on Chad Ford's top 350. Anyway, since I'm trapped in Celtics Hell, I needed something to carry me through the dregs of the NBA regular season. And you know what's kept me going? The Phoenix Suns. I watch all of their games. I rewind plays to see what they're doing and how they're doing it. I learn about basketball from them. I revel in their splendidry, and I don't even think splendidry is a word. They're the most consistently entertaining basketball team in 20 years. They have a chance to be historically good. You could be bouncing your grandkids on your lap someday and telling them that you watched the 2007 Suns. Naturally, nobody's talking about them. Everyone's tired of hearing about Nash at this point, and since they don't have the best record in the league, there isn't any urgency to make a fuss about them. But if you care about basketball at all, if the sport has ever meant anything to you, if you remember the Magic-Bird Era fondly in any way, if you're remotely interested in watching a professional sports team peak... then you need to follow the Suns. They're sniffing at true greatness. I'm not saying it will happen, just that it could. You never
interests? Although the child is at the heart of the “deal,” it is striking how little attention is usually paid to the child’s needs. What is the potential psychological, emotional and social impact of removing a child from the cultural lineage of one of the biological parents? Is the cultural disconnect that is thereby created a loss or harm to the child? Is it really in the best interest of the child to be taken at birth from his or her homeland, transported to a very different culture far away, and to be substantially, or perhaps totally, cut off from part of his or her biological and cultural heritage? It is true that this same phenomenon of cultural disconnect occurs in the context of international adoptions, yet as a society we seem to have concluded that the benefits to the child outweigh the possible negatives. However, we should not be too hasty in accepting the adoption analogy in the surrogacy context, given that there is a significant difference between the two practices: adoption is essentially child-centered, whereas surrogacy is essentially adult-centered.In other words, the goal of adoption is to protect the interests of a child whose biological parents are either unable or unwilling to fulfill their parenting roles. The goal of surrogacy, in contrast, is to create a child with the purpose of satisfying the desires of the adults. This is not to suggest that surrogacy is necessarily a less ethical practice than adoption (although some may make this claim), but it does mean that in surrogacy we need to be particularly vigilant in protecting the best interests of the child.We should also consider whether it is ethically justifiable to utilize a surrogate from a country such as Nepal in order to create a child, when there are already many babies and children available and waiting for adoption.Of course, one of the main reasons why surrogacy is so attractive to the prospective parents is that it allows the intended father to be genetically related to the child. This is understandable – most of us, if given the choice between adoption and having our “own” genetically related child, would choose the latter, and would turn to adoption only if circumstances made natural conception impossible or very problematic.But uncomfortable questions arise: if genetics is so important to the father, why do we assume that genetics is so unimportant to the surrogate mother that she would voluntarily give up the child she has conceived and carried? Even if the surrogate’s own egg is not used, the surrogate nevertheless makes a significant contribution, by gestating the baby for nine months and giving birth. Given the importance of the surrogate’s bonds to the baby, is it likely that the surrogate would have agreed to this transaction, were it not for the overwhelming lure of money? The deep-seated longing for a child of one’s “own,” and the pain suffered by individuals and couples who – for either biological or social reasons – face challenges in achieving this dream, is very real. At the same time, we must take care that in attempting to solve one problem we do not create another. International surrogacy in developing countries is fraught with risks of exploitation and coercion of women. Its long-term impact upon the child is unknown, and awaits serious research. But there can be little doubt that international surrogacy presents some potentially serious ethical concerns.We should be wary of offering our uncritical support. Join Jerusalem Post Premium Plus now for just $5 and upgrade your experience with an ads-free website and exclusive content. Click here>>Pesticide-spiked punch lures mosquitoes to their doom WASHINGTON, D.C.—Sweets are the downfall of many a human. But they may signal an even deadlier risk to mosquitoes, which have their own sweet “tooth.” That’s because scientists recently invented an aromatic cocktail derived from plant nectars that strongly attracts the insects to feed on a pesticide-laced potion. After just 2 weeks, mosquito populations in an initial field trial plummeted by nearly 66%, researchers reported at a meeting here yesterday. If successful in larger trials, the new approach could be commercialized in as little as 1 year. Every year, approximately 725,000 people die from mosquito-borne diseases like malaria, according to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Efforts to reduce mosquito populations by spraying insecticides across wide areas or distributing insecticide-containing bed netting have helped in some places. But many mosquitoes have evolved resistance to certain insecticides. To make matters worse, widespread insecticide use has contaminated soils and streams and wreaked havoc on beneficial insects, such as bees and other pollinators. To avoid these issues, Agenor Mafra-Neto, a chemist and CEO of ISCA Technologies in Riverside, California, wondered whether using a special type of bait might target mosquitoes more directly. He and colleagues from several universities collected a variety of sweet-smelling flowers and other nectar-producing plants. They used a technique known as gas chromatography to separate and identify the odor compounds. They then exposed mosquito antennae to thousands of the compounds to determine which might have a biological effect. At the same time, they eliminated scents that seemed to attract bees. Once they settled on a combination of 20 compounds, they added mosquito-killing insecticides, such as pyrethroids or spinosad, to the mix. To test their concoction, Mafra-Neto and his colleagues initially placed samples in a mosquito-containing greenhouse in Tanzania that they had used to test other mosquito control agents. Within 2 days, all the mosquitoes in the greenhouse had died from the poison. Next, they moved on to field trials. In four Tanzanian villages of roughly 500 residents in total, they sprayed their formulation under the eaves of houses, where gaps between mud walls and thatched roofs commonly let mosquitoes in. Homes in four other similarly sized villages remained untreated. At this week’s meeting of the American Chemical Society here, Mafra-Neto reported that the number of mosquitoes in the treated homes dropped by two-thirds in just 2 weeks, compared with a spike in mosquito numbers in untreated households (thanks to a period of rain). And they saw no effect on bees or other beneficial insects. “There’s a lot of promise there,” says Edmund Norris, an entomologist at Iowa State University in Ames, who attended the presentation. Dan Strickman, a vector control program manager at the Gates Foundation here who was also at the meeting, adds that if further trials prove equally successful, the new approach will have a unique advantage: Unlike many mosquito control approaches such as aerial spraying and bed nets, it may work well both indoors and outdoors. Mafra-Neto says his company is working now to get approval for their formulation from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which he says could come in as little as 1 year. However, he adds, countries such as Tanzania that face persistent problems with malaria and other mosquito-borne illnesses may approve of the sweet smelling antimosquito cocktail even sooner. And the company, he adds, has already begun efforts to extend their approach to ticks, another major vector of human diseases.A Colombian woman has become the world’s first recipient of windpipe tissue constructed from a combination of donated tissue and her own cells. Stem cells harvested from the woman’s bone marrow were used to populate a stripped-down section of windpipe received from a donor, which was then transplanted into her body in June. “Surgeons can now start to see and understand the very real potential for adult stem cells and tissue engineering to radically improve their ability to treat patients,” says Martin Birchall, professor of surgery at the University of Bristol, UK, and a member of the team which constructed the windpipe tissue. “We believe this success has proved that we are on the verge of a new age in surgical care.” Tuberculosis damage Claudia Castillo, the 30-year-old patient, had suffered a collapse of the tracheal branch of her windpipe leading to her left lung following a severe tuberculosis infection. Advertisement Left barely able to breathe, the decision was taken in March to attempt the windpipe reconstruction. Spanish doctors started the process by taking a 7-centimetre section of windpipe from a deceased donor. Researchers at the University of Padua, Italy, led by Maria Teresa Conconi, then used detergent and enzymes to purge the donated windpipe of all the donor’s cells. After six weeks, all that was left was a solid scaffold of connective tissue. Meanwhile, Birchall and his colleagues in Bristol took the stem cells from the patient’s bone marrow and coaxed them in the lab into developing into the cartilage cells that normally coat windpipes. Finally, the patient’s cells were coated onto the donated tracheal scaffold over four days in a special bioreactor built at the Polytechnic of Milan in Italy. No rejection The patient received the finished organ in June at the Hospital Clinic, Barcelona, where surgeon Paolo Macchiarini replaced Castillo’s damaged trachea with the newly constructed tissue. Now, five months later, the patient is fit and well, and there have been no signs yet that her body is rejecting the graft. The construction of the windpipe is the second organ produced outside the body using stem cells or cells from the patient’s own body. In 2006, Anthony Atalaat Wake Forest University Medical School in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, revealed that his team had fitted seven children with bladders reconstructed from their own tissue. Journal reference: The Lancet (DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(08)61598-6)Seven-star deluxe villa resort was built on an islet in Vembanad backwaters, a Ramsar site, with full cooperation of state agencies A well-know chain of luxury resorts has been caught on the wrong side of the law in Kerala. “Located on the private island of Nediyathuruthu, surrounded by the exotic and hypnotic beauty of the emerald backwaters in Kerala's Alleppey district, the luxurious all-pool villa, Banyan Tree Kerala, is the first Indian outpost of the award-winning resort group.” So says the website of Banyan Tree Hotels and Resorts, a developer and manager of premium resorts and hotels in Asia-Pacific. What the website does not mention is that the resort has been constructed in the Vembanad backwaters, which is a Ramsar site, a wetland of international importance and protected by the Ramsar Convention. Now the resort, an hour from Kochi airport, faces demolition. The Kerala High Court, July 25, ordered the demolition of all 59 villas and other constructions on the tiny island in the backwaters within three months. A division bench of the high court, comprising justices K M Joseph and K Harilal cited violation of various laws and norms like the Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ), EIA Notification-2006, Kerala Conservation of Paddy Land and Wetland Act-2008 and Wetland conservation and Management Rules-2010. Nediyathuruthu is one among the seven tiny islets in the Vembabad backwaters in Panavally grama panchayat in Alappuzha district. According to revenue records, most of the land measuring 11.5 acres (one acre equals 0.4 hectare) was paddy fields and water-logged areas. This land named “island farm” was acquired by a chartered accountant from various owners and sold to Mini Muthoot group, a leading non-banking financial corporation in Kerala. Kuwait-based Kapico Group, a privately owned international corporation with more than 40 subsidiary and joint venture companies in 11 countries, joined hands with Mini Muthoot to form a joint venture, Kapico Kerala Resort pvt ltd with Mini Muthoot chairperson Roy M Mathew as the managing director, in 2007. The project was to construct a seven star resort in the island, which would be operated by Singapore-based Banyan Tree group. The company also availed financial facility to the tune of 165 crore from a consortium of banks, led by the State Bank of India. One of the first acts of the company after obtaining sanction from the panchayat (application made on 5. 10. 2007 and sanctioned on the same day, notes the high court judgment) was the construction of a private jetty without the permission from the irrigation department. Hundreds of tonnes of sand was dumped to fill the paddy fields, roads, and retaining walls were constructed after filling up the surrounding back waters. It is alleged that as much as 10 acres was thus added, even though a survey conducted by the Alappuzha district collector confirms encroachment of only 2.04 acres. (While announcing the project, Muthoot chairperson had said the resort was to be built on a “sprawling 20 acres”.) According to the Kerala Building Rules which became effective from June 2007, permission for construction in inland islands could be accorded only in conjunction with coastal zone regulations. The regulations specify construction at a distance of at least 50 metre from the shoreline, maximum height of nine metre for a structure, 20 metre distance between two buildings and on so on, all of which have been violated. Clearance from the Ministry of Environment and Forest is mandatory if the investment is above Rs 5 crore. In the case of this resort, investment is computed to be around Rs 250 crore, and no such permission was obtained. (When the project was first announced in 2007, it was to be completed in 2008 and the estimated cost was Rs 150 crore). Thirteen licensed stake nets of fisher people were dislodged for the project. One of them, Ratheesh, filed a petition, demanding restoration of nets, damages and demolition of the illegal structures on the island. State of Kerala, Panavally Gram Panchayat, Coastal Zone Management Authority and Kapico Kerala Resorts (pvt)ltd were among the respondents. Simultaneously, the Kerala Matsya Thozhilali Aikya Vedi (TUCI, fish workers' union) launched an agitation; their front organization, Vembanad Lake Conservation Forum, impleaded itself in the case. Despite the agitations and the numerous violations, no one in authority halted the work and the construction went ahead full steam. Even though the Coastal Zone Management Authority admitted in the court that the Kapico company had obstructed the flow of the current and that the constructions were not in adherence to the coastal regulations, the authority did not intervene. The resort was all set to commence business when the High Court’s verdict came. The court has indicted the state and various state agencies involved for their inaction and complicity. The government has been asked to take action against the island owners to ensure that the unauthorized structures are removed within three months. “The court when it enforces laws in protection of environment becomes the custodian of the interests of not only the present generation, but also of posterity,” says the judgment. “The extent of the Vembanad lake has been reduced to 12,000 hectares from 42,000 hectares in the past few decades,” says Charles George, the state president of the Kerala Matsya Thozhilali Aikya Vedi (TUCI.) “Unfortunately, it is the state and its agencies like the Kochi port are the biggest culprits in encroaching Vembanad. Private groups like Mini Muthoot are taking advantage of the situation.” This verdict is a fitting rejection of all such violations, he adds. Unfortunately this landmark judgment found space only in the local pages of the newspapers in Kerala and has largely gone unnoticed.Fianna Fáil TD for Louth Declan Breathnach says the Government is failing rural communities by continually missing its own broadband delivery targets. Declan Breathnach made the comments following the release of a report by Switcher which measured the average broadband speeds across the State. “It’s simply not acceptable that homeowners and business owners in Louth are being forced to accept sub-standard broadband speeds, when users in Dublin are accessing broadband well in excess of 30 or 40Mbps,” said Deputy Breathnach. “The average connection across the country was recorded at 24Mbps – this is still 20% below the minimum level set as part of the National Broadband Plan. “Our average figures wouldn’t even meet the US standard for what constitutes broadband. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has previously said that speeds below 25Mbps should not be referred to as broadband. “The Government has a long way to go to ensure that rural communities can access decent, high-speed broadband services. “The current commitments made by Minister Naughten to achieve 30Mbps are in complete contrast to what the European Commission believe communities should be able to access. They believe, quite rightly, that 100Mbps is the minimum standard. This is what we should be aiming towards, and not a sub-par standard that is already out of date. “Two things have happened under the current Minister – the timetable for rolling out the National Broadband Plan has been pushed out, and out, until what looks like mid-2023, and the actual quality of what’s proposed to be rolled out is light-years behind what’s needed by communities. “The Minister needs to outline what measures he will take to speed up the roll out of the National Plan, and whether he will commit to increasing the standards as set by the European Commission,” concluded Deputy Breathnach.Let’s do a quick review of the Trump Presidency before and since September 1, 2017. Before 9/1/2017, the legislative achievements President Trump was able to sign off on included some, but not all, of what should have been the low hanging fruit. (Bold are my comments) There have clearly been successes. At the very top of the list is Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, who gives every sign of being the brilliant originalist who was advertised. Trump has been slower in nominating judges to lower courts, but those he has put up, in general, appear to be excellent choices. (The lower court comment here is specious. August saw numerous articles pointing out Trump’s nominees would “reshape the lower courts for a generation.”) On the legislative front, Trump’s biggest victory may have been a bill making it easier to fire incompetent employees at the Department of Veterans Affairs, and protecting whistleblowers in the agency. He has also signed some 15 bills repealing all or parts of Obama-era regulations. Few have been earthshaking, but most have been steps in the right direction. And while his withdrawal from the Paris climate accords was as much symbolism as substance (as were the accords themselves), it was an important signal that America is going to prioritize economic growth. Nor should we ignore addition by subtraction, so to speak. There are all the regulations that the Trump administration has not enacted, especially compared with what a Clinton administration probably would have done. By some measures, the Trump administration has been the least regulatory presidency since Reagan’s. That’s not nothing. The legislative failure to repeal Obamacare has been correctly dumped on Ryan and McConnell who proved their incompetence during Obama’s terms was as nothing to compared to their malignant incompetence through the end of August. Any other Congressional leader in history who had spent years conducting Kabuki theater votes of significant majorities to overturn Obamacare would have had the votes locked in to succeed or would have had the good grace to resign in disgrace for failing. Virtually all of President Trump’s base has been unanimous in viewing these two serpents among the top obstacles to achieving the goal of draining The Swamp. Frankly, the only reason there hasn’t been a tsunami of protest calling for the political heads of these two backstabbing worms is because they looked relatively timid compared to the rabid frothing of the Liberals/Progressives/Democrats and 99% of the mainstream media. Mark this down as a lesson – even though you may insist you are not influenced by the MSM, you actually are in ways too small to be readily apparent. Most people are unaware the MSM and their masters, their advertisers have spent 80+ years learning how to use media in every subliminal means possible. The mainstream media was salivating over the end of the August recess because they expected to see September be consumed by Kabuki theater around the debt ceiling limit and President Trump’s first budget. It would be no surprise to me if many of the punditry had not used the lazy days of August to write articles which would only require a few updates to be publishable as body slams on the Trump’s positions (whatever they might be), the recklessness of Far Right politicians calling for a government shutdown and the uselessness of a debt ceiling in an age when national debt exceeds $ 20 trillion. Benedict Ryan and Tokyo Rose McConnell were going to tie Congress in knots with a proposal to extend the debt ceiling for 14 months (to just beyond the 2018 midterms) which would have had 100% of the Democrats and just enough Republicans against it (you don’t really think these things are incompetence, do you?) to insure the leadership’s proposal failed. Amid the planned failure the proposed budget, tax reform, Obamacare repeal, etc, etc, etc would have been pushed into the background except when the MSM wanted to trot them out as Trump failures. * September Discontinuity * The best laid plans of worms and maggots were interrupted by President Trump’s refusal to keep to the sabotage script. He crafted a DACA position which put the Dreamers at risk and reminded Congress they are the ones responsible for making laws. Additionally, it destroyed the “Trump is Hitler” narrative the MSM was so heavily invested in because he comes across as humane (there are many people in this country sympathetic to the Dreamers even if you are not one of them) and it’s like Hitler expressing sympathy for the Jews. He cut a deal with Schumer and Pelosi on the debt ceiling because it destroyed the planned Kabuki and left so much time in the September schedule Congress has actually held meetings on tax reform, the budget and, though I have reservations about it, leaves an outside chance Lindsey Graham and cohorts’ Obamacare repeal might pass both Houses of Congress. Behold, Trump the Disruptor! President Trump’s post Labor Day strategy is to continually disrupt his opposition’s plans by using the powers of the Presidency to destroy DC’s traditional power blocs. FYI, this isn’t 3D or 10D chess – this is everyday military/political strategy: Don’t Do What Your Opponent Wants You to Do Do you suppose having some of the best military minds in American history in the Trump administration is beginning to bear fruit? Here is a surprising concept. Like most of you, I expected the Democrats and Republicans in Congress would be eager to legislatively embody their support for Dreamers by overwhelming numbers. Before I researched it, I expected support would be strong enough to pass it with veto proof majorities. It seems that’s not the case: Congress Probably Has The Votes To Make DACA Law. But That Doesn’t Mean It Will You could say the politics of immigration in the era of Trump have moved way to the right, and that’s true. But the legislative aims of Congress are different now too: A DACA provision would be much, much narrower than the more wholesale immigration reform these senators backed in 2013. If you were counting along, 48 Democrats, plus four Republicans who have supported “Dreamer” legislation this year, plus eight other Republicans who backed citizenship for much of the undocumented in 2013 equals, yes, exactly 60 votes. So there may be a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate that would back a DACA bill. The math is harder in the House, where the immigration legislation died without a formal vote in 2013. There are 13 House Republicans who are co-sponsors of a bill called the Bridge Act (Bar Removal of Individuals who Dream and Grow our Economy.) Six other Republicans have joined the House version of the RAC Act that Tillis is backing in the Senate. And in January 2015, when the House had a symbolic vote to bar the Obama administration from accepting new DACA applicants, 26 Republicans voted against this legislation, including nine members who remain in the House but are not sponsors of any the Bridge or RAC provisions. If you assume all 194 House Democrats would vote for a DACA replacement and add 13, six and nine, you have 222 likely votes for some kind of Dream Act — four more than the 218 needed to pass a bill. Not quite the head count I had expected. Here are the Republicans in Congress who support DREAMers without conditions Just nine Republicans in Congress currently support a clean legislative fix of DACA. Most Republicans are willing to support continued protections for DREAMers only if it is paired with other legislative measures, such as a border wall. This would mean Congress would have to pass some form of broader immigration reform — a task they have failed to accomplish repeatedly over the last decade. WOW! Both articles dated September 5, 2017 are from progressive media – if from a progressive point of view this isn’t a slam dunk – then what is it? Note the last sentence quoted in bold. Broad immigration reform is another opportunity for Benedict Ryan and Tokyo Rose McConnell to logjam Congress for months. What to do, what to do? There is another military strategy: Entice your enemy into fighting you where and how you choose. There was zero surprise factor on my part when immediately after having dinner with President Trump, Schumer and Pelosi put out a joint statement declaring, in essence, “Trump CAVES!” Lying liars are going to lie and the mainstream media knows a certain percentage of Trump supporters were going to panic over the progressive’s take on the meeting. How do they know that? Easy, it’s happened before. When Trump authorized the launching of 52 cruise missiles at a Syrian airbase, there were lots of Trump supporters on social media declaring, “I didn’t vote for another war. I’m done with him.” Except, it wasn’t a New War … it was just sending a message: The spineless asshat has LEFT the building. Did more people have a negative reaction than before? Yep! This time we have DACA Panic: “I didn’t vote for amnesty! Trump’s betrayed us!” This isn’t about DACA – it’s about disruption of the status quo. President Trump’s strategy is to throw away the script and stop the Kabuki theater. He’s sending an unmistakable reminder to all the professional politicians. He has the ability to change the dynamic at any time he chooses. Those who have been around politics for a good while (coughAnn Coultercough) should be ashamed of themselves for breaking into tears over “we’ve agreed we’ll talk about the possibility we might be able to agree to some sort of a deal somehow, someday, some way” – which is exactly the sum total of what happened Wednesday night. President Trump’s supporters inclined to “abandon ship” should remember they are in shark infested waters and constantly under attack. The only viable path to #MAGA is to not take counsel of your fears and to stay the course. Wednesday night’s specific message from President Trump was a message to Benedict Ryan & Tokyo Rose McConnell and it wasn’t about DACA, it’s about obstructionism and not doing their jobs: I’m pleading with you, with tears in my eyes: If you fuck with me, I’ll kill you all. Who knows? Maybe this message will result in us all getting a tax rebate check in time for Christmas? Trump Turnaround Puts New Tax-Cut Writing on the WallGet the biggest Daily stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email Two small children were left frightened for their lives when a knife-wielding seven-year-old threatened to kill them. Amelia Davis, four, and her brother Keagan, six, were playing near their Bransholme when the boy pulled out a knife and threatened them. It was the first time little Amelia had been allowed to play out. "My little boy came running into the house saying 'Mum, mum, he's put a knife up to Amelia'," shocked mother Kim Adams said. "Amelia said 'he put a knife to my back mummy'. "She was screaming and crying. "Keagan then told me the boy had put a knife up to him and called him a ginger little F*** and said he was going to kill him." Miss Adams, 27, says the whole incident has left her "feeling sick to her stomach" and she now wants to move away from the area. She said: "I just feel sick, in fact I want to move. "This was the first time Amelia had been allowed to play out and she was so excited. She had been asking to go out as soon as they got home from school. "It doesn't bear thinking about what could have happened if he had actually used the knife." Amelia and Keagan are still'shaken up' by their ordeal. Miss Adams said: "I didn't take them to school on Wednesday as they were both shaken up. "They kept asking me about the boy with a knife and worried he might come back." Miss Adams is now warning parents in the area to be on their guard. She has posted an appeal on the Hull: Blues and Twos Facebook page in a bid to make people aware of what has happened to her children. Miss Adams said: "Other parents need to be warned about what has happened. "Where does a young lad get hold of a knife like that from and why don't his parents know about what he is doing?" The boy in question was wearing a black top, black trousers with a white stripe and had Adidas trainers on. The family have reported the incident to the police and say it is being 'treated as a high priority'. Humberside Police confirmed they are investigating the incident. A force spokesman said: "We were called to reports that a boy had allegedly been threatening other children with a weapon on Curlew Close, Bransholme in Hull around 5pm on September 26. "The children who reported the incident were shaken but no one was hurt. "The children have described the boy as around seven-years-old, wearing a black coat and Adidas trainers. He was riding a green bike. "Anyone who may have any information has been asked to call 101 quoting log 422 of 26/09/17."Researchers at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) in Germany have tested a new approach to fabricating spin valves. Using ion beams, the researchers have succeeded in structuring an iron aluminium alloy in such a way as to subdivide the material into individually magnetizable regions at the nanometer scale. The prepared alloy is thus able to function as a spin valve, which is of great interest as a candidate component for use in spintronics. Not only does this technology use electron charge for purposes of information storage and processing, it also draws on its inherent magnetic properties (that is, its spin). Spintronics holds great potential for magnetic storage media. For example, with magnetic random access memories a computer's time-consuming start-up phase may cease to be an issue—as in that case it would be operational as soon as it is switched on. Typically, a spin valve is made up of successive non-magnetic and ferromagnetic layers. This layering is a very involved process and getting these components to connect reliably presents a major challenge. This is why HZDR researcher Dr. Rantej Bali and his colleagues are taking an entirely different approach. “We’ve built structures with lateral spin valve geometry where the different magnetic regions are organized one next to the other as opposed to in layers one on top of the other,” explains Bali. The idea behind this new geometry is to facilitate working in parallel on larger surfaces while keeping fabrication costs low. First, the scientists annealed a thin layer of an iron aluminum alloy (Fe 60 Al 40 ) at 500 C. This resulted in formation of a highly ordered structure, where every other atomic layer was made up exclusively of iron atoms. According to the researchers’ expectations, this substance behaved as a paramagnetic material—in other words, the magnetic moments became disordered. After this, the scientists coated the alloy with a protective polymer resist so that a striped pattern was produced on its surface. The resist-free regions were alternatingly 2 and 0.5 micrometers wide, and crucially, were separated from each other by 40-nm wide strips of resist. Next, the material was irradiated with neon ions at the HZDR’s Ion Beam Center—with important consequences. The scientists were able to demonstrate that the irradiated material exhibits very interesting properties. Beneath the protective resist strips, the material remains paramagnetic while the resist-free narrow and wide stripes actually become ferromagnetic. “A spin valve is switched via the magnetic field. Changing the spins’ alignment—parallel or antiparallel—changes the electrical resistance. We’re interested in the magnitude of the effect,” says Bali. An externally applied magnetic field aligns the spins within these regions. Depending on the magnetic field’s strength, they can be adjusted to run in parallel or antiparallel. This magnetization is permanent and is not lost if the outer field is switched off. The reason for this behavior lies in the fact that the ion beam changes the alloy’s structure. “The ions destroy the iron layers’ highly ordered structure. They knock the atoms out of position and other atoms take their place, and, as a result, the iron and aluminum atoms become randomly distributed,” explains Sebastian Wintz, a Ph.D. student who was part of the team of researchers. A small dose of ions is enough to play this atomic-level game of tag. Wintz characterizes the process as follows: “It’s a cascade, really. A single ion is capable of displacing up to 100 atoms." The regions beneath the polymer resist stripes, on the other hand, are impenetrable to the ions—which is why these regions remain paramagnetic and separate out the ferromagnetic stripes. Working closely with researchers at the Helmholtz Center Berlin (HZB), the HZDR scientists were able to visualize the material’s magnetic structure using the special SPEEM (spin-resolved photoemission microscope) at the HZB’s BESSY II synchrotron. The microscopic images showed the existence of regions with paramagnetic and ferromagnetic order demonstrating the high level of spatial resolution that can be realized by the structuring process using ion beams. Additional experiments will allow Rantej Bali and his colleagues to investigate the properties of these magnetically structured materials. The researchers are also trying to figure out the limits to miniaturization of magnetic nanostructures. Printing Nearly-Discrete Magnetic Patterns Using Chemical Disorder Induced Ferromagnetism Source: Helmholtz CenterSyrian rebel leader says US-Russian deal a blow to uprising ISTANBUL - Reuters Members of the General Assembly of the Syrian Coalition seen during their meeting in Istanbul, Turkey, Sept. 13. DAILY NEWS photo, Emrah GÜREL The head of the opposition Syrian Supreme Military Council said on Sept.14 a U.S.-Russian agreement to eliminate Syria's chemical weapons was a blow to the two-and-a-half-year uprising to remove President Bashar al-Assad from power.General Selim Idris said the deal would allow al-Assad to escape being held accountable for killing hundreds of civilians in a poison gas attack on Damascus on Aug. 21. Assad has denied responsibility for the attack.U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov announced the agreement on removing Syria's chemical weapons on Saturday after nearly three days of talks in Geneva.Idris said al-Assad's forces had started moving some of their chemical weapons to Lebanon and Iraq in the last few days to evade a possible U.N. inspection. The assertion could not be immediately verified."We have told our friends that the regime has begun moving a part of its chemical weapons arsenal to Lebanon and Iraq. We told them do not be fooled," Idris told reporters in Istanbul."All of this initiative does not interest us. Russia is a partner with the regime in killing the Syrian people. A crime against humanity has been committed and there is not any mention of accountability."Asked if rebel brigades would facilitate the work of any United Nations weapons inspectors, Idris said:This is very complicated [...] If investigators come, we will facilitate the mission. In the regions under our control there are no chemical weapons. I don't know if this will just mean that investigators will pass through the regions that are under rebel control. We are ready."But another military council official, Qassim Saadeddine, said: "Let the Kerry-Lavrov plan go to hell. We reject it and we will not protect the inspectors or let them enter Syria."Gifts guaranteed to impress science geeks Amazon has some awesome Science related products that any Science Geek in you know will love to have. Here are some of the more affordable gifts that are guaranteed to tickle the fancy of the science geek. The first aerogels were produced from silica gels. However, Kistler’s later work involved aerogels based on alumina, chromia and tin dioxide. Carbon aerogels were first developed in the late 1980s. This allows the liquid to be slowly dried off without causing the solid matrix in the gel to collapse from capillary action, as would happen with conventional evaporation. Aerogel was first created by Samuel Stephens Kistler in 1931. It was a bet with Charles Learned over who could replace the liquid in “jellies” with gas without causing shrinkage. Nicknames include “frozen smoke”, “solid smoke”, “solid air” or “blue smoke” owing to its translucent nature and the way light scatters in the material; however, it feels like extruded polystyrene (Styrofoam) to the touch. The liquid component of the gel has been replaced with a gas. As a result, it is a solid with extremely low density and low thermal conductivity. The science geek in your life would live this. Is it a gas or a gel or a liquid? It unusual for sure and all came about due to a bet! A magnetic scrubber is enclosed in each EcoSphere. By passing another magnet over the outside of the glass, the owner can manipulate the scrubber to clean the inside of the EcoSphere The main conceptual interest of these objects lies in the fact that they are materially closed ecological systems which are self-sustaining over a period of years. At room temperature, and with only low inputs of light, the algae produce oxygen which supports the shrimp and bacteria. Bacteria break down the shrimps’ wastes. The breakdown products provide nutrients to the algae and bacteria upon which the shrimp feed. The manufacturer states that shrimp live in the EcoSphere for an average of 2 to 3 years, and are known to live over 10 years. The shrimp swim energetically around the aquarium, eat the brown bacterial and algal scum on the glass, consume the filamentous green algae which sometimes forms a globular pillow in the water, and perch on a fragment of soft coral. The EcoSphere ’s main visual appeal is provided by tiny red-pink shrimp, Halocaridina rubra, between 1/4 and 3/8 inch (or approximately a centimeter) in length. Spherical or ovoid, the aquaria range from roughly baseball-size to soccer-ball-size. They are sold worldwide as scientific novelties and decorative objects. Mars Rock (Martian meteorite) A Martian meteorite is a rock that
brother every day. I’m incredibly excited about that. Published July 24, 2013TOKYO — Japanese cult king Miike Takashi started production last week on a new pic, “Yakuza Apocalypse: The Great War Of The Underworld” (“Gokudo Daisenso”) that takes him back to his violent exploitation origins. Starring Hayato Ichihara and scripted by former Miike AD Yoshitaka Yamaguchi, the film features a gang boss who has become legendary for surviving knife stabs and gunshot wounds that would kill any ordinary mortal. The reason for his seeming indestructibility: The boss is a vampire. When he is finally felled by an assassin, he bites an underling, Kageyama (Ichihara), before expiring. Now a vampire himself, Kageyama goes out to seek revenge. “Say good-bye to wimpy and boring Japanese movies. Nobody asked me, but I’ve decided on my own to return to my roots and start a riot!,” Miike said In a statement. Miike, who earned his reputation with splatter pics “Audition,” “Visitor Q” and “Ichi The Killer,” has himself been recently working in more mainstream genres such as musicals “(For Love’s Sake”), contemporary dram (“Shield of Straw”) and crime, comedy-drama (“Ace Attorney”.) “Yakuza Apocalypse” is scheduled for a 2015 release with Nikkatsu distributing.Americans are angry about AIG, and they want the government to stop the bailed-out firm's executives from getting bonuses. But according to a new USA TODAY/Gallup Poll, they don't blame President Obama (or Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner) for the upsetting rewards. Nearly half of those surveyed (46%) say AIG management is "most to blame for the fact that these bonuses were paid." Almost one in five (19%) finger Congress, while 8% blame Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and 7% say President Obama bears responsibility. News articles in recent days have highlighted Geithner's role in the payouts. Most recently, the Wall Street Journal reported that aides to the Treasury Secretary worked with AIG on the issue for months. And members of Congress have argued that the White House is at least partially to blame. Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) told the press that the Treasury was to blame for allowing "excessive executive compensation." Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), asked about a loophole that allowed banks receiving bailout money to give bonuses, "This was a Senate -- I'm going to cut you off -- this was Senate/White House -- this is Senate-White House language."In this post, I’m going to examine some of the similarities I’ve noticed in learning Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (BJJ) at the same time I started my career as an air traffic controller (ATC). Both skillsets are known for being cerebral and abstract. Jiu-jitsu and air traffic control are both a thinking man’s game. They also both rely heavily on the ability of the practitioner to synthesize mistakes and make micro-improvements towards the elusive goal of “perfection.” The trainee in both BJJ and ATC starts out knowing the goal, but not how to get there. In BJJ we know we want to A) survive, and B) submit the other person. In ATC we want to A) separate aircraft according to the rules and B) provide as expeditious a service as possible. Just like simply surviving in BJJ isn’t enough to be considered “skilled”, simply separating aircraft in ATC isn’t enough to even hold a certification to work. Both require we go above and beyond survival. We need to survive (and keep airplanes from crashing) first before anything else. After survival, we actively work towards perfecting our craft. In BJJ, we can consider “perfection” as being able to submit our opponents using as little wasted energy or movement as possible. In ATC, we work towards moving as many airplanes as expeditiously as possible, while still following all of the required rules. In both skills, the goal is to not waste energy (in BJJ) or transmissions (ATC) and to get as much done (submitting your opponent in BJJ, moving airplanes in ATC) as quickly as possible. Both skills are measurable. In BJJ, if you can submit your opponent in 30 seconds without breaking a sweat or even raising your heart rate, that is better than taking 20 minutes to submit somebody using all of your strength and energy. In ATC training, we would run a daily competition on the simulator. The goal was to see who could use vectors and speed adjustments to land as many airplanes as possible on an instrument approach while still following all of the rules. A computer would track how m any airplanes each student “landed”, while catching any errors too. The winner would be whoever landed the most aircraft without any separation “busts”. The greatest thing in common with learning BJJ and ATC is instant feedback. All trainees in ATC know how aggressive feedback from instructors can be. It’s not unheard of for trainees to publicly break down in tears after being told—often in a loud voice—all of the things they are doing wrong. A trainee working in a simulated ATC environment or a real one, will be dealing with the stress of multitasking and solving complex situations. During this time they will receive a steady stream of feedback from their instructor. In my experience, the best learning environment for BJJ is when you get tapped by a better person and they explain why they got you, or what error you made leading up to it. You could roll with high-level grapplers and get destroyed, which is in itself a form of feedback. But if you don’t get the verbal feedback as well, the actual deconstruction of your destruction, it may take you a long time to figure things out. These similarities are not special to BJJ/ATC. They apply to tennis or chess or any other myriad skillset. I believe that if you can find a way to get really good at one thing, a hobby or profession, if you can break down how you went from incompetent to competent, then that understanding will help you get competent at many other things. Air traffic control and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu are specific to my own life experience. AdvertisementsJacksonville Jaguars wide receiver Justin Blackmon has been suspended indefinitely for violating the NFL's substance abuse policy, the league announced Friday. Blackmon previously was suspended for the first four games of this season for violating the policy. His latest suspension begins immediately. He will be eligible to apply for reinstatement prior to the start of the 2014 season. "I want to sincerely apologize to Mr. (Shad) Khan, my teammates, my coaches and to the Jaguars fans for not utilizing the resources that I was provided to overcome my challenges," Blackmon said in a statement released by his agent. "I am determined to overcome the issues that have resulted in this situation, and I truly appreciate the support that the Jaguars and my agent have shown me. "I will address these matters with the type of intensity I usually direct toward my on-field play so that I can be ready to be a productive member of the team and community next season. Again, I am truly sorry to Mr. Khan, my teammates and coaches and to the Jaguars fans for the impact of my situation on the team as well as to my family and friends and those that have been there for me during these challenging times. Nobody is more disappointed with all of this than me." Jaguars general manager David Caldwell addressed Blackmon's situation. "All of us who are a part of the Jaguars family care very deeply about Justin and his well-being," Caldwell said. "That said, he must be held accountable and accept the consequences announced today by the NFL. Justin Blackmon has been suspended indefinitely for violating the NFL's substance abuse policy. Doug Pensinger/Getty Images "His suspension will provide him the opportunity to receive the attention and professional treatment necessary to overcome his challenges, and we will support him during this time. The Jacksonville Jaguars will evaluate Justin's status once he has successfully met the criteria to be considered for reinstatement to the league." Caldwell added he hopes Blackmon will play for the Jaguars again but that's a secondary concern after the receiver's health. Blackmon has registered 29 catches for 415 yards and a touchdown for the winless Jaguars (0-8), who have a bye this week. Selected fifth overall in 2012, Blackmon caught 64 passes for 865 yards and five touchdowns as a rookie. Blackmon's past troubles have been well documented. He was arrested on a misdemeanor DUI charge in Texas in 2010 after officers caught him speeding on a suburban Dallas highway. The charge was later reduced to an underage alcohol possession charge. A little more than a month after the Jaguars traded up to select the former Oklahoma State star in the draft, he was arrested during a traffic stop in Stillwater, Okla., after a breath test allegedly showed his blood alcohol content to be three times the legal limit. That arrest landed him in the NFL's substance-abuse program. Information from ESPN.com Jaguars reporter Mike DiRocco and The Associated Press was used in this report.There are nine remaining NHL arenas left standing among those opened in 1995 or earlier, including the only two without corporate sponsor names, and two others in Canadian cities. There are only three remaining stadiums built before the 1990’s, and just one of them isn’t going to be demolished in the near future. TD Garden in Boston, Massachusetts: September 30, 1995 Home of the Boston Bruins and Boston Celtics, replacing the mythical Boston Garden. The annual Beanpot challenge is played there, and it has hosted the Frozen Four three times: 1998, 2004 and 2015. It has a capacity of 17,565 for NHL games. Rogers Arena in Vancouver, British Columbia: September 21, 1995 Home of the Vancouver Canucks, and for a short while, also the Vancouver Grizzlies until they moved to Memphis. Rogers Arena replaced the Pacific Coliseum. It was the Ice Hockey venue in the 2010 winter olympics, and has a capacity of 18,910 for hockey games. It often hosts preseason games for the Toronto Raptors, and even a college basketball game between Gonzaga and Hawaii a few years ago. Scottrade Center in St. Louis, Missouri: October 8, 1994 Home of the St. Louis Blues (and them alone, not sharing it with an NBA team), it was previously known as the Kiel Center until 2000, followed by Savvis Center up to 2006. The hockey games capacity is 19,150, but the biggest attendance ever was during Arch Madness, the MVC tournament, with 22,612 showing up. United Center in Chicago, Illinois: August 18, 1994 The arena is co-owned by the Blackhawks and the Chicago Bulls, and fans inside saw the Blackhawks clinch the Stanley Cup in the 2015 series vs the Tampa Bay Lightning, the first time the Blackhawks clinched the championship on their home ice since 1938. It’s hockey capacity is 19,717, but with standing room it’s 22,428. SAP Center in San Jose, California: September 7, 1993 Home of the San Jose Sharks, it was also the home of the Golden State Warriors for one season, and since 2015, the home of the AHL’s San Jose Barracuda. Also known as The Shark Tank, it was previously sponsored by Compaq and HP, and simply known as the San Jose Arena during the first 8 years of existence. It has a capacity of 17,562. Honda Center in Anaheim, California: June 19, 1993 The Honda Center is mainly the home of the Anaheim Ducks, but also the Los Angeles Kiss, an Arena Football League, and was also the second home of the Los Angeles Clippers from 1994 to 1999. The capacity of the venue is 17,174 for hockey games, but the record attendance for the Ducks is 17,610, playing the Chicago Blackhawks in 2013. Scotiabank Saddledome in Calgary, Alberta: October 15, 1983 The oldest NHL arena in Canada, the Saddledome was first known as the Olympic Saddledome, built for the 1988 winter olympics held in Calgary, and for the Flames as well. The Calgary Hitmen of the WHL also use the Arena, as do the Calgary Roughnecks for Lacrosse. The arena was heavily damaged in the 2013 Alberta floods, but managed to be fixed in time for the 2013-2014 preseason. It has a capacity of 19,289. It will be replaced in the future as part of the CalgaryNEXT project: a sports complex which would be located in the western downtown area, and would include replacements for both the Saddledome and McMahon Stadium. Joe Louis Arena in Detroit, Michigan: December 12, 1979 One of only two NHL arenas without a corporate sponsored name, it’s named after boxer Joe Louis, who grew up in Detroit. It replaced the Detroit Olympia, and unlike most NHL/NBA cities, it does not share homes, as the Detroit Pistons play in Auburn Hills. The Pistons did however play there in a 1984 playoff game and some games in the 1984-1985 season due to the Silverdome (their home at the time) having roof problems, as in the roof collapsed. It has a capacity of 20,027. The Red Wings new arena, Little Caesars Arena, should be completed by 2017, and will replace the soon to be demolish Joe Louis Arena. Madison Square Garden in New York City, New York: February 11, 1968 Maybe the most famous sports arena in the world, Madison Square Garden has been around New York City for almost 140 years. The first two Gardens were located just Northeast of its current location, which is 4 Pennsylvania Plaza. The third Garden, opened in 1925, was on 8th Avenue between 49th and 50th Streets. The current and fourth MSG opened after Irving M. Felt, who purchased the air rights from the Pennsylvania Railroad, tore down the above-ground portions of the original Pennsylvania Station. The new structure was one of the first of its kind to be built above the platforms of an active railroad station. The New York Rangers and New York Knicks both call it home, and the arena and both teams are owned by the same person: James L. Dolan. It has a capacity of 18,006 for hockey games.British families are entitled to fear the impact that "enormous" numbers of migrants will have on jobs, housing and the NHS, the Archbishop of Canterbury has said. The Most Rev Justin Welby said that it is "absolutely outrageous" to condemn people who raise concerns as "racist" and said that their "genuine fears" must be listened to and addressed. In an interview with The House magazine, he described the scale of the migration crisis as "colossal" and said that people are "justified" when they raise concerns. He also said that there is "no correct Christian view" on how to vote in the EU referendum, adding: "You can't say 'God says you must vote this way'." He said: "Fear is a valid emotion at a time of such colossal crisis. This is one of the greatest movements of people in human history. Just enormous. And to be anxious about that is very reasonable. "There is a tendency to say 'Those people are racist', which is just outrageous, absolutely outrageous. "In fragile communities particularly - and I've worked in many areas with very fragile communities over my time as a clergyman - there is a genuine fear: what happens about housing? What happens about jobs? What happens about access to health services?" The comments represent the most significant concerns raised by the Church of England about the migration crisis to date. The Most Rev Welby said that with the right support, the British people had shown they were able to deal "brilliantly" with the challenges which such situations created. "It is simply a question of the scale on which we are prepared to act, in a way that spreads the load so it can be managed," he said. "Fear is justified, I wouldn't want to criticise that for a moment, but so is hope wholly justified, because we have the capacity. We're those kind of people, we always have been." He said that it is "legitimate" for those on both sides of the EU referendumdebate to raise fears about the outcome of the referendum. He said: “It should be about what we fear. Fear is a valid emotion. Fear of what happens if we leave, fear of what happens if we stay. You can understand why that really matters. Fear is legitimate. “My hope and prayer is that we have a really visionary debate about what our country looks like. From those who want to leave; what would it look like? What would Britain look like, having left? "What would be its attitude internationally? What would be its values? What are the points of excitement, of contributing to human flourishing? How does that liberate the best that is within us? “And from those who want to stay, how would we change the European Union? How would we make it more effective if we remained in it? What’s our vision?" The Most Rev Welby repeated his call for Britain to take more than the 20,000 refugees pledged by David Cameron, describing the commitment as "pretty thin". He said: “We are leading the world locally, in the area of the crisis, in terms of humanitarian support. "But it’s got to be both, not either/or. We’re taking an extraordinary lead there. It shows what we can do. Can we not show the same capacity and strength here, as we do there?" He also said that for the first ime in centuries Britain finds itself in a conflict with Isil and other extremists that has "very significant theological aspects". He said that Britain needs to be confident and proud about its Judeo-Christian heritage. He said: "We need to be confident about our own heritage, our Judeo-Christian heritage, whether we’re believers or not. That is what has shaped our own values, and we need to be confident in that."Trump? Clinton? Nope. How about beer instead, says downtown Midland business The owners of Michigan Brew Supply put up a sidewalk sign about two weeks ago that lists 'Trump,' 'Hillary' and 'Beer,' with a cross through both names and 'Beer' double underlined. The owners of Michigan Brew Supply put up a sidewalk sign about two weeks ago that lists 'Trump,' 'Hillary' and 'Beer,' with a cross through both names and 'Beer' double underlined. Photo: Chris Aldridge, Caldridge@mdn.net Photo: Chris Aldridge, Caldridge@mdn.net Image 1 of / 7 Caption Close Trump? Clinton? Nope. How about beer instead, says downtown Midland business 1 / 7 Back to Gallery Decisions, decisions. Public opinion of the two frontrunners running to be the next president of the United States is as scattered as a drum of spilled glitter. Polls show Donald Trump has the edge one week and Hillary Clinton leading the next. Recent Michigan polls show a swing in favor of Clinton. On the fringes, Libertarian Gary Johnson and Green Party candidate Jill Stein are picking up steam. Through it all, there’s rarely been a better chance or more ample fodder to feed a political discussion among family, friends or complete strangers — or fuel an oft regrettable “that escalated quickly” dialogue-turned-heated-argument that tests relationships. “I think mostly everyone is ready for it to be over,” said Nicole van Schagen, who co-owns Michigan Brew Supply on Townsend Street with Matthew Kris. It doesn’t mean the business can’t have a little fun in the meantime: the owners put up a sidewalk sign about two weeks ago that lists “Trump,” “Hillary” and “Beer,” with both names crossed out and “Beer” double underlined. The succinct message seems clear: it acknowledges that neither candidate likely to claim presidency is desirable, an opinion gaining popularity. Not to fear, though, because there’s still beer. And dissecting this further may be futile: messages on the sign always say something goofy on one side, van Schagen said. “This one’s gotten a lot of attention,” she said. The sign’s topical humor hasn’t necessarily ushered in a flood of business to the relatively new downtown store, which opened in the summer of 2014. But it has stirred many reactions, according to van Schagen. “It’s not anything to dive deep into,” she said. “We’re not diving any deeper than what’s out there. … We didn’t want to take sides. Beer is what we do.” For those who want to adhere to the sign’s message, van Schagen suggests a black IPA to endure the election. The ale takes the heavy body of a stout and smacks of citrus and pine normally found in an Indian pale ale, she said. It’s for those seeking “the best of both worlds” — both in a glass of suds and a president, according to van Schagen. SEE ALSO: More local news Michigan Brew Supply isn’t the only local business to have fun at the expense of the approaching election. The Midland Area Chamber of Commerce reports it recently surveyed the business community to ask, if voting today, who would be the next president. The Chamber has about 1,000 members, including various businesses, organizations and nonprofits. There were 116 respondents. The results showed Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson was only a few votes short of Donald Trump. Hillary Clinton had the lead with 41 votes (35.3 percent), Donald Trump had 35 votes (30.1 percent) and Gary Johnson had 32 (27.5 percent). Green Party candidate Jill Stein received three votes. What’s more, the survey included a comments section. One respondent reportedly wrote, “The Sweet Meteor of Death should be an option!!” “It’s a crazy, unpredictable election season, fueled partly by the voters’ frustrations, partly by the unusual, polarizing individuals running for election, and partly by perceived influence of media outlets and social media,” Diane Middleton, director of community programs, wrote in the Chamber’s weekly update for Aug. 24. “And hey, we’ve got 11 more weeks of I-can’t-watch-but-I-can’t-look-away-either craziness to go, so make sure your helmet is strapped on nice and tight.” Oh, and, “bonus points to the respondent who still has us chuckling about the Meteor of Death,” Middleton wrote.Whenever we travel somewhere, we have a checklist to go over prior to departure and upon arrival. This insure we are not driving down the highway and have something go wrong on the way and everything is secured. Departure Checklist Before Leaving Clean Grill Clean grill to allow it to be moved and stored without creating a mess. Empty Black tanks Self explanatory. Inside Trailer Monitor Secure our extra monitor. Loose items Put away items so that they will not move when the trailer is in motion. This includes: Toilet paper, hand soap, jar or utensils, toaster on the counter, weather display, and any loose items you see on the counters. Weather Sensor Grab weather sensor on top of wheel (Allows us to get outside temp) Cell Booster If in use, bring inside. Water Pump Make sure the water pump is off. Water Heater Make sure the water heater is off. Interior Windows Make sure all interior windows are closed. Refrigerator Make sure the fridge is latched, and it is off. Bikes Put bikes in vehicle. Lock door Once done inside, go ahead and exit and lock the door. Outside Trailer Wheel Covers Remove and store. Awning Securely connect the awning hooks. LP Gas Make sure the LP gas tanks are off. Electricity Disconnect electrical cable and store. Water Disconnect the hose and water filter and store. Sewer If in use, disconnect hose and place in trash bag and store. Windows Visually inspect all the outside windows and make sure they’re closed. Top of Trailer Make sure nothing is on top of the trailer (like booster antenna). Stove Vent Make sure the stove vent is closed and latched. Stabilizers Bring up stabilizers. Towing Trailer Hitch Mount hitch on Expedition. Close Latch Slide latch forward. Secure with pin. Sway Bars Install sway bars. Secure with pins. Chains Mount chains to hitch. Trailer Brake Connect trailer brake Emergency Brake Disconnect, loop through hitch and reconnect. Tow Mount Blocks Grab tow mount blocks and store. Chock Blocks Pull trailer chock blocks and store. Leveling Blocks If used, removed and store. Inspect Under Trailer Inspect under trailer and make sure everything is clear. Lights Check Check brake light and turn signals/four ways AWAY WE GO! By the time all this is done, we have a strong coffee mug in hand and ready to get some miles in! Below is what we do when we arrive at our campsite: the arrival checklist. Arrival Checklist Trailer Position trailer Position trailer on designated site Leveling Blocks If needed Chock Blocks Place chock blocks. Towing Emergency Brake Disconnect. Trailer Brake Disconnect trailer brake Chains Disconnect chains and store on tow mount Sway Bars Remove sway bars. Open Latch Lift both sides and slide latch back Tow Mount Blocks Place two mount blocks under tow mount. Lower Tow Mount Lower to insure overall trailer is level Outside Trailer Stabilizers Bring down stabilizers. Stove Vent Open stove vent Sewer If available, install sewer hose. Water Connect hose and water filter. Electricity Connect electrical cable. LP Gas Turn on gas. Insider Trailer Bikes Remove bikes Refrigerator Turn on fridge Water Heater Turn on water heater Water Pump If needed, turn on water pump Cell Booster If needed, install cell booster Place all loose objects back on the counterLast week, GHash.IO has experienced a DDoS-attack against the pool. Although the website itself did work, miners were not able to mine during 6 hours, as a result of the attack tacking up to 40 Gbps. At the moment, GHash.IO works properly. Anti-DDoS protection provided by Voxility hosting is integrated with our platform. It’s worth mentioning that there was no information leak or crashed accounts, and only GHash.IO stratum server has been attacked, not affecting CEX.IO exchange. The attack has been conducted by a hacker who has already DDOS-ed CEX.IO in October, 2014. Previously, he demanded 2 BTC for stopping the attack. This time, the payment has been raised to 5-10 Bitcoins. According to his words, Usually, I have to run the attack for 1 hour or less and I get paid, so large damage is prevented, which means, other services have also been attacked. After everything has been fixed, the hacker stopped writing to us. At the moment, we are in touch with other services that have been DDOS-ed, among them — Bitalo. We are open for communication and are ready to help other Bitcoin services to prevent the attacks. Since we suspended cloud mining services, all miners that are currently using GHash.IO are individual miners who trust our platform. With a 0% fee, we are not getting any profit from the mining pool, but we believe that mining is an extremely valuable process for the industry in general, for generating new coins and confirming transactions. That is why we’ve made all possible efforts to restore the service and are encouraging miners to connect their hardware to the pool. We will continue developing mining side of our company and invest into improving security of the pool so that Bitcoin adherents could enjoy using our service that is secure and free of charge.Early next month, The Prodigy will re-release their demure, modestly successful period piece The Fat Of The Land. XL’s reissue will feature a glut of extra remixes: Baauer, The Glitch Mob, Alvin Risk and Zeds Dead are among those taking the record to task. As The Fader report, BBC Radio 1 DJ Zane Lowe dropped Major Lazer’s remix of controversy magnet ‘Smack My Bitch Up’ on his show earlier this week. It makes sense that one of contemporary dance music’s gaudiest propositions would take on one of The Prodigy’s most shameless cuts, and the results are as you might expect – big, brash, and about as nuanced as a Fox News roundtable discussion. Bar some toasting and air horn gubbins, Diplo and co leave the track almost entirely unmolested for the first minutes. After a (very silly) drop, however, things snap into Flosstradamus mode: the tempo drops, and Diplo fires strafing high hats and wiggly synth tones at the listener. NB: Dutch bass crew Noisa have also remixed the track. The revamped Fat of the Land will be released on double-vinyl, double-CD and digital download on December 4. Update: Baauer’s remix of the Eastern-tinged ‘Mindfields’ has also surfaced. While more reverent of the original than Major Lazer’s remix, its “dubstep wobble plus stalking percussion loop” formulation is none too novel, either.UPDATES: I added the results of the Women’s Downhill Finals and corrected some of the results that I had confused. It was the end of a long day and misread the results list, my apologies — they’re correct and double checked now. I’ve also added a video taken by Robert Briggs of the Northern Skate Alliance just after the results video. What started out as a very wet, rainy New England day ended up being a mega success as 131 riders and even more fans from all over New England (and some from even further) descended upon the quaint town of Harvard, MA to compete in this year’s Central MA Downhill & Freeride Competition. According to Mike Girard, there were actually 84 different towns or cities being represented in 12 states and 3 different countries — talk about a turnout! The biggest event was Downhill, pulling in 90 riders, followed closely by Freeride which boasted 75 participants while the Flatland portion had 26 people participating. The day was a TON of fun even with the crap weather at the beginning of the day. After the second round of downhill the rain stopped and clouds began to break, allowing the sun to start drying the course off. Unfortunately it made for some patchy pavement at first, but as the day progressed the hills dried out and by the time the Freeride competition took place the hill was almost back to normal. There’s going to be a lot of video from this event, I should have an edit out sometime tomorrow and expect to see others starting to surface around the same time. Of course, as I find them or have them sent to me I’ll be sure to post them right here so stay tuned. Below are the results for the Men’s Downhill and Freeride events. Men’s Downhill Will Royce Will Miranda Jeff Vyain & Brian Bishop (sharing due to tape sticking, and melting, to Bish’s trucks and wheels). Women’s Downhill Sara Paulshock Laura Nocka Cordelia Welch Men’s Freeride Eric Roth Norman Plante & Steve Kong (tied) Bruce Clark (of our friends from the Northern Skate Alliance) Josh Wright Will Royce Longest hard wheel slide: Steve Kong Longest soft wheel slide: Trevor Granville Best Trick: Alex Newton (one foot nose blunt) Biggest bail: Nick Sharek Women’s Freeride Jess Carchia Laura Nocka (longest women’s standup) Sara Paulshock If you want to actually see the winners take their prizes and the podium check out the awards ceremony video below: Robert Briggs of the Northern Skate Alliance had his GoPro on hand and got some great footage from the event, including some helmet cam action, definitely worth a watch! Central Massachusetts DH from some dude on Vimeo. Also check out some of the photos I snapped from the event. I spent most of the day taking video (which will be edited and posted soon) but paused to take a few shots of the crowd both before and after the contest as well as the winners.The man behind Victory Point Games, and much more, joins us for this week’s chat ~ Michael Eckenfels, 24 January 2017 What was the first wargame you taught to someone else? I started with a subscription to S&T, and so taught NAPOLEON AT WATERLOO to my gaming buddies. One of their dad’s had a treasure trove of Avalon Hill games in the garage, and we played those all summer! That was… 1973, I think. What was the first wargame you ever designed (even if it didn’t see the light of day)? Really, I’m more of a developer than a designer. I did some very satisfying work on Cosmic Encounter (designing a lot of expansion material) “back in the day,” and have done so much development work on some games I have ended up their “co-designer,” but I’m a rare bird in our industry to is happy developing games for others. What are your three favorite types/genres of wargames? Strategic level 20th Century, Napoleonic, and Ancient. I like strategic level games for the Big Picture and neat abstractions that keep everything simple, manageable, and moving. How are you breaking new ground in the wargaming hobby? Where are you blazing new trails? Currently, we’re in transition from print-on-demand publishing to print-abroad publishing (used by most other game publishers). So, I spend much of my time, not blazing new trails with risky new print-on-demand games, but widening and paving the roads built by our past successes just to keep them in stock! That is, I’m upgrading many VPG “classics” these days (and, I admit, having a lot of fun revisiting them and getting another bite at the apple). But we’re preparing to launch our first “monster” size wargame series, Frank Chadwick’s ETO. It’s a real “player’s wargame” (evolved from the introductory classic, BATTLE FOR MOSCOW, which Frank Chadwick designed back in ’86 and I was fortunate enough to help develop and publish in Fire & Movement’s Beginner’s Guide to Strategy Gaming). We’re putting all the hard-core history in it, but keeping everything very, very manageable so that grognards can see and command things with ease and really just enjoy wargaming like they used to! The first game in this series, Thunder in the East, begins (as so many WWII series games do) by covering the Russian Front. Playtesting is progressing very well and revealing things that we’re busy right now smoothing out (and simplifying! I love it when a more elegant way to simulate in a wargame is found, and Frank Chadwick is a master at that). We should be pulling all the stops for it at ConsimWorld this year, and launching this one on Kickstarter in Autumn. It’s 5am and you can’t sleep. What are you doing? That’s every morning for me! 😀 I’m sorting out my work day and what business and game development goals I want to accomplish. I’ll be out of bed in a few minutes and at the office before sunrise (if traffic permits). What was your favorite subject in school (any level)? Well, that subscription to S&T back in the 70s changed everything, as history went from my least to most favorite subject in school. Computers were new on campus in the 70s (my High School was very rare in having one that the students could work with), and working with them was intriguing. Speech and Drama were also great subjects. What’s the last good book you read? Killing the Rising Sun. It was my first O’Rielly/Dugan book and was a helluva fun read! Lots of great little storylines, well told, and tightly woven together. Games should be that well-crafted! When you’re not wargaming, what are some other games you enjoy playing? I love all kinds of games. This Saturday we’re having a big chariot race (playtesting our forthcoming CHARIOTS OF ROME); that game’s a blast. All kinds of card games, fantasy and sci-fi themed strategy games, abstract games (although I’m the worst Chess player on God’s green earth)… Look, life is too short for bad games; when you find a good one, you play it. How many folks have you converted to wargaming over the years? Quite a few; I rather lost count! In High School, I taught a girl I was going out with Quatre Bras quadrigame from SPI, and boy did she boot my butt! This was good practice, as my wife (of 20+ years now) also regularly boots my butt – we’re so competitive at the game table, it’s a sight to see! Thanks for joining us, and we’re looking forward to the new crop of games! Chat about it below, or in our forums, or hit our FaceBook page >>.. Morning Media Your guide to the media circus. Sign up for Morning Media  Email Sign Up Most Recent Issue Most Recent Issue \| Archives Melania Trump, wife of Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, delivers a speech on the first day of the Republican National Convention on July 18, at the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Ohio. \| Getty Melania Trump taking legal action against Daily Mail for defamation By Hadas Gold By \| 08/22/16 02:52 PM EDT Melania Trump has started legal action against the Daily Mail and other outlets for what she claims is a defamatory article about her past. Charles Harder, an attorney for Trump, said in an email that the legal action goes beyond just the Daily Mail and is not limited to the United Kingdom, where the Daily Mail is headquartered. "Mrs. Trump has placed several news organizations on notice of her legal claims against them, including Daily Mail a mong others, for making false and defamatory statements about her supposedly having been an “escort” in the 1990s," Harder said in an email. "All such statements are 100% false, highly damaging to her reputation, and personally hurtful. She understands that news media have certain leeway in a presidential campaign, but outright lying about her in this way exceeds all bounds of appropriate news reporting and human decency." Harder was Harder was in the news recently for representing Hulk Hogan in his successful bid to sue Gawker, bankrolled by Silicon Valley investor and Donald Trump supporter Peter Thiel, who spoke at the Republican National Convention in July. The article in question was The article in question was published last week by the Daily Mail and questions Trump's biography and history as as model. Other news organizations in the United Kingdom were warned about publishing the allegations as well. Another British newspaper sent a note to employees which was shared with POLITICO, warning them about publishing
. www.BritaxUSA.com MD Moms Created by two moms that also serve as pediatricians, MD Moms is a skin care line created for kids that mothers (and non mothers) can use. According to mdmoms.com, creators Dr. Diane Truong and Dr. JJ Levinstein’s use of pure yet effective ingredients has led to the creation of “babys prescription for healthy skin.” Cleverly encased in packaging that requires the use of one hand, MD Moms produced a line without the traditional baby smell. According to Dr. JJ “mothers can be reminded of the scent of their child without smelling like one.” Aside from helping babies maintain perfect skin, the line is actively involved with childrens charities and pro-bono clinical work. www.mdmoms.com Nourish Nourish is the first bottled water for babies and toddlers created with the intent to “provide health and convenience.” Nourish provides two products- Nourish Baby and Nourish Toddler. Nourish Baby is a pre-measured water bottle topped with a nipple for formula fed babies. Nourish Toddler is a water bottle topped with a spill-proof sippy top. All bottles are recyclable and reuseable, BPA free and airport security approved. www.nourish-inc.com Fat Tie Fat Tie is a boys t-shirt line that makes dressing up boys a lot simpler and dressing them down a bit more stylish. Created by Los Angeles Trade Tech College Fashion Design graduate Marinella Gallen, Fat Tie is the result of a school project inspired by her son Max. Many moms agree that finding different fashionable items for their sons can be somewhat difficult. Fat Tie is a fashionable and machine washable option for boys that “mean business.” www.shop-fat-tie.com Icy Diamond Totes Created in April 2009, Icy Diamond Totes simplifies the need to carry around products that require refrigeration without the hassle of carrying a cooler. 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This great product can be found at www.spotlight-baby.com, along with other organic products and helpful tips for parenting. Spotlight Baby is actively involved in ending human trafficking. Portions of their proceeds support organizations that work to prevent trafficking. Babisil Munch Set Feeding your baby can be fun and a little less messy with the use of Babisil’s Munch Mate set. Included in a set are a bowl anchor, bendy spoon and a fun munch bib that catches whatever doesn’t make it into baby’s mouth. Each soft and flexible item is spill proof and machine washable. The spoon and anchor can be rolled up inside the bib for simple storage. www.babisil.co.uk Babisil Silbottle This BPA free bottle reduces colic, fluid in the ear, and is easy to clean. Similar to a drop-in disposable bottle liners, Silbottles contain a dishwasher safe inner chamber that colapses as baby drinks. A “swirler” lays just beneath the nipple, preventing chunks of unmixed formula from clogging the nipple. There is also a hole punch that is used to create different nipple flows as baby grows. www.babisil.com Vuka Made with all natural ingredients, Vuka is a line of 4 new flavorful energy drinks that give you a boost during 4 activities in your life. For the non coffee drinker that loves orange juice there is orange flavored “Awaken”. Had a long day at the gym? How about a can of berry lemonade “Workout”. For those who need a middle of the day boost there is pomegranate lychee “Think”. Mango peache flavored “Renew” leaves you feeling restored and revived. Each drink is packaged in a stylish can that cools quickly and is recyclable and reuseable. www.vuka.com Treasure Dough Treasure Dough is a product created for kids that creates hours of fun. There are 4 different themed buckets that include non-toxic playdough filled with hidden treasures. Princess Loot comes with glittery pink playdough that is full of princess jewels. Dino Diggers is a tub of green playdough that houses dinosaurs, eggs and rocks. The Under The Sea tub has blue playdough that is mixed with sea creatures and other sunken treasures. Last, the Zany Zoo tub is filled with orange or yellow playdough and holds different animals and other treasures. www.treasuredough.com Zooni Zooni specializes in fun handknit hats, muppet mittens and 3D socks. The cute children (and adult) accessories make keeping warm stylish and fun! www.zooniwear.com Trolde-Evevtyr Trolls and fairytales is what this brand translates to. Specializing in bright colorful art designs, Trolde-Eventyr creates wonderful lunch boxes, bottles and storage boxes that any child would love to call his own. www.trolde-evevtyr.dk SmartKnitKids Seamless Sensitivity Socks SmartKnitKids has created the perfect seamless Non bunching sock.They keep feet dry and comfortable for as long as you wear them. They are perferct for those with normal skin and have proved to be wonderful for those with special skin conditions. www.smartknitkids.com Others included Chicco, Skip Hop, Bright Starts, Timi & Leslie, Bratt Decor, MD Moms, Happy Heinys, Dandelion, #1 nursing clothing line Larrivo, Kid Basix, Organic Kidz, Loved Baby, Goodnight Light, Penguin Books, Moby Wrap, and Zooni and more!A quick tour of the Silicon web framework: A simple blog API in 85 C++ lines In late January 2015, I released the first version of the Silicon Web Framework. The documentation covers all the concepts of the library but does not contains a concrete example covering the needs of a real world application. In this blog post, I'll show how to write a such an application with the framework. Like most modern web apps, it relies on a database to store data, and sessions to authenticate its users. The source code of this article is hosted on the Silicon github repository. The user and post models Let's first define the models of the post and user object that will be persisted in the database. The post object stores the blog posts, while the user object stores logins and passwords. typedef decltype ( D ( _id ( _auto_increment, _primary_key ) = int (), _login = std :: string (), _password = std :: string ())) user ; typedef decltype ( D ( _id ( _auto_increment, _primary_key ) = int (), _user_id ( _read_only ) = int (), _title = std :: string (), _body = std :: string ())) post ; These two objects are like plain C objects. The only difference is that their type encode compile time information required by the framework: The pairs of symbols/types representing the object members and some extra tags: _read_only : marks post::user_id as read only. The create and update post procedures must not allow the client to update this field. _auto_increment : tells the framework that the id field is auto generated by the database at the object creation. _primary_key : marks the fields that will be used to identify an object when updating it or destroying it. Object relational mapping From these models, we can easily generate the orm and their factories. The sql_orm class provides methods to easily update, insert and delete object from the sqlite database: typedef sql_orm_factory < sqlite_connection, user > user_orm_factory ; typedef sql_orm < sqlite_connection, user > user_orm ; typedef sql_orm_factory < sqlite_connection, post > post_orm_factory ; typedef sql_orm < sqlite_connection, post > post_orm ; Session and authentication The next step is to create the session middleware class handling our user authentication and tracking. I rely on hashmap_session_factory to stores the sessions in a in-memory key-value store. If your application needs the sessions to persist after a server reboot, you can use mysql_session or sqlite_session. The user_id member of the middleware stores the id of the authenticated user, and the methods authenticate, logout and is_authenticated handle user authentication. struct session { session () : user_id ( - 1 ) {} bool authenticate ( sqlite_connection & c, std :: string login, std :: string password ) { auto res = c ( "SELECT user_id FROM blog_users where login =? and password =?" ) ( login, hash_sha3_512 ( password )); auto user_exists =! res. empty (); if ( user_exists ) res >> user_id ; return user_exists ; } bool logout () { user_id = - 1 ; } bool is_authenticated () { return user_id!= - 1 ; } int user_id ; }; Several procedures will require the user to be authenticated. They need to sends back a error 401 to the client if it is not authenticated. The restricted_area middleware fulfills this task: struct restricted_area { static instantiate ( session & u ) { if (! u. is_authenticated ()) throw error :: unauthorized ( "Only authenticated users can execute this request." ); } }; Why do we need a middleware to check for authentication? Middlewares in Silicon are instantiated before each procedure call, and if their instantiation throws, the exception will be caught by the backend and send back to the client as a HTTP error. This is the behavior we need for our restricted_area middleware. A procedure requires the instantiation of a middleware by simply declaring it as argument: [] ( restricted_area ) { // A procedure for logged users only. } Note that restricted_area::instantiate depends on a session object. The framework automatically instantiate it before each call to restricted_area::instantiate. Actually, Silicon handles any dependency graph between the middleware, as long as their is no cycle. Read more about the dependency injection module. The API The API is now a matter of few lines of code. It contains two procedures for login/logout and a set create update destroy (CRUD) procedures for the user and post objects. Let's start with the login procedure: auto blog_api = http_api ( POST / _login * post_parameters ( _login, _password ) = [] ( auto p, session & s, sqlite_connection & c ) { if (! s. authenticate ( c, p. login, p. password )) throw error :: bad_request ( "Invalid user or password" ); }, As you can see in the procedure signature _login(_login, _password), it takes as argument the user login and password. By default, arguments have type string, but you can specify other argument types: _login(_login, _password = int()). The backends automatically deserialize the arguments and pass them to the procedure via in the auto parameter. The procedure also takes as parameters two middleware instances: the session and the database connection. The framework is responsible of instantiating and passing the required middlewares to each procedure. We'll see later how to bind the middleware factories to the API. The logout method just requires access to the session and call its logout method: GET / _logout = [] ( session & s ) { s. logout (); }, We also need to manage our user table. The API relies on sql_crud, a generic CRUD generator, to generate 4 procedures ( get_by_id, create, update, destroy ) for the post and user objects. It also provides some entry points to configure the behavior of the CRUD. I used 3 of them in this example: _validate to validate the state of an object. to validate the state of an object. _write_access to restrict the modification of a user. to restrict the modification of a user. _before_create hashes the password and check for duplicate users. I placed the CRUD routes under the user namespace. I'll show later how the backend reflects the namespaces in the routing scheme. _user = sql_crud < user_orm > ( _before_create = [] ( user & u, sqlite_connection & c ) { if (! c ( "SELECT * from blog_users where login =?" )( u. login ). empty ()) throw error :: bad_request ( "User with login ", u. login, " already exists." ); u. password = hash_sha3_512 ( u. password ); }, _validate = [] ( user & u, sqlite_connection & c ) { return u. login. size () > 0 ; }, _write_access = [] ( user & u, session & s ) { return u. id == s. user_id ; } ), Like the user namespace, the post namespace manages the blog posts with sql_crud : _post = sql_crud < post_orm > ( _validate = [] ( post & p ) { return p. title. size () > 0 and p. body. size () > 0 ; }, _before_create = [] ( post & p, session & s, restricted_area ) { p. user_id = s. user_id ; }, _write_access = [] ( post & p, session & s, restricted_area ) { return p. user_id == s. user_id ; } ) Middleware factories We now need the factories required to instantiate the middlewares. restricted_area does not need a factory since it provides the instantiate static method. However, it is not the case of session, sqlite_connection, user_orm and post_orm. auto middlewares = std :: make_tuple ( sqlite_connection_factory ( "blog.sqlite" ), user_orm_factory ( "blog_users" ), post_orm_factory ( "blog_posts" ), hashmap_session_factory < session > ()); Serving the API via HTTP The mhd_json_serve backend takes as input the API object and the port to listen to. It starts a HTTP server and serve the API via a routing scheme directly generated from the API hierarchy: POST / login ( login : string, password : string ) -> void GET / logout () -> void GET / user / get_by_id ( id : int ) -> { id : int, login : string, password : string } POST / user / create ( login : string, password : string ) -> { id : int } POST / user / update ( id : int, login : string, password : string ) -> void POST / user / destroy ( id : int ) -> void GET / post / get_by_id ( id : int ) -> { id : int, user_id : int, title : string, body : string } POST / post / create ( title : string, body : string ) -> { id : int } POST / post / update ( id : int, title : string, body : string ) -> void POST / post / destroy ( id : int ) -> void To remotely call the API, the client passes the arguments via the body of the request. If an error occurs (i.e. an exception was thrown by a middleware or the procedure), a HTTP error is sent to the client. If the procedure runs successfully, the backend json-serializes its return value into the response body.IF YOU know that Donald Trump is ignorant, unprepared and bigoted, but are thinking of voting for him anyway because you doubt he could do much harm — this editorial is for you. Your support of the Republican presidential nominee may be motivated by dislike of the Democratic alternative, disgust with the Washington establishment or a desire to send a message in favor of change. You may not approve of everything Mr. Trump has had to say about nuclear weapons, torture or mass deportations, but you doubt he could implement anything too radical. Congress, the courts, the Constitution — these would keep Mr. Trump in check, you think. Well, think again. A President Trump could, unilaterally, change this country to its core. By remaking U.S. relations with other nations, he could fundamentally reshape the world, too. Of course, in many areas Mr. Trump would not have to act unilaterally. If he won, chances are Republicans would maintain control of Congress. GOP majorities there would be enthusiastic participants in much of what Mr. Trump would like to do: gutting environmental and workplace regulations, slashing taxes so that the debt skyrockets, appointing Supreme Court justices who oppose a woman’s right to have an abortion. In areas where Republican officeholders such as House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (Wis.) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) imagine themselves acting as a brake on Mr. Trump’s worst instincts, skepticism is in order. If these supposed leaders are too craven to oppose Mr. Trump as a candidate, knowing the danger he presents, why should we expect them to stand up to the bully once he was fully empowered? But say they did — or imagine, also improbably, that Mr. Trump faced a Democratic Congress. The president would appoint officers — a budget director, an attorney general, a CIA chief — who were disposed to let him have his way. And in the U.S. system, the scope for executive action is, as we will lay out in a series of editorials next week, astonishingly broad. At times we have questioned President Obama’s sweeping use of those powers even when we agreed with his goals, such as his broad grant of amnesty to millions of undocumented immigrants. Mr. Trump could push it much further. The Washington Post explores the origins of Donald Trump's transformation from a businessman to political candidate. (McKenna Ewen,Whitney Shefte,Dalton Bennett/The Washington Post) Could he tear up long-standing international agreements? Round up and expel millions of longtime U.S. residents? Impose giant tariffs? Waterboard terrorist suspects? Yes, yes, yes and yes — all without so much as an if-you-please to Congress. Could he bar the media from covering him? To a large extent, yes. Could he use the government to help his businesses and, as he has threatened, injure those he perceives as enemies? Yes, he could. Given Mr. Trump’s ever-evolving positions, and the apparent absence of fundamental beliefs other than in his own brilliance, it would be foolish to make flat predictions of how he would behave. Nor do we underestimate the resilience of the U.S. system or the devotion that U.S. government workers bring to the rule of law. But it would be reckless not to consider the damage Mr. Trump might wreak. Some of that damage would ensue more from who he is than what he does. His racism and disparagement of women could empower extremists who are now on the margins of American politics, while his lies and conspiracy theories could legitimize discourse that until now has been relegated to the fringe. But his scope for action should not be underestimated, either. In our upcoming editorials, we will examine some arenas where Mr. Trump has been relatively clear about his intentions — and where presidential powers are mighty. We hope you will read them before you vote.iPhone The band The 88 has just released a single called "Love is the Thing," a song the group recorded entirely on their iPhone. Using an iPhone app called FourTrack from Sonoma Wire Works, the band was able to lay down some 13 tracks (plus one track for a cymbal crash added later), which were then imported to a Mac for final mixdown. "This Spring, we were on tour opening up for the B-52s, with shows all around the East Coast," the band said in a post on its site. "One day while we were driving, Keith was browsing through the applications on the iPhone and came across FourTrack. We thought this app would be a great way to record song ideas while we are away from home." Once they downloaded it, the band decided, "it would be a neat experiment to record the full band on a phone." Better yet, they documented the process in a video posted to YouTube. The 88's documentary of recording "Love is the Thing" on an iPhone The recording process involved using a child's toy drum set covered with a sheet with brushes in order to produce a sound level that wouldn't overload the iPhone's microphone. The backup vocals were recorded, "like they did in the old days -- we all gathered around the phone and sang all the parts onto one track." Each instrument was recorded to its own track, and the band used an Alesis ProTrack to connect a studio mic to the iPhone for recording the lead vocal track. Those tracks were then exported to a Mac for mixing, for a total of 14 tracks (including the crash cymbal added via the Mac). "Love is the Thing" is currently available on iTunes as a US$.99 download. [Author's note: To mix in some editorial with this piece, it's an awesome song!] Thanks to Jimmy D at LoopInsight for the heads up on this project from The 88.Ezra Shaw/Getty Images Some of you might spend thousands of dollars and travel just as many miles to get to the Super Bowl, braving the traffic, crowds and, above all, weather. But hey, at least your lips won't chap during the game. Larry Brown Sports' Steve DelVecchio rummaged around all the Super Bowl hubbub and spotted a tweet that should have some of you lucky ducks who actually have a ticket to the big game feeling a little warmer already. Here is what SportsBusiness Journal's Daniel Kaplan tweets that Super Bowl denizens can expect to find when they get to their seats. Sure, the game might be a blowout, the weather could be freezing and the players on the field might only seem like ants from the cheap seats, but those facial tissues should help clear the icicles from your nostrils. To be fair, this is actually a pretty cool idea from organizers to give fans at least a modicum of comfort if the North Jersey weather is as bad as some fear. We couldn't track down an official release from the NFL that these are indeed what all fans will receive as they watch the game from MetLife Stadium. If fans do get these items, it will go a long way to spread some goodwill among what might be some grumpy denizens. Although, we have to wonder what kind of person would buy tickets, plan months to travel to the game that is being publicized as a Super Bowl of ice and forget his or her gloves? This is just one more way officials are hoping to battle what might be a freezing day at MetLife. Kaplan continued with the following tweet, assuring that the game will be played. It's just a matter of when: NFL.com reports on Wednesday's press conference wherein Super Bowl organizers explained their mammoth task of staving off the worst scenarios. As for the field, they have snow-melting machines, including one that can melt 600 tons in an hour. Any snowmen in the vicinity may want to look away. One transportation expert, Mitchell Moss, explained that the field isn't really the problem, rather the massive stands that surround it. "The question is, they may have to hire mannequins to fill the stadium." Jim O'Connor-USA TODAY Sports According to the report, officials are as ready as they can be, armed with brine, salt and teams of workers ready to turn a blustery day into one that features an actual game. At the press conference, New Jersey Department of Transportation Deputy Commissioner Joseph Mrozek said the state can deploy more than 820 vehicles and about 60,000 tons of salt within a 30-mile radius of the stadium, with even more resources available statewide if necessary. The state also has more than a quarter of a million gallons of brine and 850,000 gallons of liquid calcium in storage, which are used to treat salt when temperatures drop below freezing. There is actually a website, www.willitsnow.com, dedicated to telling fans if there will be snow at the Super Bowl. Jamie Squire/Getty Images As of this writing, a quick click on the website features the answer: "No." There is also the comfort that the temperature should rest around 36 degrees. Cold, but hardly the stuff of legend. Still, there are those who want to prepare you for the fact that Super Bowl Sunday may be moved to become Monday Night Super Bowl. The New York Daily News' Gary Myers writes, "But if we get a major storm, or the weather people are calling for one, the big game could be played on Saturday, Monday or Tuesday at a time to be determined, the NFL said Wednesday." The hope is that we get a fantastic game with true but benign winter conditions, giving the game's presentation something refreshing. Most of us will watch from home, comforted by warmth and the knowledge that there is cheap beer in the fridge. However, you fans huddling together in those expensive seats now have hand warmers, which should solve everything. Hit me up on Twitter: Follow @gabezal"All of us have preferences, and my preference would certainly be for consideration of GST issues, rather than for consideration of a simple increase in the Medicare levy, because just increasing taxes is hard to see as reform," Mr Abbott said. Tax reform: Prime Minister Tony Abbott prefers an increase in the GST. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen "If the tax mix were to be changed in ways that make our economy more efficient and more productive, that increases incentives... that would strike me as something that could well be described as economic reform." NSW Premier Mike Baird suggested raising the 10 per cent GST rate to 15 per cent on Tuesday. Preliminary modelling that Mr Baird presented the meeting on Wednesday showed that doing this without broadening the GST base would raise an extra $36 billion by 2020. But after households earning below $100,000 are fully compensated for the rise and those earning between $100,000 and $155,000 receive back half the increase, the revenue boost would be $18 billion and still fall billions of dollars short of the revenue that modelling suggests is needed to cover escalating national healthcare costs. State and territory leaders at COAG. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen Mr Abbott said he was pleased Mr Baird had raised the proposal, saying the GST was a "joint exercise" by the Commonwealth and the states "whereas the Medicare levy is simply a Commonwealth tax, so that's why [it is] my preference." He would not rule other options out, saying it would take time to think through reforms. "Whatever the outcome... we do need to keep faith with the public, and springing tax changes on an unsuspecting public, however arguable they might be, is not a way to build the kind of trust and confidence that we need to see more of in our democracy."Image copyright Getty Images I am not sure if it is by design or if he just wants a slow start, but two days in to this general election campaign and UKIP leader Nigel Farage appears to be taking it easy. Or at least that is how it seems. This is a candidate who has to win on 7 May. If he fails to become the next MP for South Thanet he has said he will quit as leader. Yet I have seen no door-knocking. Our cameras have not been told of any public event, yet. We have had two poster-unveiling ceremonies with impromptu leader interviews. He arrives, he speaks, he answers questions, then he leaves. He stayed for a brief coffee at the seaside event today, but most of the accompanying media - including myself - were locked out of a nearby pub while he sat inside, speaking to a very small, select group of journalists. Debate prep Today it was immigration, UKIP's big issue. The number one issue in this election, according to Nigel Farage. He unveiled a poster, answered some questions, then went on his way after an hour or so. Immigration UKIP Main pledges Points system used to select migrants with skills and attributes needed to work in the country Immigration capped at 50,000 people a year for skilled workers Five-year ban on immigration for unskilled workers Five-year wait before migrants can claim benefits The UKIP leader says the public will not start paying attention to this campaign until after Easter. At the same time, his party does not have the money for the busy bus-centred start that some of the others have gone for. And perhaps the reality is that the campaign has been up and running since the new year; this is merely a continuation. But Nigel Farage does not look like a man fighting for every vote in the Kent countryside. Perhaps he is, and UKIP does not want us, or you, to see that. Or perhaps he has gone for the slow start on purpose. It's possible he doesn't want to bore people, or that he wants to appear different to the other candidates. He is off on Wednesday attending a private event, for which his absence is completely understandable. Then on Thursday he is behind closed doors preparing for that evening's seven-way TV election debate. Then it is his birthday. I suspect he will pop up on Friday if he has done well in the debate. There is no question that Nigel Farage works hard. He is frenetically busy, and has been for years. He, more than the other leaders, carries the weight of his party's success on his shoulders. But it has been a slow start so far. Or at least it looks like that.These days, it seems like hardly a week goes by without another dress code debacle, in which students (mostly women) are taken to task for violating restrictive and sexist rules. Some examples: Florida's Oakleaf High School made a student wear a "shame suit," while South Plaquemines High School in Louisiana sent a Rastafarian teen home because of his dreadlocks. Usually, I take great pleasure in seeing these schools get the smackdown, because it can mean revision of outdated policies. Usually, though, the school in question isn't my own high school. Last week, Maggie L. Walker Governor's School in Richmond, VA threatened to ban girls from wearing shorts entirely for a day — and the students protested in the best way imaginable. According to Mairead Guy, a sophomore, this is what went down: without any prior warning or notification, a dress code announcement came on over the PA system one September day. In the announcement, the administration informed students that they would be performing a shorts-length spot check (MLWGS requires fingertip-length clothes), and any girls found to be in violation would be forced to change. Furthermore, if 10 girls broke the rule, all girls would be banned from wearing shorts for a day. Yes, you read that right. All girls, not just the ones who went against the dress code policy. No boys. Here's the deal. I understand the implementation of a basic dress code (students should probably not be running around in the nude), and MLWGS' fingertip-length rule is not so bad. HOWEVER. Threatening to punish all female students for the infractions of a select few is misguided and unjust. Besides, dress codes are awfully subjective: shorts can ride up and look, well, shorter than they are, and longer-legged girls can find it nigh-on impossible to nab a pair of shorts that goes down that far. Such rules don't take naturally-occurring physical variation into account. Furthermore, preventing solely women from wearing shorts sends the message that every single one of them is responsible for breaking the rules. And are men incapable of wearing short shorts? Has Sacha Baren Cohen taught us nothing? The student body was unsettled, said Guy: "I was in a club meeting [at the time of the announcement], and immediately I, and everyone else in the club, was shell-shocked and upset." They wanted to respond, but they didn't want to do so in an overtly aggressive manner. The best way to fight back, they decided, would be this: on a Thursday in late September, male students would wear shorts that barely skimmed the tops of their thighs, while female students would cover themselves in the most modest attire they could find. The result? Hilarity, combined with a poignant take-down of the dress code double standard. An administrator looks on as a short-shorted fellow arrives at school I am proud of my old high school for responding like this. The actions they took were tongue-in-cheek, yet thought-provoking; strong, yet non-violent and non-disruptive. And, what's more, they were effective. According to a senior who wished to remain anonymous, students received the following email from the director following the protest: Fighting back against sexism that is embedded in officially-sanctioned structures such as dress codes is difficult, but these guys pulled it off with aplomb. The school administration has not responded to a request for comment. Images: Ed Yourdon/Flickr; Harry Potter Gif/Tumblr; Bruno/Facebook; Mairead Guy, Ben Rhoades, Carrie Hamilton, Debbie MayoDETROIT -- Mayor Dave Bing said Wednesday that he expects to impose unpaid furlough days on city workers and other cost-saving actions Jan. 1 to make up for at least $10 million the city won't get to bolster its cash flow. Bing said the cuts are necessary because the City Council failed to approve a contract called for under Detroit's fiscal overhaul plan. The council voted 8-1 Tuesday to delay action on a $300,000 contract for the Miller Canfield law firm to advise Bing on financial matters. The city's top lawyer told the council the contract could be a conflict of interest because Miller Canfield wrote milestone agreements in Bing's reform program. Some on the council questioned whether the contract was legal under the city's charter because it was neither prepared nor approved by the city's chief on-staff lawyer. Detroit has struggled with its finances for many years as the city's population has dwindled and the automotive industry that once drove economic activity in the Motor City has diminished. The city of 700,000 has been criticized by state officials for slow progress on financial reforms. It needs the money to avoid running out of cash by the end of the year. The Michigan Finance Authority raised $137 million for Detroit earlier this year through a debt sale. While Detroit received some of that money, Michigan Treasury officials tied another $30 million to Detroit's progress on reforms. The state says Detroit won't get $10 million in bond money due Tuesday. And $20 million due to Detroit next month also is in danger. "If the milestones are not completed, the funds will not be released from escrow," Caleb Buhs, spokesman for the Michigan Treasury Department, told Reuters. "The actions Detroit must take for the treasurer to release the funds from escrow were clearly established in the Memorandum of Understanding, sent to the mayor and city council last week," Buhs said. City Council President Charles Pugh blamed Bing for the setback. "Why is Mayor Bing putting the city's finances at risk by marrying himself to one law firm?" he told reporters, adding he wants to meet with the mayor this week to choose a law firm that the council can accept. Stay informed with the latest headlines; sign up for our newsletter Projections presented by city officials to Detroit's oversight board earlier this month showed the city's weekly cash flow at just $4.1 million in mid-December before dropping to a negative $4.8 million at the end of the year. Detroit's financial advisory board was created under an agreement that allowed Detroit to avoid the appointment of an emergency manager to run the city while giving the state some oversight and allowing the mayor to disregard collective bargaining agreements with unions. The city council did approve on Tuesday a contract with Ernst & Young to provide cash-flow analysis for 2013. This was another condition set in the deal with the state. Watch the Top Videos on NBCNews.com Pugh said the council had previously approved a contract with consulting and actuarial firm Milliman for pension services, which was also a condition of the deal. While the council is officially scheduled to be in recess until early next year, Pugh said it could come back in a special session at any time. Also on Tuesday, the council rejected a nearly $48 million contract with St. Paul-based EMA Inc to run some of the city's water and sewer department. Detroit faced a cash crisis this summer that led to warning it could default on some bonds. The cash crunch and default were averted by the bond sale. This article includes reporting by The Associated Press and Reuters. More content from NBCNews.com: Follow US news from NBCNews.com on Twitter and FacebookWhen the Red Sox acquired Eduardo Nunez on July 26, there was a consensus that the 30-year-old infielder would provide key defensive depth, solidify the team’s struggles at third base and chip in offensively. Because of this, his torrid offensive pace since he’s arrived has surprised some, but not manager John Farrell. He discussed Nunez’s emergence and other topics on his weekly appearance on Dale & Holley. For the full audio, go to the Dale & Holley audio on demand page. “Here’s the thing, he’d been swinging the bat well in San Francisco before he came here,” Farrell said. “So in some ways, he has just kept on – even though he switches leagues.” Nunez was dealt to the Red Sox in part due to the team’s year-long drought of offensive production at third base, headlined by Pablo Sandoval. Sandoval has since returned to the National League and taken Nunez’ place in San Francisco, but Farrell also noted that he viewed Nunez’ defense as a major strength. “We saw him defensively as a versatile guy that we could spell some guys around the infield, add some offensive punch, which he certainly has done,” Farrell said. “So this was, you know, let’s take the versatile defensive player, add to the lineup where we felt like we needed to, particularly as we went through the month of July.” With Rafael Devers also coming on strong since his debut on July 25, Dustin Pedroia’s nagging knee issues have given Nunez an opportunity to make his case for every day playing time, and he’s certainly done that. “He’s played more second base than really in any other time in his career,” Farrell said. “And it hasn’t affected his approach at the plate so he’s been a great addition.” In 10 games in a Red Sox uniform, Nunez is slashing.422/.447/.822, and he’s got four home runs, 12 RBI and three stolen bases in that span. When asked why he moved Mookie Betts out of the leadoff spot on Tuesday, Farrell’s response was
Given that some regional volumes encompass multiple subregions (e.g. the insula volumes includes anterior, middle and posterior insula regions and the pACC region could be further subdivided into pregenual and subgenual subregions), it is possible that these subregions have different levels of involvement with self-conscious emotion. Future work that utilizes imaging techniques that allow for more detailed whole-brain analysis (e.g. voxel-based morphometry) may enable us to elucidate with more specificity the subregions that are involved in different types of emotion. CONCLUSION The results of the present study indicate that right pACC plays an important role in physiological and behavioral aspects of self-conscious emotional reactivity. These findings have implications for basic affective neuroscience and speak to the neuroanatomical basis of self-conscious emotion dysfunction in bvFTD. In patients and healthy controls, variation in right pACC gray matter volume is associated with individual differences in behavioral (for both groups) and physiological (significantly for patients) reactivity when exposed to an embarrassing situation. In bvFTD, pACC is an early target for neurodegeneration, and loss in this region may help to explain patients’ attenuated self-conscious emotion. Conflict of Interest None declared. Authors thank Victor Laluz and William Irwin for their help with the MRI data processing. Authors also thank Alan Bostrom for his statistical consultation. This work was supported by grants from the National Institute on Aging AG017766, AG019724; National Institute of Mental Health MH020006; the State of California Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center of California 03-75271; and the Hellman Family Center. 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Sturm VE Levenson RW Rosen HJ Allison SC Miller BL Self-conscious emotion deficits in frontotemporal lobar degeneration, Brain, 2006, vol. 129 (pg. 2508 - 16 ), vol.(pg. Sze JA Gyurak A Yuan JW Levenson RW Coherence between emotional experience and physiology: does body awareness training have an impact?, Emotion, 2010, vol. 10 (pg. 803 - 14 ), vol.(pg. Takahashi H Matsuura M Koeda M, et al. Brain activations during judgments of positive self-conscious emotion and positive basic emotion: pride and joy, Cerebral Cortex, 2008, vol. 18 (pg. 898 - 903 ), vol.(pg. Takahashi H Yahata N Koeda M Matsuda T Asai K Okubo Y Brain activation associated with evaluative processes of guilt and embarrassment: an fMRI study, Neuroimage, 2004, vol. 23 (pg. 967 - 74 ), vol.(pg. Tangney JP Dalgleish T Power MJ The self-conscious emotions: shame, guilt, embarrassment, and pride, Handbook of Cognition and Emotion, 1999 New York John Wiley & Sons (pg. 541 - 68 ) (pg. Vogt BA Finch DM Olson CR Functional heterogeneity in the cingulate cortex: the anterior executive and posterior evaluative regions, Cerebral Cortex, 1992, vol. 2 (pg. 435 - 43 ), vol.(pg. Wager TD Waugh CE Lindquist M Noll DC Fredrickson BL Taylor SF Brain mediators of cardiovascular responses to social threat. I. Reciprocal dorsal and ventral sub-regions of the medial prefrontal cortex and heart-rate reactivity, NeuroImage, 2009, vol. 47 (pg. 821 - 35 ), vol.(pg. © The Author(s) (2012). Published by Oxford University Press.Sacred geometry ascribes symbolic and sacred meanings to certain geometric shapes and certain geometric proportions.[1] It is associated with the belief that a god is the geometer of the world. The geometry used in the design and construction of religious structures such as churches, temples, mosques, religious monuments, altars, and tabernacles has sometimes been considered sacred. The concept applies also to sacred spaces such as temenoi, sacred groves, village greens and holy wells, and the creation of religious art. As worldview and cosmology [ edit ] The belief that a god created the universe according to a geometric plan has ancient origins. Plutarch attributed the belief to Plato, writing that "Plato said God geometrizes continually" (Convivialium disputationum, liber 8,2). In modern times, the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss adapted this quote, saying "God arithmetizes".[2] As late as Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), a belief in the geometric underpinnings of the cosmos persisted among some scientists.[3] Natural forms [ edit ] According to Stephen Skinner, the study of sacred geometry has its roots in the study of nature, and the mathematical principles at work therein.[4] Many forms observed in nature can be related to geometry; for example, the chambered nautilus grows at a constant rate and so its shell forms a logarithmic spiral to accommodate that growth without changing shape. Also, honeybees construct hexagonal cells to hold their honey. These and other correspondences are sometimes interpreted in terms of sacred geometry and considered to be further proof of the natural significance of geometric forms. Art and architecture [ edit ] Geometric ratios, and geometric figures were often employed in the designs of ancient Egyptian, ancient Indian, Greek and Roman architecture. Medieval European cathedrals also incorporated symbolic geometry. Indian and Himalayan spiritual communities often constructed temples and fortifications on design plans of mandala and yantra. Many of the sacred geometry principles of the human body and of ancient architecture were compiled into the Vitruvian Man drawing by Leonardo da Vinci. The latter drawing was itself based on the much older writings of the Roman architect Vitruvius. Islamic geometric patterns are well known too, which are used in the Qu'ran, Mosques and even in the caligraphies of personal names. In Hinduism [ edit ] The Agamas are a collection of Sanskrit,[5] Tamil, and Grantha[6] scriptures chiefly constituting the methods of temple construction and creation of idols, worship means of deities, philosophical doctrines, meditative practices, attainment of sixfold desires, and four kinds of yoga.[5] Elaborate rules are laid out in the Agamas for Shilpa (the art of sculpture) describing the quality requirements of such matters as the places where temples are to be built, the kinds of image to be installed, the materials from which they are to be made, their dimensions, proportions, air circulation, and lighting in the temple complex. The Manasara and Silpasara are works that deal with these rules. The rituals of daily worship at the temple also follow rules laid out in the Agamas. In European Religious Architecture [ edit ] The construction of Medieval European cathedrals was often based on geometries intended to make the viewer see the world through mathematics, and through this understanding, gain a better understanding of the divine.[7] These churches frequently featured a Latin Cross floor-plan.[8] At the beginning of the Renaissance in Europe, views shifted to favor simple and regular geometries. The circle in particular became a central and symbolic shape for the base of buildings, as it represented the perfection of nature and the centrality of man's place in the universe.[8] The use of the circle and other simple and symmetrical geometric shapes was solidified as a staple of Renaissance religious architecture in Leon Battista Alberti's architectural treatise, which described the ideal church in terms of spiritual geometry.[9] Unanchored geometry [ edit ] Stephen Skinner discusses the tendency of some writers to place a geometric diagram over virtually any image of a natural object or human created structure, find some lines intersecting the image and declare it based on sacred geometry. If the geometric diagram does not intersect major physical points in the image, the result is what Skinner calls "unanchored geometry".[10] See also [ edit ] References [ edit ]This article is a travel topic Japan is usually perceived as a very expensive country to visit; however, it is actually very possible to travel in Japan on a very tight budget. Perhaps the biggest way of massively cutting down your expenses is to do urban camping. Coupled with hitchhiking, you can effectively reduce your travel costs to food and admission fees alone. First and foremost, keep in mind that if given freedom of choice, the Japanese would prefer to have their parks unoccupied by itinerant sleepers and sightseers who cannot afford a decent hotel room. Fortunately, you can benefit from the "foreigner factor", which makes everyone much more tolerant of you. However, it is a good idea to keep in mind that you are indeed doing an activity that stands on the margins of society, and so you should strive to be as discreet and respectful as possible when camping, so as to give the idea that you are a respectful traveler rather than a rude foreigner trying to freeload off Japan and its people. Urban camping in a public park. Ueno, Tokyo Prepare [ edit ] If you choose to do urban camping, you will obviously need a tent, a sleeping bag and ideally a sleeping mat. You will need to carry your entire stuff all day and everyday so a good expedition backpack is also essential (around 60L is a good size). Because you always carry everything, it is in your advantage to bring the lightest stuff you can find, and carry very few clothes and non-essential items, as it makes a much bigger difference than in regular backpacking. Understand [ edit ] Japan is one of the safest countries in the world, and Japan already has its own tradition of people (usually students) sleeping in train stations, on benches, etc., called nojuku. On top of this, in major urban centers (such as Tokyo) there are many homeless people who sleep in public parks. Therefore, the sight of people sleeping or camping is not entirely unfamiliar to Japanese and it is very unlikely that you will get attacked or even disturbed in any way. The main spots you will be looking for when urban camping are public parks. These come in a variety of fashions, from quiet parks in residential areas to big parks in the middle of downtown. Some general tips to remember : - The Japanese word for Public Park is Koen (in romaji) or 公園 in kanji. - A park's "suitability scale" is usually measured in terms of quietness and intimacy. A small park where not many people are likely to pass through during the night is much better than a big park where a lot of people will see you. Many factors come in play: a park surrounded by 4 streets will usually feel very exposed, parks near train tracks are usually very noisy (because of the trains), downtown parks are usually not suitable at all (think sleeping in the middle of Times Square), etc. - If you are able to hide (in woods or behind bushes, usually only possible in big mountain parks), you can do it, but it's not necessary at all ; sometimes, setting up peacefully in a corner of the park where you will not bother anyone is easier and less conspicuous than always trying to hide somewhere. In general, only be careful to not block anything in the park (do not camp in close proximity to the swings, for example, because the presence of the tent might embarrass people and prevent them from using the swing). The most important thing is not being invisible; it is not disturbing other people who might be there. That should be your main goal. That way, people are much more likely to be tolerant of a small tent in a corner of the park than a tent in the middle of a rest hut, completely blocking it. You WILL be seen; people WILL take pictures of your tent while you are trying to sleep; get used to it. - Many times, when you wake up, you will see people : a group doing morning exercise, an old man sweeping leaves just beside your tent, a guy practicing his karate, etc. Do not ignore these people; greet them with a friendly ohayo gozaimasu! ("Good morning!"), answer their questions, etc. Japanese people are very friendly and curious, and you will surely be asked many questions about where you come from, and maybe even offered coffee! - Try not to pollute the park with your trash, use toilets whenever possible, etc. Urban camping is only possible because of the kindness and tolerance of people: keep this in mind, always. - The first thing you should ALWAYS do when arriving in a town or city you are planning to stay in is to go to the main train station, which will almost always have a tourist office inside or nearby. There, you can get a free map (which will usually indicate parks, although in cities such as Tokyo the smaller parks will not be shown); tourist offices are also very useful in general, people there are very helpful if you want to find an internet cafe, a laundromat, a public bath/onsen, etc. - A method which also works in a lot of cases (especially if you don't have a map of the area) is to find a convenience store (which should not be hard); inside, there are often atlases of the general area you are in. You can then locate the convenience store you are in, and on the same page locate nearby parks (if you have the money you can buy them, but you will have to buy a lot and they are quite bulky for a backpack). You can take a picture of the page and then go looking. It's always a good idea to plan a few parks, so if the first one is not suitable you have a backup park to check out without needing to look at another atlas. However, convenience stores do not always have these atlases for sale, or they are sometimes sealed (but there are so many convenience stores everywhere that you should be able to find one that has them). - Parks with 山 or yama (meaning "mountain") in their name are usually (you guessed it) on mountains and are consequently very quiet and often constitute very good spots (because not many people go there at night). Example: Genjiyama (源氏山）Park. - Athletic parks are usually also good, although people tend to run laps on the track until quite late and start quite early so be sure to pick a spot that's not full of people running 2 m away. - If the city has a castle, it will most likely be in the middle of a huge park, which are usually suitable. - At first urban camping will obviously be a little intimidating, especially in Tokyo, but stick with it and you will learn that it is actually quite easy and even fun once you've done it a few times! The more you do it, the less you will need to search for parks and the easier it's gonna be. Everywhere you go, you will see potential camping spots, and you will have unlimited freedom in where you want to go. - A VERY good book you can buy in Japan is Japan Compact Atlas (コンパクト日本地図帳), it's very very small (perfect for backpacking), contains maps of all Japan, PLUS detailed maps of cities, usually including some public parks. It is an invaluable resource if you plan on traveling a lot (absolutely necessary if you hitchhike). You can find it in many bookstores, it's around 1000 yen (USD $9), a bargain considering area-specific atlases are around 3000 yen and are much more big and cumbersome. The only drawback is that it's in Japanese, but it's still very helpful. All the main train stations (which almost always have the name of the city itself) are in hiragana, a syllabary used in Japanese that you can actually learn to read quite easily (as opposed to kanji ). Below are some more area-specific tips. Tokyo [ edit ] Obviously, urban camping in Tokyo is the hardest place of all Japan, but with a little practice it is very easily manageable. Your goal while in downtown Tokyo should be the small, quiet parks in the residential areas just outside downtown. In other big cities, big parks are usually the ones you should be aiming for, but in Tokyo the big parks are usually quite poor for those looking for a good night's sleep: Shinjuku's Central Park and Ueno Park are filled with homeless people (who are not really dangerous though, if you don't mind the lack of intimacy), Shibuya's Yoyogi Park closes at night, etc. There will usually be a lot of people there at night, which is not great for intimacy and/or quiet sleeping. Thankfully, on almost every street corner in the downtown areas there is a map which indicates parks and other stuff. A good method would then be to go to a map situated on the outskirts of the downtown area, and from there find a few parks which seem to be in quiet locations, then go and check them out until you find a suitable one. Also, in each train station there is a map of the surrounding area, which can also be very useful if you are not in a downtown area of Tokyo. If you find yourself absolutely overwhelmed by the sheer number of people in Tokyo, you can take a train to a random station a few hundred yen away and from there, check the map at the station and find parks; you will be almost certain of finding suitable parks in the area because these areas are virtually empty at night (everyone is sleeping or in downtown Tokyo). You should practice finding parks wherever you are standing at the moment though, this way you never need to pay for trains and you will be truly free in terms of where you choose to sleep (with a bit of practice, it becomes second nature). One big drawback of Tokyo is that there are basically no rest huts in the parks (because otherwise all the homeless people would be there), which means that when it rains you will need to camp in the rain (which is not always fun no matter how waterproof your tent is). Although if you get away from downtown areas the chances of finding one increase a lot. Also, in Tokyo, there is definitely some trial and error involved; a park will look great on the map, but when you get there it will be very bad for one reason or another. After a week, you will become very good, so do not get discouraged! Other cities [ edit ] Tokyo is in a category of its own; in other big cities, it is usually possible to sleep in the big public parks (ex: Osaka Castle Park, Kumamoto Castle Park, Fukuoka Central Park, etc.). However, most cities do not have the handy street corner maps like in Tokyo, so the first thing you should do when arriving in any city is get a map from the tourist office in the train station. Also, like in all cities, in the train stations there are maps of the immediate surroundings; you can usually find parks in the vicinity. You can also do the convenience stores' atlases method, but it's usually not necessary, you will probably be fine with a paper map (from the tourist station) and the train stations' maps (in some smaller cities, they basically show the whole city, complete with parks). Keep an eye out for rivers also : rivers passing through cities usually have public parks on their banks, which are usually good spots. In general finding parks in big cities is much easier than in Tokyo; the one you spot on the map is likely to be the one you end up sleeping in. Rural Areas [ edit ] Obviously, the small towns' public parks will almost always be perfect. However, there are a few other ways to sleep in rural areas. - In rural areas, you can often find shrines at such places, make yourself known to the neighbors first. Shrines are always open (as opposed to temples which usually close for the night), usually empty, and they give a terrain for you to sleep on. - Even though temples close for the night, it is usually possible to sleep in the parking lot of the temples (if it is a rural temple). If you arrive at a temple and there is someone there (a monk or someone tending the grounds), you can ask them if there is anywhere you can sleep. Sometimes, they will direct you to the parking lot and they will let you use the temple's facilities. Obviously, if they tell you that you cannot sleep there, be respectful and don't sleep in the parking lot. - Michi-no-eki (meaning "Road Station") are rest stops on the side of the road all over Japan. There are always toilets, vending machines, etc. You can almost always find rest huts there. Some michi-no-eki are open 24h so you can sometimes sleep inside. - If there is really nothing available, you can usually sleep in empty, out-of-the-way parking lots. - In rural Japan, pretty much anywhere where you do not bother other people or step on private property is a good spot (ex: shore, beach, forest, under a bridge...). Note that fields are private property and by sleeping there you also destroy people's fields, which is not very nice. Here are some specific parks that have been tested first hand by urban campers. This list is by no means exhaustive and you are encouraged to find new, unlisted parks: if parks get used too much, it can become hard to sleep there, because the feasibility of urban camping depends a lot on people's tolerance. Finding your own perfect little park is also a great feeling, so go out there and explore! It should also be noted that you should try to be nomad as much as possible, i.e. stay no more than 2-3 consecutive nights at any given park. This list can be useful if you are new and don't really know where to begin and want to build up your confidence a little bit. Some of them are not that great (especially those in Tokyo), but at least they can be used as stepping stones for developing autonomy in finding parks. Honshu [ edit ] Tokyo [ edit ] Yokohama [ edit ] Kamakura [ edit ] Osaka [ edit ] Miyajima [ edit ] Matsumoto [ edit ] Kyushu [ edit ] Kumamoto [ edit ] Beppu [ edit ] Nagasaki [ edit ] Okinawa [ edit ] Hokkaido [ edit ] Shikoku [ edit ] Matsuyama [ edit ] Tokushima [ edit ] Stay healthy [ edit ] Obviously, when you camp everywhere you do not have always access to showers or washing machines, as you would if sleeping in a hostel. Washing yourself [ edit ] For washing yourself, there are a few methods. Public parks and toilets [ edit ] If the weather is warm, you can wash in public parks, using available water. Sometimes the parks have toilets for handicapped people, which usually consist of a room with a toilet and sink, and is lockable; very convenient for washing! Public baths and onsen [ edit ] If it's cold outside or you do not want to wash in public parks or toilets, you can go to onsen (hot springs) or sento (public baths). In practice there is no real difference between the two, so just ask for the cheapest (they are usually around 400 yen). Internet cafes [ edit ] In the big internet cafes (such as Manboo Cafe or Media Cafe Popeye) there are sometimes showers available. They are usually free (if you also use the computers) but there is sometimes a fee. By the way, do not hesitate to take advantage of almost all Internet Cafes "unlimited free drinks" policy! Convenience stores [ edit ] Among other amenities, most konbinis (Family Mart, Lawason, 7-11) will have a bathroom, comprising of a toilet and sink. Useful for washing your face and teeth in the morning (you can get breakfast, too.) Washing your clothes [ edit ] For washing your clothes, you can do it by hand or find laundromats, which can be found pretty much anywhere. Don't wash clothes in a sink where others can view you, it's frowned upon. Use a sink in a single user bathroom but be considerate of not blocking others from use of facilities. e.g. make sure there is a second option available for others. Stay safe [ edit ] The police are the only people who are likely to wake you up. Usually though, the police do not really care about you camping: they will care more about controlling your identity to check if you are not illegally living in the country (because a foreigner sleeping in a tent obviously has something to reproach himself with). If they see you sleeping during the night, they will most likely wait until morning to tell you to leave. In Tokyo, if you sleep in the big homeless spots, you should pack up by 06:30. After this hour it is likely that the police will come to tell you to leave, but nothing worse will happen. Everywhere else, if policemen see you they may tell you to leave but if you usually leave by around 07:00 there will almost never be a problem. Some parks also have security guards, who will also usually wait until morning to tell you to leave if you are not out soon enough in the morning. IF you are awakened during the night by policemen, just ask them if you can stay this night only, and they will most likely accept (after you showed them your passport). In any case, always be polite and collaborative and there will never be a problem. Some travellers are known to have camped everywhere in Japan for 9 consecutive months and had encounters with the police around 15 times, which is not a lot considering the amount of nights spent in a tent. Only once have they been awakened during the night and they have never been expelled during the night. Due to Japan's extraordinary safety, camping everywhere is very doable and Japan is a very good country to try this lifestyle. Furthermore, camping provides the biggest amount of freedom (you never have to worry about having to find a hotel) and, best of all, it's free! This is a usable article. It touches on all the major areas of the topic. An adventurous person could use this article, but please plunge forward and help it grow!Over a dozen to be charged in LA protests over police killing By Rafael Azul 15 September 2010 Los Angeles officials announced Monday that they would prosecute more than a dozen protesters arrested during four nights of demonstrations over the death of Manuel Jamines, the 37-year-old immigrant day laborer that was shot by police on September 5. According to the Los Angeles Times, police are looking through videotapes for evidence of misconduct during the protests. One individual has already been charged with using a slingshot to “hurl semi-round projectiles” at two LAPD officers. While the individual in question is not a member of any left wing or socialist group, the Times article said that the police are specifically interested in acts committed by so-called agitators, “who officials said fueled violence” during the protests. The accusation that “outside agitators” were responsible for the angry response of immigrant workers against police killing of Jamines was first raised by the LLPPL, the union that represents LAPD officers, and is being echoed by the bourgeois media. The attempt is to delegitimize the protests, while targeting those protesting the real crime—the killing of Jamines. Several eyewitnesses say that Jamines was unarmed, or that he was inebriated and did not pose a threat to the police. (See, “Police killing of immigrant worker sparks protests in Los Angeles”) The political establishment in LA has jumped to the defense of the police officers, including one who has a history of using excessive force. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has called the police “heroes.” From the population, the killing has provoked widespread outrage, coming on top of decades of police brutality in the Pico-Union and West
I am starting my own operation. We are going to do that,” adding that his website, billoreilly.com, will beta test a half-hour newscast “where we will go into a studio and here it will look like ‘The Factor.’... It’s basically an experiment to see how many people are going to want this service. That’s coming and will be here before September in a robust form. But I suspect there will be another network maybe merging with us. There will be a network that rises up because the numbers for Fox are going down.” BillOReilly.com has long been a profitable endeavor for the former Fox News host, as he spent a significant amount of time promoting the premium services over the past dozen or so years whole on FNC. Its original video offering appears to almost only be offered to those who subscribe to its premium service, and the video platform technology appears to be outdated. At first blush, this appears to be a very smart move for O’Reilly, which tentatively follows the footsteps of his fellow “bold and fresh” former cohort Glenn Beck, who after leaving Fox News launched his own digital network The Blaze. The difference, however, is that Beck’s daily radio program is still a cash cow that can underwrite a very expensive video production and delivery platform, while O’Reilly’s radio show ended a number of years ago. But having cash on hand is almost certainly not a problem for O’Reilly. Apart from the estimated $15 Million dollar payout he walked away from in April, he is also a best-selling author at least a dozen times over. He’s got resources, and perhaps more importantly, his still loyal audience presents an optimal investment opportunity for the advertising community and institutional investors. Perhaps more importantly, building up a short form and original video series on BillOreilly.com does not preclude a future deal with a broadcast partner in the not-so-distant future. O’Reilly appears to understand that if his future online program has a previously established and well-developed audience, then any future negotiations will put him in an even more enviable position. Have a tip we should know? tips@mediaite.comAfter Chris Hadfield’s command of the International Space Station made him a global celebrity, Maclean’s thought it was only appropriate to give the astronaut the rock-star treatment during our recent cover photo shoot. Taking inspiration from Hadfield’s world-uniting rendition of David Bowie’s Space Oddity, photographer Christopher Wahl asked the astronaut to replicate Bowie’s famed image from the cover of his Aladdin Sane album. “He went full-bore with it. I explained we needed bare shoulders as opposed to the collared shirt he was wearing, so he happily took it off,” says Wahl, who ensured the lighting during the shoot also matched Bowie’s album perfectly. “He was fully participating—it was awesome. I was on a portrait high for a day and a half afterward.” Related reading Good Morning Earth: The inside story of Canada’s first space station commander A photo tour of NASA with Chris Hadfield An interactive exploration of the Hadfield universeThe emergence of psych rock in Nigeria had less to do with mind-altering drugs and more to do with mind-altering circumstances. The country had been independent for only six years when, on Jan. 15, 1966, soldiers led by Majors Kaduna Nzeogwu and Emmanuel Ifeajuna staged a coup and killed 22 top government officials. There was a countercoup led by Lieutenant Colonel Murtala Muhammed and other officers from the north in July of the same year. Then things fell apart. Members of the Igbo, a minority ethnic group, were targeted in pogroms led by the Nigerian army: houses attacked and burnt, people murdered. Millions of Igbo people fled from every part of the country to the group’s homeland in the east. The eastern Igbo-majority states eventually seceded, sparking the Biafran war, which lasted from 1967 to 1970. The soundtrack of West Africa’s independence struggle was highlife, a syncretic mix of big band jazz and indigenous musical forms and languages. The music, played in nightclubs and hotel ballrooms, captured the excitement and aspirations of the masses as never before. But the military state–imposed curfews, ethnic violence, and subsequent war delivered the coup de grace to the genre, as musicians of Igbo extraction or from states in the east and midwest fled for fear of victimization. Some highlife musicians from were conscripted into both armies; they were the lucky ones: They entertained rather than fought. The devastation wreaked in the east by warfare and a blockade imposed by the Nigerian government led to utter ruin. An estimated 1 million Igbo died during the conflict. As it sometimes happens, the country experienced an explosion of youth culture—particularly in the eastern states—parallel to its humanitarian catastrophe. Afro psych rock emerged during the Biafran war. “Highlife was old, and the youth plugged into rock and soul music from the north, south, east, and west. The east had more bands, but in the early ’70s rock was big everywhere,” says Tino Martins, rock guitarist of the groups MonoMono and C.S. Crew. The tremors of the British Invasion and Beatlemania were felt in Nigeria. Many bands formed in the early ’60s mimicked the classic British setup of guitar, bass, and drums. The Junkers, the Hykkers, the Merchants, the Spiders, the Clusters, Soul Assembly: Most played more soul music than rock-and-roll, a la Otis Redding, Eddie Floyd, and James Brown. Some, like the Lagos-based Hykkers, played more rock than funk and were very popular. During the Biafran war, the Igbo musicians who fled east continued where they had left off. The rock-and-rollers like the Hykkers, the Wings, and Aktion 13 continued to rock-and-roll. The soul boys like the Hygrades continued their experimentations with James Brown. “Music was our way to avoid getting involved in the war. We were lucky enough to provide entertainment for the soldiers and civilians—that kept us out of action. I lost cousins and uncles, though,” says Berkley “Ike“ Jones, a guitarist and founding member of the rock group Blo. “The most in-demand players of the postwar era—Jake, Jerry, Berkley, Feladey, Mike Kollins … were brought to Lagos from the ashes of Biafran bands. Of course, the Biafrans were probably less ‘exposed’ than Lagos kids. … Having spent three years in a blockaded combat zone, they didn’t have as much access to all the latest records and styles. This contributed to their rougher and heavier sound,” says Uchenna Ikonne, cultural historian and author. Here is a rundown of the songs you must listen to and the history of groups you should know if you want to get into Afro psych rock. Ofo and the Black Company was formed in Ibadan, a city in western Nigeria, which was a hotbed of music innovation. Their performances were epic theatrical displays of Afro-tinged psychedelic rock and showmanship. Decca (West Africa Recordings) signed the group to its freshly launched imprint, Afrodisia, a label aimed at the emerging youth market. “Ofo and the Black Company delivered on the hype with their first single, ‘Allah Wakbarr,’ a screaming, proto-metal orgy of ecstasy exploding around the traditional Islamic exhortation of the Creator’s greatness. ‘Allah Wakbarr’ was …. changed the direction of popular music in the sense that Decca started looking for and signing other bands that could reproduce that sound,” says Ikonne. Dele Olaseinde, a guitarist who joined Ofo and the Black Company later, recalls the group’s debut at the New Afrika Shrine in 1970. “They came out like shamen or masquerades chanting in Igbo and playing percussion instruments, dancing around the stage with makeup. Then Larry [Ifedioranma] got on the drums and Popo Kamson picked up his guitar, and they started rocking the whole place silly, creating heavy sounds that knocked everyone into space. Everyone that witnessed that show agrees that it was probably the most unique show they ever witnessed.” Ofo and the Black Company were very psychedelic in both attire and sound and on the heavier end of the rock spectrum. They also did not shy away from dissonance. Their psychedelia came from Ifedioranma’s interest in different forms of spiritual and religious forms. This paved the way for other musicians (Joni Haastrup’s MonoMono, Shadow Abraham, the Identicals, Prince Twins Seven-Seven) to explore and channel traditional spirituality in popular music. The trippy quality of some Afro rock is due to an Afro-spiritual vibe, not copious drug use, as some scholars have argued. The Hykkers, a Lagos-based group of teenage rockers, were one of the foremost rock groups before the war broke out, according to Olaseinde. When the conflict erupted, most of the group headed to the east, and the Biafran military leaders channeled the band’s popularity in an effort to improve morale. When the war ended on Jan. 15, 1971, most of the Hykkers returned to Lagos. But the group’s bassist, Bob Miga, and guitarist, Eddie Duke, stayed back to form the Strangers. Luckily, the Hykkers found Jake Sollo and Ify Jerry, a bassist and guitarist renowned in the east for their creativity as members of a band called the Fractions. After Sollo and Jerry joined the Hykkers, the group scored a nationwide hit with “Deiyo Deiyo.” But Sollo’s partnership with Jerry, albeit very creative, eventually broke down. Enter the Funkees: The band had moved to Lagos from Aba and was in the market for a flashy lead guitarist as EMI Nigeria (an offshoot of the British record label) prepared to send them to London to work on a debut album. Sollo joined up as a guitarist in the mold of guitar hero Jimi Hendrix. In London the Funkees got heavily into psych rock, and their sound changed as they soaked in the influence of the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Sollo and the Funkees became one of the major Afro rock bands in London, sharing the stage with Ofo and the Black Company and Remi Kabaka. The group split in 1976, and Sollo joined the Afro-pop supergroup Osibisa. Jones, who befriended and sometimes jammed with Sollo in the east during the Biafran war, said the guitarist was destined for the success he found on the Nigerian and international music scene. “He was a great guitar player and a really sweet guy. He hailed from Ogidi-Ikenga in Idemili (Anambra state); even as a child he played a local flute called the oja. His dad was also into traditional music, he was the oti Iba, “drum beater,” in their village. He played weddings and funerals. So Jake Sollo had music in his veins.” Blo was a group made up of Jones, Laolu Akins, and Mike Odumosu. They were already well-respected musicians in the Lagos rock circuit when they went to work with iconic EMI producer Odion Iruoje on their seminal first album, Chapter One. Uchenna Ikonne explains the different forces that came together to form Blo: “Ginger Baker, ex-drummer with Cream, drove across the Sahara in 1970 and set up shop in Lagos … where he hosted jam sessions that included people like the Clusters, Jake [Sollo] and Jerry [Ify], Tunde Kuboye, Tee Mac, Lijadu Sisters, Joni Haastrup, etc.” Those sessions gave birth to the band Salt, which played Afro psych rock and toured the U.S. and Europe. But they ultimately broke up. A few of the former Clusters players formed Blo, making a sound influenced by Carlos Santana and Jimi Hendrix. “All these currents added to the creation of the Afro psych rock sound,” says Ikonne. Blo’s gatefold album featured a strong, Afrocentric cover design and the trippy sounds of “Chant to Mother Earth” and “We’re out Together.” It was an international sensation, and for many Chapter One was their introduction to African rock music. Blo changed the genre forever. After recording Chapter One for EMI in 1973, Blo moved on to record more danceable music, much to the disappointment of their producer. “I really wish they had persevered with the Afro rock—that was their most creative phase—but they wanted to move on,” Iruoje says. The group nevertheless continued to rise to greater heights for several more years, and Jones remembers the thrill of performing at soldout venues: “We toured a lot in those days, playing schools and stadiums. … Our craziest fans were in Mid-West, Warri, and Benin. After our concerts, they would barricade the exits and not allow us to leave till 6 in the morning of the following day.” Ofege’s scene-shifting breakout Afro-rock album was stymied by a music manager. “When I started recording Ofege, EMI said I was ‘fooling around with kids,’” says legendary EMI producer Odion Iruoje. “There was no previous hit by a young band, so they had no references.” Iruoje discovered Ofege at a high school battle of the bands and brought in Berkley Jones to replace the lead guitarist. Jones “enhanced the sound with his rock solos, but the manager of EMI blocked the album’s release because he felt the music was not mature enough,” Iruoje says. The album was shelved for nine months until that manager left EMI. When a new executive started, Iruoje played him the record that would become Try and Love. That’s all it took. They made a few amendments to the cover design and released the album in 1973. “Try and Love” was a runaway hit and took over the radio waves. It marked a real cultural shift and signaled the emergence of the youth—the new Nigeria. The album was very influential as it encouraged many young students to start bands and, more important, it showed those students’ parents that there was money to be made in music. They were a bit more lenient with their wards. The album was released by EMI in other African markets, notably Ghana and East Africa, influencing regional as well as Nigerian rock and roll. Temi Kogbe is a vinyl digger, collector, and trader of rare West African vinyl. He lives in West Africa and runs Odion Livingstone and Livingstone Studio, two music labels dedicated to officially releasing Africa’s unearthed gems from the past.The Irish travelling community has received a major boost in its bid to be recognised formally as a distinct ethnic group. A key parliamentary committee has backed the bid by Irish travellers for formal recognition. The justice committee of the Irish parliament will now call on the Prime Minister Enda Kenny and Justice Minister Alan Shatter to ratify the call. The Sunday Times reports that a draft report on traveller ethnicity by Sinn Fein justice spokesman Pádraig Mac Lochlainn will be approved by members of the justice committee next month. The paper says the committee will then call on the government to formally recognise the travelling community’s distinct ethnicity. Martin Collins, a traveller and co-director of the lobby group Pavee Point, told the paper: “If the Taoiseach (prime minister) stood up in the Dail (parliament) and recognised the ethnicity of travellers, it would demonstrate that we belong here. “My people are an integral part of this island and have been since the 5th century. Recognising our ethnicity would show we are valued and respected for who we are - something we don’t feel at the moment.” Ireland has yet to follow the lead set by authorities in Britain and Northern Ireland who already acknowledge traveller ethnicity. The reports says the move would give the travelling community the protection of international human rights conventions for the first time. Collins added that ethnic status would mean traveller culture would have to be recognised and valued in the Irish education system. He said: “The Irish government would have to support and facilitate the nomadic lifestyle if it wanted to treat travellers as something more than failed settled people.” The Sunday Times report also states that Brigid Quilligan of the Irish Traveller Movement told the justice committee that travellers, ‘once a strong, proud people’, had been devalued within Irish society. She said: “Never before in my lifetime have I seen such hate as I have seen in the past five years. “If one opens a newspaper or turns on the television if one looks at Facebook, Twitter or anything at all, anti-traveller sentiment is fired at one. As travellers, we experience this in our daily lives and we try to set about changing that by making people aware of us and by working in partnership with people.” The draft report from the justice committee argues: “Ireland has maintained a position for decades that amounts to ethnicity denial without having presented any evidence-based defence of this position to our international partners nor indeed the travelling community. “The formal recognition by this state of traveller ethnicity will not be a magic wand or formula that on its own can address all of those challenges. “But it will be a major step in the right direction towards a permanent and positive realignment of the relationship between the settled community and the traveller community in Ireland.” http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/news/ireland/article1394097.ece The Irish travelling community has received a major boost in its bid to be recognised formally as a distinct ethnic group. A key parliamentary committee has backed the bid by Irish travellers for formal recognition. The justice committee of the Irish parliament will now call on the Prime Minister Enda Kenny and Justice Minister Alan Shatter to ratify the call. The Sunday Times reports that a draft report on traveller ethnicity by Sinn Fein justice spokesman Pádraig Mac Lochlainn will be approved by members of the justice committee next month. The paper says the committee will then call on the government to formally recognise the travelling community’s distinct ethnicity. Martin Collins, a traveller and co-director of the lobby group Pavee Point, told the paper: “If the Taoiseach (prime minister) stood up in the Dail (parliament) and recognised the ethnicity of travellers, it would demonstrate that we belong here. “My people are an integral part of this island and have been since the 5th century. Recognising our ethnicity would show we are valued and respected for who we are - something we don’t feel at the moment.” Ireland has yet to follow the lead set by authorities in Britain and Northern Ireland who already acknowledge traveller ethnicity. The reports says the move would give the travelling community the protection of international human rights conventions for the first time.Collins added that ethnic status would mean traveller culture would have to be recognised and valued in the Irish education system. He said: “The Irish government would have to support and facilitate the nomadic lifestyle if it wanted to treat travellers as something more than failed settled people.” The Sunday Times report also states that Brigid Quilligan of the Irish Traveller Movement told the justice committee that travellers, ‘once a strong, proud people’, had been devalued within Irish society. She said: “Never before in my lifetime have I seen such hate as I have seen in the past five years. “If one opens a newspaper or turns on the television if one looks at Facebook, Twitter or anything at all, anti-traveller sentiment is fired at one. As travellers, we experience this in our daily lives and we try to set about changing that by making people aware of us and by working in partnership with people.” The draft report from the justice committee argues: “Ireland has maintained a position for decades that amounts to ethnicity denial without having presented any evidence-based defence of this position to our international partners nor indeed the travelling community. “The formal recognition by this state of traveller ethnicity will not be a magic wand or formula that on its own can address all of those challenges. “But it will be a major step in the right direction towards a permanent and positive realignment of the relationship between the settled community and the traveller community in Ireland.”(Photo: ptmoney.com)At a time when the gap between the ultra-rich and the rest of us is reaching historic heights across the globe, at least $21 trillion (with a “t”) in unreported private financial wealth was recently discovered sitting in secret tax havens. While it can be difficult to imagine sums so large, consider this: the $21 trillion alone is the amount of the U.S. and Japanese economies combined. That reflects only financial wealth, and not the holdings and investments of this monied elite in mansions, yachts, private jets, etc. According to a recent reports by the Tax Justice Network, “The Price of Offshore Revisited” and “Inequality: You Don’t Know The Half of It,” this staggering disparity is only growing worse. The report states at the end of 2010, the wealthiest fifty private banks held over $12.1 trillion, up $5.4 trillion from 2005. Three private banks handle the lion’s share of offshore assets — UBS, Credit Suisse, and Goldman Sachs. If these offshore holdings earned a very modest 3% return rate, and the income were to be taxed at 30%, this would generate tax revenues between $190 – $280 billion. The study is one of the first attempting to measure the hidden wealth. It could be as high as $32 trillion — a staggering sum. At a time when governments around the world are starved for resources, and we are more conscious than ever of the costs of economic inequality, “This new report focuses our attention on a huge ‘black hole’ in the world economy that has never before been measured — private offshore wealth, and the vast amounts of untaxed income that it produces,” says the author James Henry, who is the former chief economist of the global management firm, McKinsey & Company.There has been enough that has been said over the past week about WebExtensions that I wasn’t sure if I wanted to write this post. As usual, I can’t seem to help myself. Note the usual disclaimer that this is my personal opinion. Further note that I have no involvement with WebExtensions at this time, so I write this from the point of view of an observer. API? What API? I shall begin with the proposition that the legacy, non-jetpack environment for addons is not an API. As ridiculous as some readers might consider this to be, please humour me for a moment. Let us go back to the acronym, “API.” Application Programming Interface. While the usage of the term “API” seems to have expanded over the years to encompass just about any type of interface whatsoever, I’d like to explore the first letter of that acronym: Application. An Application Programming Interface is a specific type of interface that is exposed for the purposes of building applications. It typically provides a formal abstraction layer that isolates applications from the implementation details behind the lower tier(s) in the software stack. In the case of web browsers, I suggest that there are two distinct types of applications: web content, and extensions. There is obviously a very well defined API for web content. On the other hand, I would argue that Gecko’s legacy addon environment is not an API at all! From the point of view of an extension, there is no abstraction, limited formality, and not necessarily an intention to be used by applications. An extension is imported into Firefox with full privileges and can access whatever it wants. Does it have access to interfaces? Yes, but are those interfaces intended for applications? Some are, but many are not. The environment that Gecko currently provides for legacy addons is analagous to an operating system running every single application in kernel mode. Is that powerful? Absolutely! Is that the best thing to do for maintainability and robustness? Absolutely not! Somewhere a line needs to be drawn to demarcate this abstraction layer and improve Gecko developers’ ability to make improvements under the hood. Last week’s announcement was an invitation to addon developers to help shape that future. Please participate and please do so constructively! WebExtensions are not Chrome Extensions When I first heard rumors about WebExtensions in Whistler, my source made it very clear to me that the WebExtensions initiative is not about making Chrome extensions run in Firefox. In fact, I am quite disappointed with some of the press coverage that seems to completely miss this point. Yes, WebExtensions will be implementing some APIs to be source compatible with Chrome. That makes it easier to port a Chrome extension, but porting will still be necessary. I like the Venn Diagram concept that the WebExtensions FAQ uses: Some Chrome APIs will not be available in WebExtensions. On the other hand, WebExtensions will be providing APIs above and beyond the Chrome API set that will maintain Firefox’s legacy of extensibility. Please try not to think of this project as Mozilla taking functionality away. In general I think it is safe to think of this as an opportunity to move that same functionality to a mechanism that is more formal and abstract.Iraq’s Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zebari blamed on Friday Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his security officials for the Islamist insurgency gaining power in parts of Iraq, in a rare criticism of the Iraqi leader by a government official. “Surely the man who is responsible for the general policies bears the responsibility and the general commander of the armed force, the ministers of defense and interior also bear these responsibilities,” Zebari said, in a statement to Al Arabiya News Channel. “There are other sides who bear responsibility, maybe political partners, but the biggest and greatest responsibility is on the person in charge of public policies,” Zebari added. The Kurdish foreign minister’s comments are likely to further deteriorate relations between Maliki’s Shiite-led government and the Kurds. Such deterioration would complicate efforts to reach a power-sharing government, capable of combating the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) militants. ISIS militants and their allies have seized large swathes of Iraq in recent weeks and declared a so-proclaimed Islamic “Caliphate” in their territories. Meanwhile, Iraq’s most influential Shiite preacher, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, appealed to Iraqi politicians not to be “obstacles” standing in the country’s transition of power, as the deadline for naming a new prime minister looms. In remarks delivered through his spokesman, Sistani’s appeals are seen as an indirect appeal to Maliki to leave office. Regional threat The growing power of ISIS has alarmed other Arab states who are concerned that their campaign could embolden militants on their patch. Saudi King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz called on regional leader and religious scholars on Friday to rise against the militants trying to “hijack” Islam. The king did not name specific groups, but indirectly referred to violence in countries such as Iraq and Syria. In July, the Kurdish political bloc ended all participation in Iraq’s national government, after Maliki accused the Kurds of allowing terrorists to stay in Erbil, the capital of their semi-autonomous Kurdistan region. Maliki is ruling in a caretaker capacity, after he won a parliamentary election in April but failed to win enough support from the Kurdish, Sunni minorities and some fellow Shiites to form a new Cabinet. Biggest threat since Saddam’s fall ISIS’ offensive has spiked sectarian tensions and threatened to dismember Iraq. The conflict poses the biggest danger to the stability of the OPEC country since the 2003 fall of longtime dictator Saddam Hussein after a U.S.-led invasion. Maliki appointed Hussain al-Shahristani, a Shiite deputy prime minister, as acting foreign minister. [wpResize]An Alabama family went fishing for striped bass but ended up rescuing a bald eagle that got caught in its snare. "He swooped down and grabbed our live bait. It looked like a 3- or 4-year-old eagle," said Mike Freeman, who was fishing on Alabama's Smith lake Sunday with a guide and his two children, Trevor and Julia. While Freeman said his first instinct was to cut the line, he said his quick-thinking son pulled out his smartphone and looked to Google for an answer. "Of course, there weren't any directions for what to do if you hook a bald eagle, but there were for pelicans, so we followed those directions," Freeman said. "The first direction was don't cut the line," he said. "We trolled over to it and Bubba, the guy who was with us, grabbed it by the leg and unhooked it." Freeman said the bird then swam to shore where it idled for a minute before flying away. "It was an intense and extraordinarily rewarding day to see him fly off uninjured," he said. The bald eagle - America's national symbol - was taken off the endangered species list in 2007.A Budget that betrays working parents - that's what we've had from George Osborne today. Families with kids are going to be really hard hit by the Tories plans. Women are going to be hit more than twice as hard as men - by a Chancellor and a Prime Minister who clearly don't give a damn about working parents’ lives. Many families are going to be thousands of pounds worse off as a result of the £4.5bn cuts to tax credits alone, with over 3million families affected. That's even before you include real cuts in the value of child benefit for the next four years. If you're on average pay with two children, you'll lose £2,000 in tax credit cuts next year. I'm glad the Tories have finally given in to our calls for a big increase in the minimum wage, but it’s not enough to compensate parents for the tax credits they are cutting. And they certainly shouldn't call it a Living Wage because it still falls short of that. A single mum with two children working part time on the National Minimum wage will gain just over £400 from higher pay but lose £860 from lower tax credits in 2016/17. A couple with two kids both working full time on the minimum wage will still be £700 a year worse off. And if you're currently paid more than the minimum wage, you'll be harder hit. Plus they are actually discouraging parents from working harder. Earn an extra pound or two and they'll claw half of it back from your tax credits. Remember how they said a 50 per cent tax was a disincentive for the highest paid people in the country? Yet they are quite happy to do it for the poorest paid. So much for George Osborne's promise to help working people. Do parents just not count as working people? Is this the "lifestyle" George Osborne claimed he didn't want to fund? And remember David Cameron's pre-election pledge that child tax credit is “not going to fall." It was a lie. This is a shameful betrayal of parents working hard to support their kids and get on in life. In the 21st century working parents shouldn't have to go to food banks to put a hot meal on the table, as too many families now do. But tax credit cuts aren't the only assault on working parents. The Government is saving £370m from delaying childcare plans - despite having made grand promises before the election about nursery places and tax relief. We warned at the time that their plans weren't funded - so it has proved. Whilst George Osborne made much in his speech of promising Britain a pay rise, he also slipped in five more years of a 1% cap on public sector pay – below inflation, even though services like the NHS are already facing a serious and growing recruitment and retention problem. And the research I commissioned today from the House of Commons Library shows that women are being hit over twice as hard as men by the Chancellor’s plans. Of the £34bn net extra money being raised from households over the next five years (taking account of the increases in tax allowances as well as cuts to tax credits and all the changes to benefits), £24bn is coming from women – even though women still earn less than men. David Cameron and George Osborne still have a serious women problem – they just don’t get the impact of their plans on women’s lives. Of course the deficit and the debt need to come down. Of course Labour would have had to make tough decisions to get back into surplus. That is why I identified £800m in savings in the home office budget whilst protecting frontline policing- from things like abolishing Police and Crime Commissioners. But it is also why I think George Osborne’s plan to cut inheritance tax now for some of the richest estates is the wrong priority. Because there is an alternative to George Osborne’s plans. The Tories approach isn't fair, and isn't good for our economy and our country in the long term. At the same time as hitting Britain's families, the Tories are failing to deliver the balanced growth and high paid jobs we need for the future - that also helps bring the deficit down. Growth has been revised down this year. So have exports. And so has productivity. That means we're not getting the high skilled jobs our country needs. We need a national mission to almost double R&D investment in our economy to match the 3% of GDP our competitors invest and there were no measures in today’s budget to do that. The Chancellor talks about one nation – but he doesn’t think parents are part of that one nation. He talks about a long term plan but he is happy for stagnant growth with weak exports and low productivity to drag our debt up and our economy down. Labour needs to have the strength to stand for a better approach – for a stronger economy with sustainable public finances and a fairer, less divided country: the two things go hand in hand.A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to McCain's Speech Our Skin-Burning, Cigar-Chomping, Jackass-Studded, Palin-Aghast Report from the RNC SUNDAY The night before I am to be pepper-sprayed by a police officer, I run into two acquaintances from Seattle who have come to St. Paul to protest the Republican National Convention. They are drinking at the Pi Bar in South Minneapolis, one block away from being across the (usually figurative) tracks. In honor of the convention, Pi Bar is throwing a "Flaming Carnivale of Deviance," a fire-lit parking-lot party straight out of James Dobson's darkest dreams: dykes on bikes, drag queens and transsexuals playing carnival games including a cock-ring toss, performance groups with names like "Bedlam Theatre" and "Gay Witch Abortion." The poster for the event features a clip-art drawing of the Republican elephant, bandaged and bruised, holding a crutch. It's funny, but it's a fantasy. Two days later, the St. Paul Pioneer Press will report on 25 people treated at hospitals for injuries from police actions during tomorrow's protest, including two children who inhaled pepper spray. Two days after that, local news sites will post photographs of 17-year-old Keith Smith, bloodied and stomped by authorities while in custody, with a boot print on his back, and of 19-year-old Elliot Hughes, who will report being punched, hooded, and smacked around by police, who allegedly used him to practice their pain-compliance holds. But that is all to come. As my Seattle acquaintances, Brady McGarry and DK Pan, are leaving Pi Bar, they invite me to stay the night a few blocks away, at their friends' place. The apartment—home to Francis, Angie, and Jenny—is a second-story walkup directly above a barbershop. It's big, open, and mussed. White Christmas lights festoon the slightly greasy kitchen and a sign, painted in green watercolor, directs visitors to the compost bucket. A poster of Bea Arthur hangs on the wall. A journal sits by the toilet: "The Poop Book," in which Francis, Angie, and Jenny detail the size and consistency of their extrusions, along with whatever thoughts drifted through their heads while divesting themselves. The entries are both narcissistic and introspective. The young women obsess over the details of their own shit ("burrito!") and muse about the purpose of their lives. Outside in the dark, McGarry and Pan talk about police who allegedly wept during the WTO riots in Seattle. "That's really radical," McGarry says softly, smoking a cigarette. "That's the seed of a groundswell." We talk about the preemptive raids of the past two days here in the Twin Cities—about police who charged into five different residences and held their occupants, some of them video bloggers, at gunpoint. The conversation drifts toward the war in Iraq that McGarry, Pan, and 10,000 others will protest tomorrow. McGarry mentions his childhood friend Jason Bogar, an army corporal killed in Afghanistan earlier this summer. Protesting war is not, for him, an abstract exercise. The next morning, McGarry comes by my couch with a Sharpie and suggests we all write the phone number of a legal-defense collective on our thighs, just in case. If I hear about trouble at a certain intersection, he says, that'll be them. "Well, see you at the barricades." He pauses. "I've always wanted to say that." MONDAY MORNING "On TV it looks huge, but the Xcel Center, a squat sports arena in downtown St. Paul, is not a big building. In the afternoons, before the halls are thick with people, you can walk the interior perimeter in five minutes. Its capacity is 20,000, and there are 10,000 protesters in front—one protester for every two people inside—chanting through the barricades and past a line of police: "Who is a terrorist? Bush is a terrorist! Who is a terrorist? Bush is a terrorist!" Curious Republicans venture down to gawk. Several look like bad TV movie versions of themselves, the kinds of flimsy clichés you'd expect from a bunch of Democrats throwing a Republican-themed costume party. Dennis G. Lennox III, 24, from Michigan, wearing antique, round-rimmed glasses and resembling a daguerreotype of an owl, censures protests as "uncivilized" and adds, "They should do something more productive, like write articles and essays." Saul Farber, 22, running for New York State Assembly, and Andrew Abdel-Malik, his friend, watch warily through the barricade. "Shit, I think they want to jump the fence," Abdel-Malik says. "You wearing comfortable shoes?" Farber answers, in all seriousness, "Yeah, I can run in Prada loafers." Dan Kramer, 40-ish, who owns a PR firm in Sacramento—his previous employer was Nichols-Dezenhall, a spin machine for the former CEO of Enron among others, dubbed "the pit bull of public relations" by Business Week—struts around with indestructible hair and a smug smile. "It's very interesting," Kramer says, after having his picture taken from behind the barricades. "Most of those folks look so well-off, well-to-do."
spoke of their pride in adopting those ancestors' names. She had been so different—only sixteen, a boy in everyone's eyes but her own, about to choose and declare her name before the khan and all the Mardu. The khan had walked among the warriors, hearing the tales of their glorious deeds. One by one, they declared their new war names, and each time, the khan shouted the names for all to hear. Each time, the horde shouted the name as one, shaking the earth. Then the khan came to Alesha. She stood before him, snakes coiling in the pit of her stomach, and told how she had slain her first dragon. The khan nodded and asked her name. "Alesha," she said, as loudly as she could. Just Alesha, her grandmother's name. "Alesha!" the khan shouted, without a moment's pause. And the whole gathered horde shouted "Alesha!" in reply. The warriors of the Mardu shouted her name. In that moment, if anyone had told her that in three years' time she would be khan, she just might have dared to believe it. Half-lost in her memories, the khan of the Mardu was smiling when the other dragon hit the ground behind her, smiling as she whirled to face it, smiling as her sword bit deep into its neck while it lunged at the nameless orc beside her. It bellowed and thrashed as death came to claim it, but one more swing of her heavy blade cut its head clean off. Mardu Runemark \| Art by Viktor Titov The orc beside her stared dumbly, no trace of anger remaining on his face. "I know who I am," Alesha said to him, still smiling. "Now show me who you are." She nodded toward the last two beasts that still snapped and snarled at the surrounding Mardu. He hesitated, still slack-jawed, but then collected himself and ran back into battle. She followed him, watching as he threw himself into the frenzied melee around the largest of the dragons. He was strong, clearly, and fast despite his bulk. He fought with no lack of skill, but his techniques were unorthodox. He used his strength to batter the beast's head and limbs, to knock it off balance and shift its position. He ensured that its deadly teeth and claws never made contact with the other fighters, and he made openings for his allies to strike. He wasn't looking for the killing blow, but he made it possible. Alesha nodded, smiling to herself. Soon enough, the battle was over. Six dragons lay dead on the canyon floor among many dead warriors. Their losses were steep, but six dragons! Six of Kolaghan's brood would never prey on the Mardu again. The horde had much to celebrate. The survivors set to work. The woe-reapers chanted their ancient rites over the dead to keep them still in death. Goblins skittered over the battlefield, gathering arrows that could be reused and broken weapons that could be reforged. Other Mardu carved up the dragon corpses for meat and trophies. Bloodfell Caves \| Art by Adam Paquette Alesha walked among them, just as she had fought beside them. In each cluster of fighters, she sought out those who had not yet claimed a war name. On this day, many had earned the right to claim their names. She listened to tale after tale of heroic deeds, and with each name chosen, she shouted the name for the horde to hear—with never a moment's hesitation. Fangbreaker. Cliffleaper. Barzeel. Tailrider. Turuk. Vallash. At last she came to the orc who had fought beside her, the orc who had dared to question her. "You," she said. "How many battles have you fought?" He stood stiffly, looking over her head rather than meeting her gaze. "Nine." "And what deeds of glory do you claim this day?" "None, Khan." "None? Nine battles and you have earned no glory? You have no war name to claim?" "No." "Then you are a fool. I know who you are, but you don't know yourself." He bristled again, but this time didn't dare to speak. She turned to the warrior next to him. "Kuru Vashar," she said, "you fought beside this soft heel today. What did you see?" Vashar stood and looked at the taller orc. "I fell underneath one of the dragons," she said. "Its weight crushed me to the ground. You stood beside me and struck the beast, shifting its balance so I could get out, then you helped me to my feet." Alesha nodded and pointed to another. "Magran Backbreaker, what did you see?" "Khan, this one put himself between me and a deadly claw. His strength knocked the claw aside, then I slipped past and drove my spear beneath the dragon's foreleg." One more. "Jalasha Impaler, what did you see?" Jalasha reached up and clapped the orc on the shoulder. "My friend saved my life, throwing himself onto a dragon's head when it was about to take me in its jaws." Shockmaw Dragon \| Art by Alejandro Mirabal Alesha nodded and stepped close to the nameless orc. She grabbed the edge of his armored collar and pulled his head down, forcing his eyes to meet hers. "I know who I am. I am not a boy. I am Alesha, like my grandmother before me." Several of the nearest warriors murmured their approval. "And I know who you are," she said. "The Mardu know you. But you—you think every Mardu must be a Backbreaker or Helmsmasher. You think your deeds are not as glorious as theirs. And you are wrong." She let go of his armor and shoved him, sending him stumbling back a few steps. "When you learn what your place among the Mardu is, then you can choose a name." She turned away, ready to move to the next group of soldiers. "Wait," the orc said. Alesha paused but did not turn around. "Why?" "I have a tale of the battle." She turned and glared at him. "We have heard enough of your deeds." "This is not my glory." He raised his voice so all around could hear. "Today I saw a warrior strike down a dragon with a single blow, and on her face she wore the joy of battle." Alesha smiled. The orc took a step closer and spoke more quietly. "As you say, my khan, I do not know myself. But I know you, I follow you—" Now he shouted over all the din of the battlefield. "—and I call you Alesha, Who Smiles at Death." And once again, the warriors of the Mardu shouted her name.The Los Angeles Lakers are listing Pau Gasol as probable for tonight’s game against the visiting Portland Trailblazers. Gasol has been diagnosed with plantar fasciitis on his right foot. More from the LA Daily News: “Gasol didn’t report any signs of pain following the Lakers’ 126-114 loss Wednesday to the Denver Nuggets. But the Lakers forward had already dealt with knee tendinitis since the beginning of training camp, an injury that eventually sidelined him for eight consecutive games. Gasol has averaged 12.75 points on 42.2 percent shooting, 8.25 rebounds and 5.5 assists in the past four games since his return. The Lakers were given the day off of practice, but Gasol spent part of that time getting examined by foot specialist Dr. Kenneth Jung. It’s currently unclear contributed to Gasol’s plantar fasciitis, an inflammation of a tendon within the sole of the foot. Recently, Lakers coach Mike D’Antoni has slotted Metta World Peace and Jordan Hill as the primary backup power forwards. Based on his recent rotations, it’s likely World Peace would get the starting nod should Gasol need to sit out.”Texting a driver while they are operating a vehicle may open you up to liability in the state of New Jersey, per a ruling from the state appeals court. Judges have just agreed that safely stationary texters can bear some responsibility if the driver they’re texting causes any trouble—but it all depends on the knowledge and intent of the texter. "We hold that the sender of a text message can potentially be liable if an accident is caused by texting," wrote the judges (PDF), "but only if the sender knew or had special reason to know that the recipient would view the text while driving and thus be distracted." The ruling is an interpretation of an existing New Jersey law that created "criminal penalties for those who are distracted by use of a cell phone while driving and injure others. The new law explicitly permits a jury to infer that a driver who was using a hand-held cell phone and caused injury in an accident may be guilty of assault by auto." But the law didn't address civil cases, nor did it cover the liability of remote texters. The question before the judges was whether, as a matter of common low, civil suits could target those outside the car who knowingly distract the driver. The ruling stems from the case of a motorcycle-riding couple who got into an accident with an 18-year old driver who had been texting when his truck drifted into oncoming traffic. The couple sued the both the man and his 17-year old girlfriend, who had been texting him. Despite the decision that a texter can be liable, in this case she was not; the girlfriend claimed ignorance that her boyfriend was driving at the time she sent the messages. Slate compares the situation to bartenders being held liable for not cutting off a patron they know will be driving. “It creates a legal standard that is not really meant to be enforced in court," writes Emily Bazelon, "but rather to remind citizens of their responsibilities.”On Tuesday, Judicial Watch released 296 pages of Hillary Clinton's email records as part of its lawsuit against the State Department. Within the release are 44 government email exchanges that had not previously been turned over to the State Department, falsifying Clinton's oft-repeated claim that she had turned over all of her government emails. The messages were found during a search of agency computer files of long-time Clinton aide Huma Abedin. They reveal that while in office -- and in violation of ethics agreements she agreed to when she was appointed secretary of State -- Hillary Clinton interacted with lobbyists, political and Clinton Foundation donors, and business interests: The new documents reveal that in April 2009 controversial Clinton Foundation official Doug Band pushed for a job for an associate. In the email Band tells Hillary Clinton’s former aides at the State Department Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin that it is “important to take care of [Redacted]. Band is reassured by Abedin that “Personnel has been sending him options.” Band was co-founder of Teneo Strategy with Bill Clinton and a top official of the Clinton Foundation, including its Clinton Global Initiative. Included in the new document production is a 2009 email in which Band directs Abedin and Mills to put Lebanese-Nigerian billionaire and Clinton Foundation donor Gilbert Chagoury in touch with the State Department’s “substance person” on Lebanon. Band notes that Chagoury is “key guy there [Lebanon] and to us,” and insists that Abedin call Amb. Jeffrey Feltman to connect him to Chagoury. As a close friend of Bill's and a top donor to the Clinton foundation, Chagoury was indeed a "key guy" to the Clintons: He has appeared near the top of the Foundation’s donor list as a $1 million to $5 million contributor, according to foundation documents. He also pledged $1 billion to the Clinton Global Initiative. According to a 2010 investigation by PBS Frontline, Chagoury was convicted in 2000 in Switzerland for laundering money from Nigeria, but agreed to a plea deal and repaid $66 million to the Nigerian government. These types of interactions with the Clinton Foundation appear to be in violation of the ethics agreements Hillary Clinton agreed to prior to being appointed and confirmed as secretary of State. On January 5, 2009, for example, Secretary of State-designate Hillary Clinton wrote in a letter to State Department Designated Agency Ethics Official James H. Thessin: “For the duration of my appointment as Secretary if I am confirmed, I will not participate personally and substantially in any particular matter involving specific parties in which The William J. Clinton Foundation (or the Clinton Global Initiative) is a party or represents a party... ” According to the Capital Research Center, while Clinton served as secretary of State, foreign donors to the Clinton Foundation made up one-third of all donors giving more than $1 million, and made up more than half of donors who gave $5 million or more: Before Obama even took office, the Clinton Foundation’s chairman of the board, Bruce Lindsey, signed a Memorandum of Understanding on Dec. 12, 2008 with Valerie Jarrett, then co-chair of President-elect Obama’s transition team. The document provided that “During any service by Senator Clinton as Secretary of State, the Foundation will publish annually the names of all new contributors.” We now know that the foundation cast aside its promise to make timely disclosure of donations it took in from foreign sources. And in recent days Reuters discovered that the Clinton Foundation filed incorrect Form 990 disclosures with the IRS. All nonprofits have to file the document once a year, after which it becomes publicly available. As a result of Reuters reporting, the Clinton Foundation admitted that its IRS filings from 2010 through 2012 and those of its Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) from 2012 and 2013 are not accurate. The foundation does not rule out the possibility of revisiting its IRS filings going back 15 years. According to Reuters, “[f]or three years in a row beginning in 2010, the Clinton Foundation reported to the IRS that it received zero in funds from foreign and U.S. governments, a dramatic fall-off from the tens of millions of dollars in foreign government contributions reported in preceding years.” Rather than condemn Clinton’s egregious violation of her agreement with the Obama administration, President Obama has fulsomely endorsed her and campaigned on her behalf. The blatant cronyism on display in the newly released emails helps explain why Clinton might want to keep them under wraps, as revealed in another email exchange.Microsoft has enabled developers to support cross-network play on its Xbox Live network, giving Xbox, Playstation, and PC gamers the chance to play against one another for the first time. It essentially means that players on Windows 10 and Xbox One will now be able to play gamers who are using other multiplayer online networks, such as the PS4’s Playstation Network. The onus, however, will be on developers to create games that can unify the networks. “It’s up to game developers to support this feature, and Xbox Live players will always have the option of choosing to play only with other Xbox Live players,” wrote Chris Charla, head of Microsoft’s ID@Xbox program, in a blog post today. The first cross-network game will be Rocket League, which the game’s developers have announced will come later this spring. The studio had been pushing Microsoft to install support for cross-network play. “We were prodding everyone all the time,” Jeremy Dunham, the studio’s vice president, told Mashable. This move removes one of the key considerations for gamers buying either a PS4 from Sony (sne) or an Xbox One from Microsoft (msft), two of the top-selling consoles in the market. Previously, gamers could only play peers using the same console during offline or online gaming. However, it remains to be seen how unified play handles console-specific features like security, voice chat and reporting abusive players. It also is unclear which console could benefit more from this integration. In January, it was reported that 36 million PS4 units have been sold globally, outpacing the Xbox One at 19 million units.Danish firm Henning Larsen Architects have won a competition to design a new campus for the University College Sealand in Roskilde, Denmark. The campus will be made up of four adjacent volumes, each slightly angled to create a series of sheltered courtyards. The new 14,000 square-metre facilities will be used for existing bachelor programs in social education and social work, health, and teaching. The central building will have a large cantilevered overhang to cover the main courtyard. Renders are by Peter Krogtoft and HLA Visuals Here's some more from the architects: Campus Roskilde Henning Larsen Architects wins invited competition for new campus in Roskilde, Denmark. ”Many minds – one pulse.” This is one of the key concepts of the project proposal for Campus Roskilde selected by an unanimous jury at a press conference on 8 July. Behind the winning proposal is a team consisting of turnkey contractor Enemærke & Petersen, Henning Larsen Architects, COWI Engineers and Thing & Wainø Landscape Architects. With the new Campus Roskilde, University College Sealand will consolidate its professional bachelor’s programmes covering social education and social work, health and teaching. The new campus will facilitate dialogue and random meetings and provide the students with a feeling of being part of a manifold university environment beating with one pulse. The new campus of 14,000 m2 will consist of four square buildings – slightly rotated towards each other to create an intimate, varied space around the campus square. Under the overhang of the central building, a roofed square will open up towards the rest of the campus stimulating the sense of vibrancy and community among the students. Campus Roskilde is characterised by a significant green profile where the generous intake of daylight will help lower the energy consumption. The first phase of the building is expected to be completed in 2012. Credits Location: Campus Roskilde, DenmarkCLIENT: University College Sealand Gross Floor Area: 14.000 m2 Type of Assignment: First prize in invited competition, 2010 HLA Team Partner in charge: Peer Teglgaard Jeppesen Project Leader: Michael Soerensen and Viggo Haremst Project Manager: Jesper Hoiberg Energy Consultant: Michael Joergensen Project Team: Sofie Hedin, Andreas Brink, Erik Folke Holm, Emil Skibsted, Greta Lillienau, Blanca Ulzurrun, Ida Bergstrøm 3D Visualisation: Peter Krogtoft/HLA Visuals Collaborators: Enemærke & Petersen, COWI Engineers, Thing & Wainø Click above for larger image Click above for larger image Click above for larger image Click above for larger image See also: .When we first started developing the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) nearly three years ago, we had to figure out how to deliver a consistent command-line experience to the ever-expanding surface area of AWS APIs. We decided to auto-generate commands and options from the underlying models that describe AWS APIs. This strategy has enabled us to deliver timely support for new AWS services and API updates with a consistent style of commands. We believe consistency and timeliness help our customers be productive on AWS. We also understand it is difficult to get familiar with and effectively use the thousands of commands and options available in the CLI. We are always looking for solutions to make the CLI as easy as possible to learn and use. This search for better usability led us to create aws-shell, which we’re making public today at https://github.com/awslabs/aws-shell. The project, along with our plans to collaborate with Donne Martin, the author of SAWS, were announced during this year’s re:Invent talk, Automating AWS with the AWS CLI. Donne has made amazing progress in providing a great command line UI for AWS CLI users. It’s been a pleasant surprise and a validation of our feature ideas to see a community project take off and gain so much popularity in a short amount of time. We are excited and grateful to join forces with Donne and bring him on board as one of the maintainers of the aws-shell project. Now let’s take a look at some of the key features available in aws-shell: Interactive, fuzzy auto-completion of commands and options Dynamic in-line documentation of commands and options Auto-completion of resource identifiers (for example, Amazon EC2 instance IDs, Amazon SQS queue URLs, Amazon SNS topic names, and more) Execute regular shell commands by piping or prefixing shell commands with ‘!’ Export all commands executed in the current session to your text editor (.edit special command) Running the “.edit” command after executing some commands gives you all the commands in your default text editor We’re excited to get aws-shell into your hands, and we look forward to your feedback. As always, you can find us in GitHub. Please share any questions and issues you have!When Life Gives You Snow, Make Snow Cream Enlarge this image toggle caption Courtesy of Chloe Tuttle Courtesy of Chloe Tuttle There's snow across much of the country this weekend. In eastern North Carolina, where it doesn't snow a lot, snowflakes are an occasion for some folks to flock outside, scooping up what falls to make "snow cream." That's ice cream made from fresh snow — but you have to mix it fast, before it melts. Chloe Tuttle runs a bed and breakfast in Williamston, N.C., and she's a bit of an expert on snow cream. She tells Weekend Edition Saturday host Scott Simon the trick is to use soft, freshly fallen snow. "With that you mix heavy cream, sugar and vanilla and stir it until it's soft," Tuttle says. "It tastes like homemade ice cream, but very special because you can only get it once a year." You can make your own batch of snow cream this year using the recipe below. It doesn't necessarily have to be snow from the country, but just be sure that it is fresh and clean. Snow Cream Recipe Directions: "Stir until it's soft," Chloe Tuttle says.A brand new technical conference is hitting the Bitcoin space this week. Loosely inspired by the well-known Scaling Bitcoin workshops, the French Bitcoin community will host the Breaking Bitcoin conference in Paris, on September 9 and 10. The conference has an explicit focus on security and is targeted at an audience with an understanding of the technical aspects of Bitcoin. “All of the talks and panels will have different angles that tie in to this theme,” co-organizer Elizabeth Stark told Bitcoin Magazine. The Breaking Bitcoin conference was born out of discussions on the CryptoFR Slack, a discussion platform for the growing developer community in France. A group of volunteers, including French Bitcoin community member Pierre Lorcery, Chainsmiths managing director Kevin Loaec and Ledger CTO Nicolas Bacca, as well as California-based Lightning Labs CEO Elizabeth Stark, decided to organize the technical event. “The idea was simple,” said Stark, who has previously been involved with organizing Scaling Bitcoin workshops. “We made a weekend out of the types of talks we see at developer meetups around the world and invited some of our favorite speakers to Paris.” Breaking Bitcoin’s focus on Bitcoin’s security is unique in the space. Where Scaling Bitcoin mostly focuses on how to improve the technology in a number of ways, including scalability, fungibility, privacy, and more, Breaking Bitcoin instead highlights all the different ways in which Bitcoin can be attacked and how these attacks can be defended against. “Talks will range from social and political attack vectors, to spam attacks, to layer 2 security, to hardware attacks, to secure and usable applications,” Stark said. “This is, as far as I know, the first ever technical conference focused solely on Bitcoin security. The goal of the event is to have a true community-driven, cypherpunk conference, and our hope is that we've delivered on this.” Speakers and panelists in Paris include Bitcoin Core contributors Eric Lombrozo and Peter Todd, Libbitcoin developers Amir Taaki and Eric Voskuil, Lightning Network developers Dr. Christian Decker and Laolu Osuntokun, BitGo engineer Jameson Lopp, Electrum developer Thomas Voegtlin, Venture Capitalist Alyse Killeen, and many more. Tickets start at €100 (~$120), with room for up to 300 attendees.Before we dig into this rather lengthy tutorial, let me apologize. This is part three (see parts one and two) and it's taken me several months to finally write it, for two reasons: First, as the founder of the company, my presence and attention was needed elsewhere, and second, I wanted our website to run on this set up for a while, so that I was sure what I'll write is going to have good, reliable and performant outcome. Also, since we'll be using Google Cloud to deploy this solution, be warned that we will be spinning up a couple of relatively small virtual servers, which does come with a cost of a few dollars (for the duration of you running these servers to follow the tutorial), so make sure that you delete them all after we're done. The good news is that if you never used Google Cloud before, you're given a $300 bonus by Google to try it out! Let's get started! What is Kubernetes Kubernetes, in short, is a container orchestration tool. That means it does all the heavy lifting to make sure our containers are running properly, destroys the unneeded ones or spins up new ones, makes sure that traffic routing is correct between them and a number of other, useful things, most of which need to be done manually in the traditional server administration world. Why not Docker Swarm? Well first, because I have absolutely no experience with it, and second, because Kubernetes is becoming the market leader when it comes to container management. For a good reason too, since it's an open-source project by Google, a company that knows a thing or two about server technologies and hurdles they bring. There are several entities (which in Kubernetes, are defined with the use of yaml files) that we'll be referring to and using throughout this tutorial that is worth mentioning in advance but will likely become much more familiar once we put them to use: pod is Kubernetes' primary entity, so to speak. It's almost analogous to Docker's container, the only difference being we can have multiple containers within one pod. For now, think pod == container is Kubernetes' primary entity, so to speak. It's almost analogous to Docker's container, the only difference being we can have multiple containers within one pod. For now, think deployment is how we control pods. Its meaning somewhat differs from the traditional meaning of the word, because it's not a process but rather a configuration snippet with which we define how many pods (also called replicas in this context) of a certain kind we need, how much resources we want to allocate to each and a slew of other responsibilities. is how we control pods. Its meaning somewhat differs from the traditional meaning of the word, because it's not a process but rather a configuration snippet with which we define how many pods (also called replicas in this context) of a certain kind we need, how much resources we want to allocate to each and a slew of other responsibilities. services is how we expose certain kind/group of pods either internally to be connected from other pods or externally to the internet. Services are among the simplest entities to define. is how we expose certain kind/group of pods either internally to be connected from other pods or externally to the internet. Services are among the simplest entities to define. secrets are an entity that holds, you guessed it, secrets, such as passwords and API keys. In Kubernetes, we consume secrets by mounting them onto a pod, under a certain path, let's say /etc/secrets (could be anything). Then our DB_SECRET is stored as a string inside /etc/secrets/DB_SECRET. are an entity that holds, you guessed it, secrets, such as passwords and API keys. In Kubernetes, we consume secrets by mounting them onto a pod, under a certain path, let's say (could be anything). Then our is stored as a string inside. endpoints are an automatically managed entity. We normally don't need to define them ourselves because Kubernetes does it when we define a service, but there are exceptions, such as when we want a service to route to an external server which Kubernetes is not aware of. We will use this approach in our tutorial (hint: for wp-content ). are an automatically managed entity. We normally don't need to define them ourselves because Kubernetes does it when we define a, but there are exceptions, such as when we want a service to route to an external server which Kubernetes is not aware of. We will use this approach in our tutorial (hint: for ). node is a physical machine or a virtual server on which a Kubelet is running. Kubelet is a Kubernetes worker process that communicates with its master about the state of the node, and all other entities. When our stack is up and running, all the pods are on worker nodes, master just keeps track of everything and delegates work. Like a boss. is a physical machine or a virtual server on which a is running. Kubelet is a Kubernetes worker process that communicates with its master about the state of the node, and all other entities. When our stack is up and running, all the pods are on worker nodes, master just keeps track of everything and delegates work. Like a boss. ingress is - despite its somewhat exotic name - a simple domain routing configuration object. With it, we tell Google's (or own) load balancer which domain should be routed to which service and port. Confused? Don't worry, it will all make much more sense soon! Setting up Google Cloud We will use Google Cloud to set up our Kubernetes stack, the primary reason being we don't need to take care of the Kubernetes master node ourselves - Google does it for us. To proceed, first log in to Google Cloud console and fill out all the details, which should result in you coming to the console dashboard: Google cloud dashboard Here, navigate to Container Engine and create your first container cluster; Feel free to name it whatever you like and pick the zone closest to you, but make sure to choose the micro machine type and leave the size at 3 nodes. In a real world scenario, we would, of course, choose bigger capacities. Also, note the image field, it says cos. It stands for container optimized os which is Google's Linux, specifically built for containers and based on the open source Chromium OS project. Kubernetes cluster creation Click Create and wait a couple of minutes so that our cluster comes online. We can now check our virtual machines up and running by navigating to Compute Engine -> VM instances: Compute Engine Instances With our cluster setup, we now need to step back and consider our final stack a little. The challenge we're facing with WordPress running in multiple containers is how much (or more importantly, what) we want those containers to share and how. First, there's wp-config.php that is custom to every WordPress install, and then there's wp-content. In my opinion, it makes sense to bake the former directly into the image in a way that allows us not to have the need to touch it - ever. As I've shown you in the previous tutorial, we can make it read environment variables, rather hard coding values. The second part is significantly more complicated. We need all our containers to share the same wp-content, which means we have to set up a network disk on which that directory will be stored. Luckily, there's a solution for that called GlusterFS which Kubernetes supports out of the box, and it's fairly trivial to set up! On the page with your instances listed, click Create instance and again, select the micro type of the machine and put it in the same zone as your container cluster. Name it gluster-1. GlusterFS Instance Creation Create the instance and while it's setting up, create yet another, with exactly the same settings, but name it gluster-2. Yes, we will need two GlusterFS instances, for two reasons: first, so we have redundancy in place, and second, for educational purposes :) Your VM instances screen should now look like this: All our compute engine instances If you paid attention during instance creation from the previous couple paragraphs, you may have noticed the cost of each instance is roughly $4/month, which means this setup will cost us about $20 per month, which is not expensive at all! Granted, for production you'll most likely need more powerful instances, but you should be able to get the full stack up and running with less than $100/month. Yes, this isn't a setup for a simple blog, but when you need availability and performance, it's a reasonable cost. Setting up GlusterFS Now it's time to get our hands a bit dirty! To proceed, you'll first need to install Google SDK, which will let you connect to any of the instances through the shell. I won't describe setting it up here since the official documentation includes a step-by-step guide to get it running properly. Once you're done setting it up, make sure you can list your instances through the shell: $ gcloud compute instances list. If you're unable to do that, it means you haven't authenticated through the shell yet, so run $ gcloud auth login email@example.com and confirm the login in the browser. Then, set the current active project: $ gcloud config set project your-project-id (you can find your project id by clicking the My First Project in the top navigation bar in cloud console). Now you can run the list instances command again and you should get something similar to this: Instance list in Terminal Now, open two separate tabs in whatever program you use to run shell, because we will configure both GlusterFS instances at the same time: In your browser, click the SSH arrow icon and choose View gcloud command, which you then need to copy into one of your shells, each instance into its own one. For me, one of them looks like this: $ gcloud compute --project "avian-current-168511" ssh --zone "europe-west1-b" "gluster-1" Before we set up GlusterFS, let's make sure both nodes are up to date and have GlusterFS installed. Run these commands on both of them: $ sudo -i to switch to the root account to switch to the root account $ apt-get update to update apt repositories to update apt repositories $ apt-get install -y apt-transport-https $ wget -O - https://download.gluster.org/pub/gluster/glusterfs/3.11/rsa.pub \| apt-key add - to install GlusterFS's public RSA key (change 3.11 for the rigtht version) to install GlusterFS's public RSA key (change for the rigtht version) $ echo deb https://download.gluster.org/pub/gluster/glusterfs/LATEST/Debian/jessie/apt jessie main > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/gluster.list (make sure your distro is correct) (make sure your distro is correct) $ apt-get update $ apt-get install -y glusterfs-server $ ps aux \| grep gluster $ mkdir -p /data/brick1 With GlusterFS installed, it's now time to configure it. It's worth noting that there is no notion of Master/Slave nodes, all servers are called peers since a client that mounts a GlusterFS volume can connect and read/write to any of them. Let's go back to our cloud console and check the internal IP addresses of our GlusterFS nodes as we will need to connect them between one another. In my case, the IPs are 10.132.0.5 (lets call this node gluster-1 ) and 10.132.0.6 ( gluster-2 ). On gluster-1, run $ gluster peer probe 10.132.0.6 and on gluster-2, run $ gluster peer probe 10.132.0.5 We probed both instances between each other, meaning they are now aware of one another but don't serve any volumes yet, so let's do that next. On both nodes, create the directory that will be served as a single, but replicated volume, called wp-content-site1 (replicated means that a particular directory is always in sync on both nodes). I recommend you to use a slightly more specific name because you'll probably want to have multiple websites mounting wp-content from the same GlusterFS nodes (don't worry about WordPress at this point, we can mount this volume into our installed WP under a completely different name). To create the directory, run $ mkdir -p /data/brick1/wp-content-site1 Almost there! With both nodes having their directories, all we have to do is create a GlusterFS volume. On gluster-1, run the following commands: $ gluster volume create wp-content-site1 replica 2 10.132.0.5:/data/brick1/wp-content-site1 10.132.0.6:/data/brick1/wp-content-site1 force $ gluster volume start wp-content-site1 $ mkdir -p /mnt/wp-content-site1 $ mount -t glusterfs 10.132.0.5:/wp-content-site1 /mnt/wp-content-site1 $ touch /mnt/wp-content-site1/test.txt Let's go through what we just did. First, we created a new volume, which is replicated across both nodes and used force parameter, otherwise GlusterFS would complain that it prefers to have volumes on external disks. Then we started the newly created volume, which means external clients can now connect to any of the two nodes to mount the volume onto themselves. In fact, in step 4 we did just that, we mounted the volume through GlusterFS onto the node itself. (Note: don't confuse /data/brick1/wp-content-site1 and /mnt/wp-content-site1 - the former is what GlusterFS uses as it's filesystem, whereas the latter we just mounted to try out the volume, we could skip this step). Lastly, we created a test file on gluster-1 which should now also be listed on gluster-2 if we ran $ ls /data/brick1/wp-content-site1. You could now unmount /mnt/wp-content-site1, but let's leave it as it is, because it's this directory we will use as our wp-content (feel free to exit out of the shell on gluster-2 - you won't need it anymore). So before closing gluster-1 shell, let's download WordPress and extract wp-content : + $ cd /mnt/wp-content-site1 - $ wget https://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz - $ tar -zxf latest.tar.gz - $ mv wordpress/wp-content/*. - $ rm -rf wordpress latest.tar.gz - $ chown -R 1000:1000. Note that in the future, if you need to make any adjustments on
; irreparable tooth decay; an abscess; cysts; tumours; damage to nearby teeth and bone; or other pathological conditions justify the procedure," writes Rabin. Whatever you decide, the most important thing is to make sure you're regularly seeing your dentist for check ups and cleaning, because dental health is not something to be taken lightly. Especially for young adults at the start of their life.Story highlights Iowa GOP voters were sharply split between Romney, Santorum, and Paul Romney won voters who were most concerned with beating Obama Santorum ran best among the most conservative voters Paul was strongest among the young and first-time caucus-goers Iowa's Republican electorate shattered Tuesday night, showing a party establishment under siege and voters unable to coalesce behind any candidate in a deeply flawed field. The big winners in first-in-the-nation caucus state were establishment favorite Mitt Romney, libertarian outsider Ron Paul, and social conservative star Rick Santorum. But the state's inability to deliver a clear verdict may have taken Romney -- the candidate with the most money and strongest machine -- one major step closer to the GOP nomination. The biggest loser: Michele Bachmann. The firebrand Minnesota congresswoman, born in Iowa, briefly rocketed to the top of the GOP field after winning the Ames straw poll over the summer. She was depending on the state's Christian conservatives to establish her as the main alternative to Romney. Now it's unclear how long she'll be able to continue. Exit polls showed Romney winning major support among voters most concerned with beating President Barack Obama in November. Asked which candidate quality is most important, a plurality of 30% cited the ability to defeat the president. The former Massachusetts governor won almost half of those voters. Asked to choose which kind of experience is most important -- a background in business or government -- a majority cited the private sector. Romney, who made a fortune as a venture capitalist, won 35% of those voters -- a clear plurality. In contrast, Santorum's strength could be found among the 47% of voters who called themselves "very conservative." The former Pennsylvania senator, who has trumpeted his anti-abortion credentials among other things, dominated this section of the electorate. Santorum also topped the field among the 65% of voters who said they feel positively about the populist conservative tea party movement. JUST WATCHED Santorum thanks God after Iowa caucuses Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Santorum thanks God after Iowa caucuses 03:34 JUST WATCHED Ron Paul projected third in Iowa Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Ron Paul projected third in Iowa 07:35 JUST WATCHED Perry to reassess his campaign Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Perry to reassess his campaign 07:45 JUST WATCHED Newt Gingrich vows to carry on Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Newt Gingrich vows to carry on 08:58 At the same time, Santorum ran best among the state's influential born-again and evangelical voters. Nearly six in 10 caucus-goers identified with this segment of the electorate, and a plurality of that group went with the former senator. Reflecting his late momentum, Santorum also ran best among the nearly 20% of voters who didn't decide which candidate to back until Tuesday. Some of the biggest headlines of the night belong to Paul, a Texas congressman long seen as occupying the ideological fringes of the Republican Party. Paul -- perceived as out of step with the GOP mainstream on a host of economic, social, and foreign policy issues -- summoned an army of support from the young, independents, and first-time caucus-goers. Nearly 40% of the participants in Tuesday night's contest had never attended a caucus; Paul beat his nearest competitor among this group of voters by 16 points. Roughly one quarter of the electorate was comprised of independents; they broke for Paul overwhelmingly, giving him 48% of their votes. As for the young, they went for the 76-year-old Paul by one of the most lopsided margins of the night. Over half of voters age 17 to 29 backed Paul, while Santorum ran second best among this group with a distant 23%. In sum, Romney won the pragmatic establishment while Santorum won the GOP's most conservative core and Paul dominated the outsiders. Now the race turns to New Hampshire, where Romney owns a second home and a massive lead in the polls. In terms of overall percentage of the votes, the former Massachusetts governor may not have done any better in Iowa in 2012 than he did in 2008. Questions remain about his ability to win over the bulk of Republicans nationwide. But the splintered Iowa field allowed him to dodge an electoral bullet that effectively killed his presidential hopes four years ago. With divided Iowa now in the rear view mirror, it is still unclear at best whether anyone can stop him.For all of our supporters, who have patiently awaited the Spells of Genesis Mobile Soft Launch, we can now confirm a “tentative” release date. We are hard at work together with our producer, All 4 Games, to a launch for both iOS and Android on Tuesday, December the 13th. We have had to implement some additional technical requirements to the latest version of SoG approved by the producer. These were minor changes nevertheless necessary to be able to publish the game on the app stores. We like to add “tentative” to the date because you never know… it will be in the hands of Apple and Google to make it go live. From submission to approval it usually takes a week, however sometimes it does take longer, based on the number of apps they need to approve and if they find issues with our app. We also had to revisit the number of countries where we will be initially soft launching. Following guidance from All 4 Games, we can confirm they will be Canada and Switzerland. Worry not, we will also release a version for Android and WebGL which will be exactly the same as the one on the app stores but without the in-app purchases screen. So everyone should be able to enjoy the latest game-play. What’s new? The Soft Launch release will feature In-App Purchases (IAP) with a dedicated screen which replaces the current “summon” section, a new, colorful and improved map, as well as a more polished UI. Most of the changes we have had to implement are to do with the back-end, analytics, and app stores integration. We are very excited and look forward to the Soft Launch as much as all of our fans, if not more! We have done our best to produce a solid release in the hope the community will continue to offer their support beyond this hugely important milestone for us, all the way to the eventual full launch. We are thrilled to have you with us, The EverdreamSoft Team“Dagon” and “Nyarlathotep” with PETSCII This project of a graphic novel in “text-mode” made with PETSCII on a Commodore 64 is making me loose the few mind sanity I had left! Thanks to Raquel Meyers and Dany Quest, this amazing book is now running its KickStarter campaign and IT HAS TO HAPPEN or the world as we know it will fall to its death into a non-euclidian nightmare! ” The writings of H.P Lovecraft and the art of Text mode (text characters rather than pixels) have an unnatural binding. How can one show the unfathomable nightmares by the writer from Providence, if not using the tool that is the Commodore 64? Those who remember (or even still use) the Commodore machine can certainly perceive what I saw the first time I encountered the art of Raquel Meyers. It seems that the insane descriptions from the Lovecraft’s stories were born to be depicted with the character set known as PETSCII (C64 ASCII) of that computer’s keyboard. So here we are. “ More details on the KickStarter campaign page…FBI Director James Comey speaks in Detroit in April. (Photo11: Carlos Osorio, AP) WASHINGTON — FBI Director James Comey once again raised the prospect that sustained spikes in violent crime in many U.S. cities could be linked to a pull back by police who fear the scrutiny of a plethora of cellphone video trained on law enforcement actions across the country. Citing rising murder numbers in some of America's largest cities, including Chicago and Las Vegas, Comey said the phenomenon of "viral videos'' may be prompting changes in the way officers are policing their cities. "I was worried about it last fall,'' Comey told reporters at a Wednesday briefing, referring to continuing surges in violence. "And I am, in many ways, more worried now....The people dying are almost entirely black and Latino. I don't know what the answer is. But, holy cow, do we have a problem.'' And the director said that "changes in the way police may be acting... could well be at the heart of this'' troubling trend. The director’s remarks echoed a similar assessment he provided during separate appearances last fall in Chicago, which put him at odds with some in law enforcement and the White House. At that time, White House spokesman Josh Earnest and Attorney General Loretta Lynch said that the available data did not support such a conclusion. The White House and Justice Department did not address Comey's remarks Wednesday. But Comey said he continues to hear from local law enforcement authorities who fear that officers have become less aggressive in carrying out their duties, if only marginally, out of concern that their actions will be captured on video and dissected publicly. While Comey could not absolutely attribute the crime spikes to less aggressive policing, he urged academics and others to examine the possible relationship. "It's a problem (violent crime) that most of America can drive around,'' the director said. "From the Las Vegas strip, you can't tell that more 60 people have been murdered in Las Vegas this year. From the Miracle Mile in Chicago, you can't hear the sounds of gun shots that have killed more than 200 people so far this year. "There is a perception that police are less likely to do the marginal things that suppress crime,'' the director said. Comey said he had become newly concerned about the issue after reviewing quarterly crime data collected by the Major Cities Chiefs Association, a law enforcement group representing the nation's largest cities. Many of the more than 40 cities represented in the in the group's review, he said, were reporting problems with violence. Darrel Stephens, executive director of the chiefs' association, could not be immediately reached for comment. But Chuck Wexler, director of the law enforcement think tank Police Executive Research Forum, said police officials were scheduled to meet later this month in New York to discuss the possible causes of the scattered surges in violence. That meeting, Wexler said, would address the issue known as de-policing. "Why is crime going up in some cities and not in others? It is a question that police chiefs are asking,'' Wexler said. Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1TbAovbHow Google Authorship decreased our traffic by 90% A lot of our readers are small businesses and self-funded startups just like us. So I hope it's OK if we share our findings and challenges. Almost every single SEO-blog on this planet (including SeoMoz, Copyblogger etc. etc.) has written a post about why "Google Authorship" is so great and why you should "claim" it right now. In short - because after you associate your G+ profile with your website there will be a small picture showing up next to your website in Google search results (aka "the SERP" - "Search engine results page"). Woohoo. Thousands of webmasters have reactivated their dead G+ profiles and associated their pages with their G+ accounts hoping to improve their CTR (click-through rates). Including me. But it turns out, it's not that simple. "Big traffic change" email from Google. I got this email from Google this morning: http://www.jitbit.com/: Big traffic change for top URL Search results clicks for http://www.jitbit.com/xxxxxxxx/ have decreased significantly. The number of clicks that your site receives from Google can change from day to day for a variety of factors, including automatic algorithm updates. However, if you have recently made significant changes to the content or configuration of your site, this change may be an indication that there are problems. I almost had a heart attack. For a company that gets most of its inbound traffic from Google this is a disaster. Thank God it was not our flagship product - the helpdesk ticketing system. So I went to check our positions - they were fine, nothing has changed. WHAT has changed then? This: Most people were clicking the #2 result. Not sure why. Maybe it's my stupid ugly face. Maybe it's because people are used to filter out the ADs, in other words filter out the first couple of results that look unusual. I just did that myself - after looking at the page I even thought for a moment - "whoa, where's my page, it's not even in the SERP, where is it?" But it's a fact. Our positions haven't changed but the number of clicks is down by 50%-90% By the way, kudos to Google who emailed me this message. Make sure you set up a webmaster-tools account so you get alerted when something like this happens - a major change to your website traffic, CTR-rate etc.. It's not that simple I have just removed my author info and re-published my website. You know, just in case. But here's the report from Webmaster tools that shows, how the CTR actually changes depending on the page: Turns out, it's not that simple. Some pages moved down, but some have improved drastically. After spending an hour analyzing these reports I found this... Key takeaways Google Webmaster tools is a must! Go "verify" your site right now if you haven't done this already. I really am thankful for this tool and for the email alert I received. Go "verify" your site right now if you haven't done this already. I really thankful for this tool and for the email alert I received. It depends on where you are on the SERP. If you're #1 - people will most likely skip your result. . If you're #1 - people will most likely skip your result. It depends on whether there are paid ads on the SERP. If there's no paid ads there - people will think your site is the paid AD. If there are paid ads, but you're the #1 result - people will still think you're a paid ad. . If there's paid ads there - people will think your site the paid AD. If there paid ads, but you're the #1 result - people will still think you're a paid ad. It depends on if there's more than one "Authorship" result on the SERP. If you're the only one with the picture - they will skip you. . If you're the only one with the picture - they will skip you. It depends on what your page is about. If it's a personal "blog" page - it's OK. If it's a news story or a press-release - it's OK. If it's a "product" page - it's NOT. If it's a "review" article - it's NOT. At least, this is what I found for our websiteAre you wearing your clothing or are your clothes wearing you? Maybe you are wondering what does that even mean? Are you dressing with intention or purpose or are you just gravitating to a piece that you like? To have a sense of style is wearing clothing that empowers you and that doesn’t make you feel self-conscious or uninspired. Here are a few questions to ask yourself: Are you buying too many prints? When you look in your closet, is it full of pattern and prints that may be fun but limit you to how many outfits you can create with them. Ask yourself a few questions when you pick up that printed top next time in the store. • Is it a color or pattern that will make a difference in my wardrobe? • Will it make my other pieces feel new again? • Does it have more layering potential than other pieces I own? Do you only own one-hit wonders? When it comes to this category, are you buying great pieces to wear once to only sit in your closet afterwards? Here are a few questions and answers to the mistakes you may be making. • Ask yourself: Are you buying what fits for your lifestyle? Are you buying fancy sequined dresses and shoes but spending most of the time laying low key? • Are you buying it JUST because it’s on sale? While it may be insanely exciting to score a $500 Alice and Olivia dress for $100, if it doesn’t fit you quite right you actually just cost yourself a bit of money. Are you too focused on trends? As a stylist, I am one of the first people to say that I do dive into trends and like to switch things up quite a bit. I made a promise to myself that I had to have my “essentials wardrobe” complete before I add the hottest pieces of the fashion world into the same closet. So … Are you someone who has a shopping high because you are able to scoop something up that you saw on the latest street style blog or favorite retailer’s website? With the age of social media, trends are happening faster then the retailers can supply them which can become a vicious shopping cycle. I am not saying to stop buying things that do bring you actual joy – if they are a trend and they do make you happy, get it and have some fun! Just don’t over do it. Some questions to ask yourself are: • Where are all the different areas in my life I can wear this? • Will I love this a year from now? • Is it the best piece for my body type? • Does it truly feel like me? Now you are on your way to dressing more with intention and now the fun can begin! https://www.timesleader.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/web1_EJS31-1-.jpg Ask yourself some simple questions before buying that newest outfit. https://www.timesleader.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/web1_EJS-SHOP.jpg Ask yourself some simple questions before buying that newest outfit. Elizabeth Jones StylingWhat's Stoicism then? It's a philosophy that first appeared in ancient Greece in 300 BC. Philosophers taught Stoicism in the streets of Athens, under the Stoa Poikile or painted colonnade, hence the name 'Stoic'. It became popular in Roman culture and most of the surviving Stoic books we have are by ancient Romans, like Seneca, Epictetus and the emperor Marcus Aurelius. Doesn't Stoic mean you repress your emotions beneath a'stiff upper lip'? No. That's what it's come to mean in modern English, but the ancient Stoics tried to help people transform their emotions, not bury them. In fact, they were constantly talking about emotions and how to transform them - they were the pioneers of what today we'd call psychotherapy (a word which comes from the Greek for 'care of the soul'). In fact, Stoicism is the principal influence on Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), which the British government has put over £1 billion into making available for the treatment of emotional disorders. So how can I practice Stoicism? The first Stoic, Zeno of Citium, said Stoicism means 'living according to nature'. That doesn't mean living like a wild beast. The Stoics thought humans are blessed with a rational, moral nature, and being true to our humanity means learning to develop our inherent capacity for wisdom so we think right and act right. When we think and act virtuously, we will naturally be happy. They agreed with Socrates' remarkable claim that 'virtue is sufficient for happiness'. All I need to be happy is to be virtuous? Yes. We can use reason and wisdom to respond wisely to anything that life throws at us – even imprisonment or torture - and still be content. As the psychologist Viktor Frankl learned in a Nazi concentration camp: 'Everything can be taken from a man except the last of the human freedoms: the freedom to choose our response.' How do I respond to adversity wisely? The trick is to understand how our thoughts and opinions cause our emotions. As Epictetus put it: 'Men suffer not because of events, but because of their opinion about events.' We put labels on the things that happen to us, like 'this is catastrophic', 'this is intolerable' and so on, and this guides our emotional reactions. We can learn to change our emotions by changing our thoughts, and asking ourselves questions like 'Is this really so intolerable, so out-of-the-ordinary? Can I learn to endure it?' Seneca said: 'All adversity is training.. the obstacle becomes the way', while Epictetus said: 'Difficulties reveal men's characters.' Psychology suggests that humans can cope with all kinds of adversity if they have a strong enough reason to do so. Why should I accept external things? Ancient Stoicism was in fact a sort of philosophical religion - they believed the universe was guided by a pantheistic intelligence they called the Logos, through which everything ultimately turned out for the best. Later Stoics, like Seneca, were a bit more agnostic, but they still recognized the wisdom of accepting the limit of our control over the universe. But doesn't this acceptance make you into a doormat for others to tread on? Not necessarily. The ancient Stoics were very involved in politics - Cato the Younger gave his life resisting Julius Caesar, Seneca gave his life standing up to the emperor Nero, while Marcus Aurelius was emperor of Rome. The Stoics believed in doing the right thing, even if that meant you lose your life - doing the right thing is more important than longevity. This made them quite difficult people to manipulate or threaten. Epictetus, for example, was banished not once but twice from Rome. It all sounds very individualistic. What about our relationships with other people? The Stoics believed that all rational beings are connected through the Logos. We all have reason, so we're all brothers and sisters, citizens together in the great 'city of god' (or cosmopolis). We have a duty to treat each other with dignity, and this duty extends to all humanity, not just to our family, race or nation. This radical idea was influential on later universalist philosophies like Christianity and liberalism. Are there still Stoics today? There are indeed. Academic philosophy more or less ignored Stoicism for most of the 20th century, but it has always attracted people as a life-philosophy. In the early 20th century, it was a key influence on self-help writers like Dale Carnegie. And In the last decade, the internet has enabled more and more people to learn about Stoicism and self-identify as Stoic. It's particularly popular with people in the military, due to the influence of Admiral James Stockdale, an American who used Stoicism to cope with being imprisoned and tortured in the Vietnam War. It's also popular with sportspeople - in the US, the New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick (that's him in the photo) reportedly used Stoic ideas to coach the Patriots to their 2015 and 2017 Superbowl triumphs. You can find out more about modern Stoicism at sites like modernstoicism.com What criticisms could we lob at Stoicism? In practice, most Stoics are men - it seems to appeal less to women. It could be criticized as being over-rational and over-serious, and ignoring the more intuitive, erotic or ecstatic side of life. Historically, there's never been much of a Stoic community (compared to, say, Christianity). Some neuroscientists might say it's over-optimistic in its claim that we can consciously re-programme our habitual thoughts and beliefs. How can I practice Stoicism in my daily life? The Stoics had various'spiritual exercises' they practiced regularly to transform their psyches. One technique was to use a diary to keep track of their thoughts and actions each day, to see whether they were making progress at strengthening good habits and weakening bad habits. Another was to memorize and repeat philosophical maxims. They also practiced various visualization techniques to put things in perspective, such as imagining seeing their life from the perspective of space, or imagining their death. What are some useful Stoic maxims? Marcus Aurelius 'Your mind becomes dyed with the colour of its habitual thoughts. Therefore soak your mind in these ideas. ' 'Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.' 'The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it.' 'Vex yourself not at the course of things. They don't care about your vexation. Perhaps the desire of the thing called fame torments you. See how soon everything is forgotten, and look at the chaos of infinite time on each side of the present, and the emptiness of applause, and the fickleness and lack of judgment in those who pretend to give praise, and the narrowness of its domain, and be quiet at last. It is in your power whenever you choose to retire into yourself. For there is no retreat that is quieter or freer from trouble than a man’s own soul. Epictetus 'What should we have ready at hand in a situation like this? The knowledge of what is mine and what is not mine, what I can and cannot do.' '‘But the tyrant will chain –’ What will he chain? Your leg. ‘He will chop off –’ What? Your head. What he will never chain or chop off is your integrity.' 'Progress is achieved not by luck or accident, but by working on yourself every day. 'Practice, for heaven's sake, in little things, and then proceed to greater.' When someone is properly grounded in life, they shouldn’t have to look outside themselves for approval. I cannot escape death, but at least I can escape the fear of it. If you learn that someone is speaking ill of you, don’t try to defend yourself against the rumours; respond instead with, ‘Yes, and he doesn’t know the half of it, because he could have said more.’ Seneca 'We suffer more in imagination than in reality. ' Friedrich Schiller 'Happy he who learns to bear what he cannot change.' 'God, grant me the strength to change the things I can change, the courage to accept the things I can't change, and the wisdom to know the difference.' The Serenity Prayer Viktor Frankl Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way….When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves. Further Reading Greek Philosophy Julia Annas, Ancient Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2000) R. W. Sharples, Stoics, Epicureans and Sceptics: An Introduction to Hellenistic Philosophy (Routledge, 1996) T. Irwin, Classical Thought (Oxford, 1989) Julia Annas (ed.), Voices of Ancient Philosophy: An Introductory Reader (Oxford, 2001) Prof Jules Evans Philosophy for Life and Other Dangerous Situations Stoicism William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy (Oxford, 2009) John Sellars, Stoicism (Acumen, 2006) Moses Hadas (ed.), Essential Works of Stoicism (Bantam, 1961)CUPERTINO, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Apple® today introduced a new 21.5-inch iMac® starting at just $1,099, making the world’s leading all-in-one desktop even more affordable. Featuring a stunning ultra-thin design, brilliant display, Core i5 processors and the world’s most advanced operating system, the new iMac is the perfect entry-level Mac® desktop. The new 21.5-inch iMac features a 1.4 GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 processor with Turbo Boost Speeds up to 2.7 GHz, Intel HD 5000 graphics, 8GB of memory and a 500GB hard drive. All iMac models include next generation 802.11ac Wi-Fi, and two Thunderbolt ports and four USB 3.0 ports for excellent expandability and support for high-performance peripherals. iLife® and iWork® come free with every new Mac. iLife lets you edit your favorite videos with iMovie®, create new music or learn to play piano or guitar with GarageBand®, and organize, edit and share your best shots with iPhoto®. iWork productivity apps, Pages®, Numbers® and Keynote®, make it easy to create, edit and share stunning documents, spreadsheets and presentations. iWork for iCloud® beta lets you create your document on iPad®, edit it on your Mac and collaborate with friends, even if they’re on a PC. Every Mac comes with OS X®, the world’s most advanced operating system, designed for ease of use while taking full advantage of the powerful technologies built into every Mac. Earlier this month, Apple announced OS X Yosemite, a powerful new version of OS X redesigned and refined with a fresh, modern look, powerful new apps and amazing new continuity features that make working across your Mac and iOS devices more fluid than ever. The final version of OS X Yosemite will be available for free from the Mac App Store℠ this fall. Pricing & Availability The new 21.5-inch iMac is available today through the Apple Online Store (www.apple.com), Apple’s retail stores and select Apple Authorized Resellers. Starting at $1,099 (US), the new iMac features a 1.4 GHz processor with Turbo Boost speeds up to 2.7 GHz, 8GB of memory and a 500GB hard drive. Configure-to-order options include a 1TB hard drive, a 1TB Fusion Drive, and up to 256GB flash storage. Additional technical specifications, configure-to-order options and accessories are available online at www.apple.com/imac. Apple designs Macs, the best personal computers in the world, along with OS X, iLife, iWork and professional software. Apple leads the digital music revolution with its iPods and iTunes online store. Apple has reinvented the mobile phone with its revolutionary iPhone and App Store, and is defining the future of mobile media and computing devices with iPad. NOTE TO EDITORS: For additional information visit Apple’s PR website (www.apple.com/pr), or call Apple’s Media Helpline at (408) 974-2042. © 2014 Apple Inc. All rights reserved. Apple, the Apple logo, Mac, Mac OS, Macintosh, iMac, iLife, iWork, iMovie, GarageBand, iPhoto, Pages, Numbers, Keynote, iCloud, iPad and OS X are trademarks of Apple. Other company and product names may be trademarks of their respective owners.California's debt still a heavy cloud over state's future Gov. Jerry Brown's new budget presented a plan to pay back nearly $28 billion owed, but various sources estimate the state's debt at hundreds of billions. The budget Brown proposed Thursday addresses only a small portion of the overall debt, which stems from the same types of bills that drove cities like Vallejo, Stockton and San Bernardino into bankruptcy. The state is likely to find its debt consuming an ever larger share of money meant for the basic needs of government. Sacramento is legally obligated to pay many billions of dollars withheld from schools, local governments and healthcare providers as lawmakers struggled repeatedly to balance the books. It owes Wall Street more per resident than almost every other state. And it has accumulated a crushing load of debt for retiree pensions and healthcare, now totaling more than taxpayers spend each year on all state programs combined. But even though it appears to be free of the deficit that dogged the Capitol in recent years, the state is no model of financial health. SACRAMENTO — Gov. Jerry Brown proclaimed last week that California, which now has enough cash to pay its day-to-day bills, can no longer be described by naysayers as a "failed state." "Every year we fail to acknowledge or fix these things, it just makes the cost bigger," said Joe Nation, a former Democratic assemblyman who teaches public policy at Stanford University. When he released his budget plan, Brown vowed to knock down the state's "wall of debt." He presented a timeline for repaying nearly $28 billion the state owes to government programs that it raided for cash or deprived of funds over the years, as well as some bonds sold to balance the budget. Payments of $4.2 billion would be made in the budget year that begins in July. Subsequent payments, growing to as much as $7.3 billion a year, would continue into 2017. At that point, Brown says, $4.3 billion in debt would remain, mostly for delayed payments to healthcare providers and money owed to municipalities and schools for implementing state mandates. "By paying down the debt, we've put ourselves in a stronger position when things go bad, as they inevitably do," Brown said. But numerous reports by state agencies, think tanks and academics have shown the wall of debt to be many stories higher than $28 billion — hundreds of billions of dollars over the next few decades. Brown's repayment plan does not significantly reduce the sizable debt to Wall Street or account for promises the state has made to its current and future retirees but is not setting enough money aside to cover. "If we just ignore these longer-term pressures, we're going to be back in the soup soon," said Mike Genest, who was budget director for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. State officials must grapple with a major shortfall in the retirement fund for teachers. Fund officials have warned that Sacramento needs to immediately start contributing about $3 billion annually to keep the pension system solvent. Sacramento could kick the bill to school districts, requiring them to start paying more pension costs from their own budgets. But the money needed now to stabilize the fund is enough to wipe out the $2.7-billion budget boost the governor is proposing for schools after many years of cuts. "That is a demand that will have to be met," said David Crane, who advised Schwarzenegger on pensions and the economy. "Even if there is an increase in funding for schools, the districts may have to use that — and more — to meet that demand."PORTLAND, Ore. – Governor Kate Brown on Friday announced a plan to address gun violence in Oregon and across the country. The governor joined Rep. Suzanne Bonamici, Multnomah County District Attorney Rod Underhill, faith leaders, gun safety advocates, and other elected officials at Veterans Memorial Coliseum. The plan is called "Oregonians United to End Gun Violence." Brown spoke about new policies and legislation to protect Oregonians from gun-related violence. "In Oregon, 2,280 Oregonians – an average of 456 people each year – died from firearms-related injuries between 2010 and 2014," said Governor Brown in a news release. "I call on each of us as Oregonians and Americans to stand united in our resolve to end this senseless loss of life." Governor Brown will take immediate action through executive order to give Oregon State Police and local authorities more tools to track and analyze gun transactions. The governor says these tools can be used in the prosecution of illegal firearms sales and help to keep guns from falling into the wrong hands. Sign up for the daily 3 Things to Know Newsletter Thank You Something went wrong. This email will be delivered to your inbox once a day in the morning. Thank you for signing up for the 3 things to Know Newsletter Please try again later. Submit Additionally, Governor Brown's executive order establishes a new work group to review and assess firearms-related domestic violence offenses. The executive order also directs the Oregon Health Authority to report annually on gun violence and its effect on public health, and when warranted, recommend polices to increase gun safety in Oregon. The governor also announced her plan for the 2017 legislative session. She wants to close the “Charleston Loophole.” In Oregon, if the state police are unable to determine a person’s eligibility to purchase a firearm within three days, current law requires approval of the sale of the firearm. She also wants to close the “Boyfriend Loophole.” By expanding the types of relationships that qualify under “domestic violence” charges, those convicted of certain crimes of domestic violence and stalking will no longer have access to firearms. She also wants to outlaw the future purchases of extended-capacity magazines in Oregon, and calls on congress to ban assault-style weapons.Open-Mouth Sabotage, Networked Resistance, and Asymmetric Warfare on the Job A recurring theme in ruling class circles over the past thirty years has been the “crisis of governability” (e.g. Samuel Huntington, et al., The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission, 1975). It increased by at least an order of magnitude with the new possibilities the Internet offered for networked resistance (Netwar) by the late 1990s. David Ronfeldt and John Arquilla (The Zapatista “Social Netwar” in Mexico MR-994-A, 1998) surveyed the global support network for the Zapatista movement as one of the earliest examples of this phenomenon. One topic that has received far less attention than it deserves, in my opinion, is the application of this networked resistance or asymmetric warfare model in the specific context of labor relations. This is the theme of draft Chapter Nine (PDF – Special Agency Problems of Labor: Internal Crisis Tendencies of the Large Organization) of my work in progress on anarchist organization theory. As is the case with the crisis of governability in general, asymmetric warfare in the workplace predates network culture by many decades, if not centuries (it probably started the first time a slave or serf told his master some farming implement “broke itself”). My concern here is with the specific tactic the Wobblies have called “open mouth sabotage” and the exponential increase in its potential made possible by the rise of network culture. One of the central themes of the Cluetrain Manifesto was the potential for direct, unmediated “conversations” between workers and customers. The authors believed that by bypassing the company’s official happy talk and engaging in genuine dialogue, workers would create authentic relationships that would actually increase customer loyalty. But that’s only one side of the coin. Businesses that follow the typical MBA model of repeated and relentless downsizings and speedups, and internal authoritarianism to suppress disgruntlement over such policies, have good reason to fear their employees talking directly to the customer. Their worst nightmare scenario is for the workers to realize that the customer (or the general public) is a potential ally against their common worst enemy–management–and to pass along all the dirt to strategically chosen outsiders with the goal of causing maximum damage to the employer. And given that the
burst on to the list after 2008. Other members of the One Percent are returning after earlier collapses. Whether it's Sheldon Adelson, the casino king who lost more than 90 percent of his paper fortune, then earned it back, or Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, who saw his fortune more than triple in recent weeks, the stock market is quietly restoring massive fortunes. According to the Federal Reserve, the top one percent saw a turnover of more than a third between 2007 and 2009, meaning that a third of them fell off and were replaced by the new, new money.Problem How do I use CSS3 gradients for my background-color and then apply a background-image to apply some sort of light transparent texture? Problem courtesy of: Ronald Solution Multiple backgrounds! body { background: #eb01a5; background-image: url("IMAGE_URL"); /* fallback / background-image: url("IMAGE_URL"), linear-gradient(#eb01a5, #d13531); / W3C / } These 2 lines are the fallback for any browser that doesn't do gradients. See notes for stacking images only IE < 9 below. Line 1 sets a flat background color. Line 2 sets the background image fallback. The final line sets a background image and gradient for browsers that can handle them. Line 3 is for all relatively modern browsers. Nearly all current browsers have support for multiple background images and css backgrounds. See http://caniuse.com/#feat=css-gradients for browser support. For a good post on why you don't need multiple browser prefixes, see http://codepen.io/thebabydino/full/pjxVWp/ Layer Stack It should be noted that the first defined image will be topmost in the stack. In this case, the image is on TOP of the gradient. For more information about background layering see http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-background/#layering. Stacking images ONLY (no gradients in the declaration) For IE < 9 IE9 and up can stack images this same way. You could use this to create a gradient image for ie9, though personally, I wouldn't. However to be noted when using only images, ie < 9 will ignore the fallback statement and not show any image. This does not happen when a gradient is included. To use a single fallback image in this case I suggest using Paul Irish's wonderful Conditional HTML element along with your fallback code:.lte9 #target{ background-image: url("IMAGE_URL"); } Background position, sizing etc. Other properties that would apply to a single image may also be comma separated. If only 1 value is supplied, that will be applied to all stacked images including the gradient. background-size: 40px; will constrain both the image and the gradient to 40px height and width. However using background-size: 40px, cover; will make the image 40px and the gradient will cover the element. To only apply a setting to one image, set the default for the other: background-position: 50%, 0 0; or for browsers that support it use initial : background-position: 50%, initial; You may also use the background shorthand, however this removes the fallback color and image. body{ background: url("IMAGE_URL") no-repeat left top, linear-gradient(#eb01a5, #d13531); } The same applies to background-position, background-repeat, etc. Solution courtesy of: Gidgidonihah Discussion If you have strange errors with downloading background images use W3C Link checker: https://validator.w3.org/checklink Here are modern mixins that I use (credits: PSA: don't use gradient generators):.buttonAkc {.gradientBackground(@imageName: 'accept.png'); background-repeat: no-repeat!important; background-position: center right, top left!important; }.buttonAkc:hover {.gradientBackgroundHover('accept.png'); }.gradientBackground(@startColor: #fdfdfd, @endColor: #d9d9db, @imageName) { background-color: mix(@startColor, @endColor, 60%); // fallback background-image: url("@{img-folder}/@{imageName}?v=@{version}"); // fallback background: url("@{img-folder}/@{imageName}?v=@{version}") no-repeat scroll right center, -webkit-linear-gradient(top, @startColor 0%, @endColor 100%) no-repeat scroll left top; // Chrome 10-25, Safari 5.1-6 background: url("@{img-folder}/@{imageName}?v=@{version}") no-repeat scroll right center, linear-gradient(to bottom, @startColor 0%, @endColor 100%) no-repeat scroll left top; }.gradientBackgroundHover(@imageName) {.gradientBackground(#fdfdfd, #b5b6b9, @imageName); } Discussion courtesy of: Mateusz I always use the following code to make it work. There are some notes: If you place image URL before gradient, this image will be displayed above the gradient as expected..background-gradient { background: url('http://trungk18.github.io/img/trungk18.png') no-repeat, -moz-linear-gradient(135deg, #6ec575 0, #3b8686 100%); background: url('http://trungk18.github.io/img/trungk18.png') no-repeat, -webkit-gradient(135deg, #6ec575 0, #3b8686 100%); background: url('http://trungk18.github.io/img/trungk18.png') no-repeat, -webkit-linear-gradient(135deg, #6ec575 0, #3b8686 100%); background: url('http://trungk18.github.io/img/trungk18.png') no-repeat, -o-linear-gradient(135deg, #6ec575 0, #3b8686 100%); background: url('http://trungk18.github.io/img/trungk18.png') no-repeat, -ms-linear-gradient(135deg, #6ec575 0, #3b8686 100%); background: url('http://trungk18.github.io/img/trungk18.png') no-repeat, linear-gradient(135deg, #6ec575 0, #3b8686 100%); height: 500px; width: 500px; } <div class="background-gradient"></div> If you place gradient before image URL, this image will be displayed under the gradient..background-gradient { background: -moz-linear-gradient(135deg, #6ec575 0, #3b8686 100%), url('http://trungk18.github.io/img/trungk18.png') no-repeat; background: -webkit-gradient(135deg, #6ec575 0, #3b8686 100%), url('http://trungk18.github.io/img/trungk18.png') no-repeat; background: -webkit-linear-gradient(135deg, #6ec575 0, #3b8686 100%), url('http://trungk18.github.io/img/trungk18.png') no-repeat; background: -o-linear-gradient(135deg, #6ec575 0, #3b8686 100%), url('http://trungk18.github.io/img/trungk18.png') no-repeat; background: -ms-linear-gradient(135deg, #6ec575 0, #3b8686 100%), url('http://trungk18.github.io/img/trungk18.png') no-repeat; background: linear-gradient(135deg, #6ec575 0, #3b8686 100%), url('http://trungk18.github.io/img/trungk18.png') no-repeat; width: 500px; height: 500px; } <div class="background-gradient"></div> This technique is just the same as we have multiple background images as describe here Discussion courtesy of: trungk18 you could simply type : background: linear-gradient( to bottom, rgba(0,0,0, 0), rgba(0,0,0, 100) ),url(../images/image.jpg); Discussion courtesy of: Nejmeddine Jammeli One thing to realize is that the first defined background image is topmost in the stack. The last defined image will be bottommost. That means, to have a background gradient behind an image, you would need: body { background-image: url("http://www.skrenta.com/images/stackoverflow.jpg"), linear-gradient(red, yellow); background-image: url("http://www.skrenta.com/images/stackoverflow.jpg"), -webkit-gradient(linear, left top, left bottom, from(red), to(yellow)); background-image: url("http://www.skrenta.com/images/stackoverflow.jpg"), -moz-linear-gradient(top, red, yellow); } You could also define background positions and background size for the images. I put together a blog post about some interesting things you can do with CSS3 gradients Discussion courtesy of: Robert If you have to get gradients and background images working together in IE 9 (HTML 5 & HTML 4.01 Strict), add the following attribute declaration to your css class and it should do the trick: filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.gradient(GradientType=0, startColorstr='#000000', endColorstr='#ff00ff'), progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(src='[IMAGE_URL]', sizingMethod='crop'); Notice that you use the filter attribute and that there are two instances of progid:[val] separated by a comma before you close the attribute value with a semicolon. Here's the fiddle. Also notice that when you look at the fiddle the gradient extends beyond the rounded corners. I don't have a fix for that other not using rounded corners. Also note that when using a relative path in the src [IMAGE_URL] attribute, the path is relative to the document page and not the css file (See source). This article (http://coding.smashingmagazine.com/2010/04/28/css3-solutions-for-internet-explorer/) is what lead me to this solution. It's pretty helpful for IE-specific CSS3. Discussion courtesy of: KSev As a sure method way, you can just make a background image that is say 500x5 pixels, in your css use: background-img:url(bg.jpg) fixed repeat-x; background:#<xxxxxx>; Where xxxxxx corresponds with the color that matches the final gradient color. You could also fix this to the bottom of the screen and have it match the initial gradient color. Discussion courtesy of: Epicus my solution: background-image: url(IMAGE_URL); / fallback / background-image: linear-gradient(to bottom, rgba(0,0,0,0.7) 0%,rgba(0,0,0,0.7) 100%), url(IMAGE_URL); Discussion courtesy of: ShinDarth Here is a MIXIN that I created to handle everything that people might like to use:.background-gradient-and-image (@fallback, @imgUrl, @background-position-x, @background-position-y, @startColor, @endColor) { background: @fallback; background: url(@imgUrl) @background-position-x @background-position-y no-repeat; / fallback / background: url(@imgUrl) @background-position-x @background-position-y no-repeat, -webkit-gradient(linear, left top, left bottom, from(@startColor) @background-position-x @background-position-y no-repeat, to(@endColor)); / Saf4+, Chrome / background: url(@imgUrl) @background-position-x @background-position-y no-repeat, -webkit-linear-gradient(top, @startColor, @endColor); / Chrome 10+, Saf5.1+ / background: url(@imgUrl) @background-position-x @background-position-y no-repeat, -moz-linear-gradient(top, @startColor, @endColor); / FF3.6+ / background: url(@imgUrl) @background-position-x @background-position-y no-repeat, -ms-linear-gradient(top, @startColor, @endColor); / IE10 / background: url(@imgUrl) @background-position-x @background-position-y no-repeat, -o-linear-gradient(top, @startColor, @endColor); / Opera 11.10+ / background: url(@imgUrl) @background-position-x @background-position-y no-repeat, linear-gradient(top, @startColor, @endColor); / W3C / } This can be used like so:.background-gradient-and-image (#f3f3f3, "../images/backgrounds/community-background.jpg", left, top, #fafcfd, #f2f2f2); Hope you guys find this helpful. credit to @Gidgidonihah for finding the initial solution. Discussion courtesy of: lukehillonline I wanted to make span button with background image, background gradient combination. http://enjoycss.com/ helped to do my work task. Only I have to remove some auto generated additional CSS. But it's really nice site build your scratch work. #nav a.link-style span { background: url("../images/order-now-mobile.png"), -webkit-linear-gradient(0deg, rgba(190,20,27,1) 0, rgba(224,97,102,1) 51%, rgba(226,0,0,1) 100%); background: url("../images/order-now-mobile.png"), -moz-linear-gradient(90deg, rgba(190,20,27,1) 0, rgba(224,97,102,1) 51%, rgba(226,0,0,1) 100%); background: url("../images/order-now-mobile.png"), linear-gradient(90deg, rgba(170,31,0,1) 0, rgba(214,18,26,1) 51%, rgba(170,31,0,1) 100%); background-repeat: no-repeat; background-position: 50% 50%; border-radius: 8px; border: 3px solid #b30a11; } Discussion courtesy of: Chatura Dinesh Halwatura I resolve the problem in that way. I define Gradient in HTML and background image in the Body html { background-image: -webkit-gradient(linear, left bottom, right top, color-stop(0.31, rgb(227, 227, 227)), color-stop(0.66, rgb(199, 199, 199)), color-stop(0.83, rgb(184, 184, 184))); background-image: -moz-linear-gradient(left bottom, rgb(227, 227, 227) 31%, rgb(199, 199, 199) 66%, rgb(184, 184, 184) 83%); height: 100% } body { background: url("http://www.skrenta.com/images/stackoverflow.jpg"); height: 100% } Discussion courtesy of: vander2000 I had an implementation where I needed to take this technique a step farther, and wanted to outline my work. The below code does the same thing but uses SASS, Bourbon, and an image sprite. @mixin sprite($position){ @include background(url('image.png') no-repeat ($position), linear-gradient(#color1, #color2)); } a.button-1{ @include sprite(0 0); } a.button-2{ @include sprite (0 -20px); } a.button-2{ @include sprite (0 -40px); } SASS and Bourbon take care of the cross browser code, and now all I have to declare is the sprite position per button. It is easy to extend this principal for the buttons active and hover states. Discussion courtesy of: coreballs I was trying to do the same thing. While background-color and background-image exist on separate layers within an object -- meaning they can co-exist -- CSS gradients seem to co-opt the background-image layer. From what I can tell, border-image seems to have wider support than multiple backgrounds, so maybe that's an alternative approach. http://articles.sitepoint.com/article/css3-border-images UPDATE: A bit more research. Seems Petra Gregorova has something working here --> http://petragregorova.com/demos/css-gradient-and-bg-image-final.html Discussion courtesy of: Alex I made an example with enjoycss http://enjoycss.com/5q#background in enjoycss editor you can conbine any number of backgrounds, linear, repeating-linear, radial, repeating-radial,images,colors you adjust your backgrounds with GUI and it automaticaly generates the code code is here http://enjoycss.com/5q/code/0/background#background Discussion courtesy of: Nedudi For my responsive design, my drop-box down-arrow on the right side of the box (vertical accordion), accepted percentage as position. Initially the down-arrow was "position: absolute; right: 13px;". With the 97% positioning it worked like charm as follows: > background: #ffffff; > background-image: url(PATH-TO-arrow_down.png); /fall back - IE / > background-position: 97% center; /fall back - IE / > background-repeat: no-repeat; /fall back - IE */ > background-image: url(PATH-TO-arrow_down.png) no-repeat 97% center; > background: url(PATH-TO-arrow_down.png) no-repeat 97% center, -moz-linear-gradient(top, #ffffff 1%, #eaeaea 100%); > background: url(PATH-TO-arrow_down.png) no-repeat 97% center, -webkit-gradient(linear, left top, left bottom, color-stop(1%,#ffffff), color-stop(100%,#eaeaea)); > background: url(PATH-TO-arrow_down.png) no-repeat 97% center, -webkit-linear-gradient(top, #ffffff 1%,#eaeaea 100%); > background: url(PATH-TO-arrow_down.png) no-repeat 97% center, -o-linear-gradient(top, #ffffff 1%,#eaeaea 100%);<br /> > filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.gradient( startColorstr='#ffffff', endColorstr='#eaeaea',GradientType=0 ); P.S. Sorry, don't know how to handle the filters. Discussion courtesy of: mugé If you also want to set background position for your image, than you can use this: background-color: #444; // fallback background: url('PATH-TO-IMG') center center no-repeat; // fallback background: url('PATH-TO-IMG') center center no-repeat, -moz-linear-gradient(top, @startColor, @endColor); // FF 3.6+ background: url('PATH-TO-IMG') center center no-repeat, -webkit-gradient(linear, 0 0, 0 100%, from(@startColor), to(@endColor)); // Safari 4+, Chrome 2+ background: url('PATH-TO-IMG') center center no-repeat, -webkit-linear-gradient(top, @startColor, @endColor); // Safari 5.1+, Chrome 10+ background: url('PATH-TO-IMG') center center no-repeat, -o-linear-gradient(top, @startColor, @endColor); // Opera 11.10 background: url('PATH-TO-IMG') center center no-repeat, linear-gradient(to bottom, @startColor, @endColor); // Standard, IE10 or you can also create a LESS mixin (bootstrap style): #gradient {.vertical-with-image(@startColor: #555, @endColor: #333, @image) { background-color: mix(@startColor, @endColor, 60%); // fallback background-image: @image; // fallback background: @image, -moz-linear-gradient(top, @startColor, @endColor); // FF 3.6+ background: @image, -webkit-gradient(linear, 0 0, 0 100%, from(@startColor), to(@endColor)); // Safari 4+, Chrome 2+ background: @image, -webkit-linear-gradient(top, @startColor, @endColor); // Safari 5.1+, Chrome 10+ background: @image, -o-linear-gradient(top, @startColor, @endColor); // Opera 11.10 background: @image, linear-gradient(to bottom, @startColor, @endColor); // Standard, IE10 } } Discussion courtesy of: Tamás Pap This recipe can be found in it's original form on Stack Over Flow.Photo courtesy of Jhunnel Sarajan. MANILA -- A photo of a scrawny man watching his daughters enjoy a fried chicken meal in a popular fast-food chain recently went viral on social media, garnering thousands of likes and shares from people who were touched by the iconic image that depicts selfless love. The photo was taken by Jhunnel Sarajan, a real estate professional, who returned the following day to get more details about the family as people expressed interest to help. In his conversation with the man in the photo, Sarajan found out that he is a stroke victim and a single father to his two kids. He also shared details on how to help the family, including the phone number of JR Arebuabo, the man's uncle. Meet the selfless father Photo by Jonathan Cellona, ABS-CBN News ABS-CBN News looked for the man and his two children. We found them in a slum area in Barangay 61 in Tondo, Manila. Ryan Arebuabo, the man in the viral photo, lives in a 4-square-meter shanty made of used plywood and rusty iron sheets. Hanging just beside the worn out door is a portrait of Arebuabo's priceless possessions, his two children Rose May and Rose Ann. Photo by Jonathan Cellona, ABS-CBN News The 38-year-old had a stroke attack four years ago, back when he was still selling boiled corn in the neighborhood. He said he never underwent therapy sessions, and his last visit to the doctor was three years ago. Due to his condition, Arebuabo was unable to work for months after he was released from the hospital. Half of his body was paralyzed, and he had a hard time speaking. Another tragedy also struck him. His wife left him, taking their two kids with her. "Dati sabi niya may tindahan daw siya sa Bulacan," Arebuabo told ABS-CBN News. "Babalik, tapos aalis na naman. Hanggang sa hindi na talaga bumalik. Isinama pa pati mga anak ko." Photo by Jonathan Cellona, ABS-CBN News According to Arebuabo's younger sister Ria, they expected that his wife will leave him. "Alam niyo naman, karamihan sa mga lalaking na-i-stroke ay iniiwan ng asawa," she said. "Kawawa talaga 'yong kuya ko." Ria said her brother did all he could to convince his wife to return. He even renovated their house and bought a second-hand television to show her that he could support them. "Siya, kahit ano pang masasamang marinig niya tungkol sa asawa niya, talagang gusto niyang mabuo 'yong pamilya niya. Tatlong beses nga niyang sinundan sa Bulacan 'yong asawa niya, pero wala talaga," she said. A hardworking provider Photo by Jonathan Cellona, ABS-CBN News Although Arebuabo was unable to win his wife back, he succeeded in getting custody of their children. "Buti na lang iyung mga bata, naibalik sa kanya. Baka kasi kung ano pa ang gawin niya. Baka sila ang maging lakas niya para humaba pa ang buhay niya," Ria said. Despite his condition, the dedicated father persevered to bring food on the table and support his children's education. Both Rose May and Rose Ann are studying at Jose Corazon De Jesus Elementary School. Rose Ann, 8, is in Grade 2, while Rose Mae, 6, is in kindergarten. "Mahirap din, minsan napapagod ka. Pero kahit pagod ka, lumaban ka-- kahit ang tulog ko konti lang kasi nagtitinda ako eh," Arebuabo said. Photo by Jonathan Cellona, ABS-CBN News Arebuabo is one of the beneficiaries of the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps), a government initiative that provides conditional cash grants to the "poorest of the poor, to improve the health, nutrition, and the education of children." Every other month, Arebuabo said he receives P2,200, which he uses to buy school supplies and other needs of his children. He also received a stall cart from DSWD, which he turned into a sari-sari store wherein he earns P100 to P200 in a day-- enough to bring meals to the table. Photo by Jonathan Cellona, ABS-CBN News Everyday, Arebuabo wakes up at 5 a.m. to help his children prepare for school. One afternoon, he decided to bring his kids to a fast-food chain to celebrate Rose Mae's upcoming graduation. Both kids ordered their favorite meal, while their father just satisfied his hunger by watching them enjoy the meal. "Hindi na po ako kumain. Makita ko lang na busog sila, okay na ako," he said. A father’s love Photo by Jonathan Cellona, ABS-CBN News Early in his life, Arebuabo learned the meaning of unconditional love. Arebuabo's father, now 60, was also alone in providing for his four siblings. His mother died after giving birth to their youngest. "Sipag at pag-aalaga sa mga anak," Arebuabo said. "Kung paano ako inalagaan ng tatay ko, gano'n din ang ginagawa ko ngayon." Arebuabo's father continues to work as a jeepney driver to help out with the family's expenses. In his spare time, he does the laundry for Arebuabo and his two kids. "Siya talaga ang idol ko," he said. "Malaki ang sakripisyo niya para sa mga kapatid ko, lalo na sa pamilya ko." Photo by Jonathan Cellona, ABS-CBN News According to Arebuabo, a father's duty is not just to provide food on the table. He is also tasked to make sure that his children will achieve their dreams. "Gusto ko lang makapagtapos sila sa pag-aaral," he said. "Kahit hirap akong magbasa, tinuturuan ko pa rin sila." Arebuabo said he wants to prove to his estranged wife and the rest of the world that he can continue being a good father to his children despite being almost incapacitated by stroke. Photo by Jonathan Cellona, ABS-CBN News Arebuabo also believes that one day, he and his children will rise from the slums.Get the biggest daily news stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email A boat called Titanic II lived up to her name – and sank on her maiden voyage. Just like the doomed luxury liner 99 years ago, the 16ft cabin cruiser sprang a leak and rapidly started taking on water. Horrified owner Mark Wilkinson was left clinging to the side as his pride and joy disappeared beneath the waves – without an iceberg in sight. Bemused holidaymakers looked on while Mark, from Birmingham, was flung a life belt and finally dragged out of the drink by the local harbour master. Unlike her namesake, Titanic II did not disappear for ever into the murky depths. She was later hauled up and towed out of West Bay harbour in Dorset. Mark, who is in his 40s, admitted: “If it wasn’t for the harbour master I would have gone down with her. “It’s all a bit embarrassing and I’m pretty fed up with people ribbing me about it.” SHOUTED He had recently taken ownership of the second-hand boat and towed it on a trailer to the south coast for its first outing. He had been enjoying a successful fishing trip, but as he entered the harbour a large hole opened up in the fibre-glass hull. Mark frantically tried to pump out the water out but was forced to abandon ship when it started to go down stern-first. Margaret O’Callaghan, 63, from Bridport, was one of dozens of tourists on the quayside. She said: “There was this big guy desperately trying to hold on as the boat was going down. “I shouted at him to jump, but he was clinging on for dear life as the tide swept the boat in.” Harbour master James Radcliffe blamed an old repair job. He said: “The hole in the hull was about six inches square.” One seafaring local joked: “It wasn’t a very big boat – it could have been sunk by an ice-CUBE.”Transport Minister Anthony Albanese is renewing his call for a second Sydney airport, arguing national productivity will suffer if another site is not found. Mr Albanese has hit back at NSW Premier Barry O'Farrell who has reportedly ruled out a second Sydney airport on the grounds that the community should not be "contaminated" by more aircraft noise. "There is an absolute need for a second Sydney airport, sooner rather than later"... Anthony Albanese. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen Mr O'Farrell is against proposed second sites at Badgerys Creek and Wilton and is suggesting there should be an express rail link to an expanded Canberra airport instead. "There is an absolute need for a second Sydney airport, sooner rather than later," Mr Albanese told reporters in Sydney, calling for a bipartisan approach to the issue.In a move that would have been incredibly useful back on New Year's Eve, Uber is lowering rates in dozens of cities across the United States and Canada. The ride-hail company itself admits that the decision was prompted by an annual winter slump that comes about after the holidays, with fewer riders to go around as most people hunker down for the coldest parts of the year. For the third year in a row, Uber has announced that it's slashing rates by as much as 20 percent in some cities, in the hope that the lowered prices will lure even those of us who prefer to hibernate all winter out of the house. The company notes on its blog that there is a caveat: If the price cuts don't increase earnings in a city, they'll change right back to normal. In fact, that's exactly what they did in Seattle last year, where Uber totally reversed its price cuts after the lower fares didn't prove profitable enough. "While pricing is a science, every city is different: different economic circumstances; different regulations; different competition," the company writes. As such, the extent to which fares are lowered depends on the city. Los Angeles and San Francisco, for instance, will see a 10 percent drop, while Houston users will receive a 20 percent reduction, Bloomberg Business reports. Unfortunately for riders in New York City and Chicago, prices in those cities will remain untouched. Ironically, the lower fares come less than two weeks after Uber made headlines for its surge pricing on New Year's Eve. As is the case after every major holiday, some Uber riders were shocked to wake up on New Year's Day and find bills for rides that typically cost them much less. Admittedly, Uber does send out an email about surge pricing. And it provides blog posts about understanding surge fare. And it makes you accept the higher rates before calling a ride. But I digress. Because it depends on the market, there's no word on how long the price cuts will last. If you use Uber and want to take advantage of the lower fare, now is the time — just be sure to tip your driver well. (Although hopefully you're doing that anyway.) Images: Giphy (2)The chair of the Democratic National Committee, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, has announced her resignation on the eve of the party’s convention, dealing a blow to hopes of demonstrating unity in the face of the threat from Donald Trump. Democratic national convention: fight for America's soul moves on to Philadelphia Read more Schultz said she would step down after the convention. She has been forced to step aside after a leak of internal DNC emails showed officials actively favouring Hillary Clinton during the presidential primary and plotting against Clinton’s rival, Bernie Sanders. “Debbie Wasserman Schultz has made the right decision for the future of the Democratic party,” Sanders said in a statement, adding that the party leadership must “always remain impartial in the presidential nominating process, something which did not occur in the 2016 race”. The Sanders campaign has long claimed that the party establishment had its “finger on the scales” during the bitter and surprisingly long primary, but the embarrassing new revelations proved to be the final straw for a figure who had been a lightning rod for tension within the party. The DNC chair, whose named is emblazoned at the top of thousands of convention credentials, was originally expected to play a central role in the four-day meeting of delegates and party leaders. But as the convention prepared to get under way in Philadelphia on Sunday, there were already reports that Schultz had lost a prestigious speaking slot and would only “gavel-in” proceedings. Internally, the resignation may reduce tensions, removing from the stage a figure who was almost certain to have been greeted with boos by sections of the large pro-Sanders delegation. Nevertheless, the turmoil risks undermining public attempts to show that Democrats have come together as a party and draw a contrast with chaotic scenes at on the floor at the Republican convention in Cleveland last week. It will also raise new questions about the source of the leaked emails, which emerged on Friday and are the latest in a batch of documents believed to have been hacked from DNC computers earlier this year. Wikileaks published the latest batch, but on Sunday, Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, said “experts” believed the Russian government may have played a role, even claiming their motive was to help elect Donald Trump. “What’s disturbing to us is that experts are telling us Russian state actors broke into the DNC, stole these emails, and other experts are now saying that the Russians are releasing these emails for the purpose of actually of helping Donald Trump,” Mook told CNN. In June, Wasserman Schultz called the breach a “serious incident” and said Crowdstrike, a cybersecurity firm brought in by the DNC, had “moved as quickly as possible to kick out the intruders and secure our network”. The Trump campaign has angrily denied the suggestion that it is being promoted by the Russians, though it has taken a noticeably softer line toward Vladimir Putin than most other western parties and politicians. Crowdstrike experts who examined the first release of hacked emails several weeks ago suggested they bore the hallmarks of a government-sponsored hacking attempt. More immediately, the Schultz resignation may inflame anger among Sanders supporters, many of whom had resisted the idea that the only way to stop Trump is by supporting Clinton. The most explosive new revelation from the WikiLeaks release was an official’s suggestion that Sanders’ religious faith, or lack thereof, could be flagged as a way to dissuade voters from backing him in Bible belt states. “I think I read he is an atheist,” the DNC chief financial officer, Brad Marshall, wrote in one email. “This could make several points difference with my peeps. My Southern Baptist peeps would draw a big difference between a Jew and an atheist.” Sanders, who is Jewish, spoke little of religion during the primary, but the sight of a supposedly neutral body apparently seeking to weaken one of its own party candidates caused particular anger among progressives. Schultz, a congresswoman from Florida who is herself Jewish, is not thought to have been directly involved in this email exchange, but she was seen in other messages writing dismissively of the Sanders campaign. On Sunday, she said she had discussed her decision with Barack Obama, who appointed her in 2011, and with Clinton, in the interests of helping the party secure the election in November. “Going forward, the best way for me to accomplish those goals is to step down as party chair at the end of this convention,” Wasserman Schultz said in a statement. “As party chair, this week I will open and close the convention and I will address our delegates about the stakes involved in this election not only for Democrats, but for all Americans,” she said. “We have planned a great and unified convention this week and I hope and expect that the DNC team that has worked so hard to get us to this point will have the strong support of all Democrats in making sure this is the best convention we have ever had.” Earlier, Sanders told ABC: “I think she should resign, period.” “I don’t think she is qualified to be the chair of the DNC,” he added to CNN. “Not just because of these emails, which revealed the prejudice of the DNC, but also because we need a party that reaches out to working people and young people. And I don’t think her leadership style does that.” Bernie Sanders: I will not support Democratic party chair in her primary Read more The senator’s campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, said the emails proved his suspicion that the party establishment was biased against Sanders. This spring, Sanders and Wasserman Schultz had clashed over alleged improper access to a DNC voter database, the scheduling of TV debates during the primary campaign and the angry reaction of Sanders supporters to a Nevada nominating convention. In May, the feud reached such an acrimonious level that the senator promised to support her opponent in the Democratic primary race this fall. But Democratic leaders praised and thanked Wasserman Schultz in emphatic statements. “For the last eight years she has had my back. This afternoon, I called her to let her know that I am grateful,” Obama said in a statement. Wasserman Schultz, the president said, “brought Democrats together not just for my re-election campaign, but for accomplishing the shared goals we have had for our country”. Obama also saluted her role in “supporting our economic recovery, our fights for social and civil justice and providing health care for all Americans”. Clinton paid extensive tribute to a “longtime friend”, adding: “there’s simply no one better at taking the fight to the Republicans than Debbie.” “I look forward to campaigning with Debbie in Florida and helping her in her re-election bid,” the presumptive Democratic nominee added. “Because as president, I will need fighters like Debbie in Congress who are ready on day one to get to work for the American people.” Staffers also had praise for the representative, despite the controversy around her. “Regardless of the circumstances, you got to feel for someone who has logged
0026), cefoxitin, (P < 0.015) cefemendole (P < 0.0239) and amoxicillin (P < 0.057). Integration of ϕ24 B into the primary site 250 bp upstream of IntS inhibits respiration utilising B-D-allose. Lysogeny also limits cell respiration in the presence of oxolinic acid although this is linked to phage induction as the cellular target is DNA gyrase. Inhibition of DNA gyrase has been previously shown to stimulate temperate phages to the lytic life cycle as cellular stress stimulates RecA, LexA and proteolytic cleavage of the repressor protein promoting phage induction44. Figure 2: A comparison of Area Under the Respiration Curve (AURC) data from the Biolog bacterial phenotypic microarray. Data plotted shows the addition of supplemented nutrients or chemical challenge showed statistically significant difference in rates of respiration between the lysogen and naïve MC1061 host (for P values see SI Table 2). Arbitrary Omnilog fluorescence values (y-axis) show differences between the naïve MC1061 (light grey) host and the lysogen (dark grey) over a 47.5 h time period (n = 3). Error bars represent SEM. Graphs A-F show significantly higher amount of respiration of the lysogen compared to the naïve host under the following conditions; (A) U-2-monophosphate, (B) 8-hydroxyquinoline, (C) chloroxylenol, (D) cefoxitin, (E) cefomendole and (F) amoxacillin. Graphs (G–I) show mean AURC values where growth on different carbon sources or chemical challenge that has a detrimental effect on the respiration of MC1061 when converted by ϕ24 B, these inculde; (G) β_D-Allose, (H) ofloxacin and (I) oxolinic acid. Full size image ϕ24B integration increases MC1061 tolerance to sub-inhibitory concentrations of chloroxylenol and 8-hydroxyquinoline To better understand the level of antimicrobial tolerance of the single lysogen, we first determined sub-inhibitory concentrations (SIC) against both MC1061 and the lysogen that reduce cell growth by ~60%. The antimicrobials chloroxylenol, oxolinic acid and 8-hydroxyquinoline were selected to validate the Biolog data. Prior to comparison, an approximate SIC range was determined for MC1061 utilising each of the 3 test drugs. Figure 3 illustrates increased tolerance by the lysogen in the presence of chloroxylenol and 8-hydroxyquinoline. Conversely, the naïve host shows increased tolerance compared to the lysogen in the presence of oxolinic acid. This also offers a positive control for the assay as oxolinic acid targets DNA gyrase and therefore stimulates phage induction26. Phage induction was confirmed by the presence of free phage compared to the un- induced control (data not shown). Figure 3 Response in growth of both MC1061 (light grey) and the ϕ24 B lysogen (Dark grey) to an increasing concentration of (A) 8-hydroxyquinoline, (B) chloroxylenol, and (C) oxolinic acid. Bacterial growth was measured by increase in optical density at 600 nm after 18 hours growth at 37 °C, as per original Biolog assay. Error bars represent the standard error of the mean (SEM) (n = 12). Significance represented by (P) thresholds; *<0.001, <0.01, <0.05. Full size image Metabolic profiles comparing naïve MC1061 to ϕ24 B Lysogen We used an untargeted metabolite profiling approach using high resolution LC-MS (≤1 ppm mass accuracy in full scan) to determine metabolic differences between bacterial host and lysogen during growth and when challenged with a sub-inhibitory concentration of test antibiotic. To broadly compare findings, significant metabolic differences (p < 0.05) were observed between both growth phase and antimicrobial challenge. In total, >11 K ion features or possible metabolites were determined across all of the different tests performed. Of these 81 showed discrimination between the naïve MC1061 and the ϕ24 B lysogen that had clean chromatogram peaks and <5% coefficient variable (CV) (SI Table 3). These 81 metabolites that show differences can be further stratified to each test. The metabolite data was analysed using supervised and non-supervised methods of multivariate analysis. Principal Component Analysis was first employed to visualise trends in the dataset and identify potential outliers. To further interrogate the data, Partial-Least Squared Discriminant Analysis models (PLS-DA) were generated and score plots are shown in (Fig. 4A–C). The PLS-DA models for both hydroxyquinoline and chloroxylenol conditions score plots had good discriminating ability, establishing the metabolic differences between the lysogen and naïve host. During standard growth conditions component 1 failed to discriminate: Q2 −0.556, R2Y 0.262, as R2Y and Q2 < 0.5, although certain metabolites showed significant differences between the lysogen and MC1061. The 8-hydroxyquinoline component 1: Q2 0.74, R2Y 0.89 and the chloroxylenol component 1: Q2 0.802, R2Y 0.923 were both discriminatory with an R2Y and Q2 > 0.5. Further model statistics can be found in the supplementary information SI Table 5. Stx-phage ϕ24 B has been previously shown to undergo spontaneous induction27 and may impact the metabolite profile through sequestration of host function and movement to lysis. We therefore compared the metabolite profiles of both the lysogen and MC1061 with a phage inducing agent, oxolinic acid (DNA gyrase inhibitor). No correlation was seen between metabolite profiles of the lysogen or MC1061 when compared to that of the lysogen undergoing induction with oxolinic acid (data not shown). Figure 4 (A–C) The metabolite profiles of MC1061 versus lysogen and multivariate analysis using partial least discriminant analysis (PLS-DA). The panels represent score plots from PLS-DA models of: (A) Standard growth conditions, and supplementation with (B) 8-hydroxyquinoline and (C) chloroxylenol, between the naïve host (light grey spot) and lysogen (dark grey spot), the model discriminatory parameters for the PLS-DA analysis are described in the results section and in SI Table 5. Full size image ϕ24 B integration alters the metabolite profile of MC1061 in standard growth conditions Out of the 81 discriminatory metabolites determined in this study, only 16 were shown to discriminate between the naïve host and single lysogen under standard culture conditions. Of these 16 metabolites 4 were found in higher levels in the lysogen. This suggests that the lysogen down regulates certain metabolic functions or is directing metabolism along a different pathway, or both. It is likely to support the change in biology we report in this work and increased rates of early growth by the lysogen. Early growth in the lysogen demonstrates an observable difference in metabolic profile compared to the naïve MC1061. Under standard growth conditions during early growth, 5 metabolites in total were shown to discriminate between the naïve MC1061 and lysogen. Of these, 1 was higher compared to the naïve control (Fig. 3 SI). During stationary phase, in standard growth conditions, only 9 metabolites in total showed significant difference and all were found in lower levels in the lysogen. As phage-mediated metabolic differences are present during standard culture, the differences in metabolite profiles under challenge with sub-inhibitory concentrations of 8-hydroxyquinoline and chloroxylenol were tested (Fig. 2B,C). The previous Biolog results showed that the lysogen displays a tolerance to these 2 antibiotics. ϕ24 B integration alters the metabolite profile of MC1061 during growth under sub-inhibitory concentrations of 8-hydroxyquinoline Upon treatment with 8-hydroxyquinoline, there were 29 metabolites that showed significant difference between the naïve MC1061 and single lysogen. Of these 29 metabolites, 22 were found in higher levels in the lysogen. Early growth phase in the lysogen demonstrates an observable difference in metabolite profile compared to naïve MC1061. Under 8-hydroxyquinoline stress during early growth, 6 metabolites in total were shown to discriminate between the naïve MC1061 and lysogen. Of these, 5 were higher compared to the naïve control (Fig. 3 SI). ϕ24 B integration alters the metabolite profile of MC1061 during growth under sub-inhibitory concentrations of chloroxylenol Under chloroxylenol treatment, 41 metabolites showed significant differences between the naïve MC1061 and lysogen. Of these 41, the lysogen had 22 metabolites with significantly higher levels compared to the naïve host. Early growth phase in the lysogen demonstrates an observable difference in metabolic change compared to the naïve MC1061. Under chloroxylenol stress during early growth, 13 metabolites in total were shown to discriminate between the naïve MC1061 and lysogen. Of these, 9 were higher compared to the naïve control (Fig. 3 SI). Alteration in metabolomics profile and antimicrobial tolerance is not linked to kanamycin resistance selective marker used to detoxify ϕ24 B The kanamycin gene (aph3) used to detoxify the ϕ24 B phage18 is used as a selective marker only prior to experimentation. As there is no consistency in the metabolic profiles when the lysogen cultures are treated with the 2 different antimicrobials this cannot be driven by ϕ24 B encoding aph3. The metabolite profiles are also discriminatory to each of the 2 antimicrobials tested. Characterising the metabolites that discriminate between the naïve MC1061 and ϕ24 B lysogen The discriminatory metabolites determined from each test were compared with metabolite databases and were putatively identified based on exact mass and empirical formula (LCMS methods section). The identity of each metabolite was confirmed using fragmentation analysis using a secondary MS/MS stage. Identities with fragment similarity were found for 58 of the 81 metabolites discriminating between the naïve and lysogen. We focus here on 6 particular metabolites as they have robust identities from fragmentation patterns, retention times, and low accurate mass error (PPM), relating to known curated bacterial metabolites (Table 4 SI). The 6 metabolites are: hexadecanoic acid (a fatty acid that is utilised in the construction of lipid A), sphinganine (putative kinase), 5-Methyluridine (nucleotide synthesis, specifically pyrimidine), ophthalmic acid (glutathione analogue), pimelic acid and FAPy-Adenine, with PPM error margins of 0 ± 1 (0.17, −0.64, 0.45, 1.31, 0.56 and −1.00, respectively). The lysogen has significantly higher intensity levels of pimelic acid under all tests, specifically during early growth (Fig. 5). FAPy-Adenine, a bacterial stress marker45, is only seen in stressed conditions in these analyses, with the lysogen expressing significantly lower intensity during early growth and higher intensity at stationary phase growth (Fig. 5). Hexadecanoic acid is identified in significantly higher abundance under cellular stress of chloroxylenol, and is further increased in the lysogen during early growth (P = 0.04). Metabolite sphinganine is present under standard conditions in higher intensity in the naïve MC1061. When challenged with chloroxylenol, intensity levels of sphinganine were undetectable in both naïve and lysogen during early growth. During mid-exponential and stationary phase growth under choloroxylenol test there is >100 fold increase in intensity of sphinganine in both the naïve and lysogen. 5-Methyluridine is present at stationary phase in all conditions, and is also identified in higher intensity when challenged with both antibiotics. Ophthalmic acid was present at all stages of growth under standard conditions where the lysogen shows lower intensity at early and mid-growth, and higher levels at stationary phase. When treated with either antimicrobial agent, ophthalmic acid was only present at stationary growth, with significantly higher intensity found in the lysogen (P = 0.001). During standard culture, there are 16 metabolites responsible for the differences seen between the core metabolic profiles of naïve host and lysogen during the 3 growth phases. Importantly 10 of these, including pimelic acid, are also present when the lysogen is challenged with chloroxylenol and 8-hydroxyquinoline. Figure 5: Biotin concentration, FAPy-Adenine and pimelic acid intensity showing significant biological differences between naïve host and lysogen during growth and antimicrobial challenge. (A1): Changes in cellular stress marker FAPy-Adenine abundances under the challenge of chloroxylenol at early, mid and stationary growth between the lysogen (dark grey) and naive Host (light grey). (B1): Average pimelic acid abundance under chloroxylenol at early, mid and stationary growth between the lysogen and naive Host. (A2): Average FAPy-Adenine abundances under selective pressure of 8-hydroxyquinoline at early, mid and stationary growth between the lysogen and naive MC1061. (B2): Average pimelic acid abundances under challenge with 8-hydroxyquinoline at early, mid and stationary growth between the lysogen and naive Host. (A3): Average pimelic acid abundances under standard conditions at early, mid and stationary growth between the lysogen and naive Host. (B3): Variance in the amounts of Biotin present in samples of Ф24 B lysogen and MC1061 naïve Host. Error bars derived from standard error of the mean (n = 3). Biotin Quantitation test performed using BioVision® quantitation kit (7.5) using a modified protocol. Two tailed significance represented by <0.001, <0.01, <0.05, key: Inc. = Increase, *expo = exponential growth. Full size image In the absence of antibiotics, the metabolite profile shows less discrimination between the lysogen and host at the 3 stages of growth by PLS-DA (Fig. 4A). Changes in individual metabolite abundances were measured as before (Figs 4 and 6), and >100 were deemed possible biologically relevant metabolites. From the confirmed compounds, a total of 16 metabolites (SI Table 3) were shown to discriminate between MC1061 and the ϕ24 B lysogen. Figure 6: Heatmap generated by metabolic levels of 81 metabolites using HCA and DM Culture conditions and presence or absence of phage can be found alongside each profile (H = 8-hydroxyquinoline, C = chloroxylenol). Each individual tile represents a metabolite. The colour of a given tile denotes higher or lower intensity of the metabolite. The colour scale key is: dark blue: lowest levels; white: mid-point; dark red: highest level. The gradient between these colours represents variation in the levels of the metabolite across the colour scale (putative ID’s can be found in SI Table 3). Pimelic acid is highlighted across all profiles with a hatched box. Full size image We further analysed these data using Hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA) and Euclidean dissimilarity matrix (DM) to create a heatmap that discriminates between 81 metabolites across all tests in this study (Fig. 6). The unsupervised heatmap shows that the metabolic profiles have separated by condition.RTI replies to be available online now; Narendra Modi surprises Sonia Gandhi India oi-Nairita New Delhi, Oct 23: Prime Minister Narendra Modi might have surprised Congress President Sonia Gandhi by taking UPA scheme to another level. While critics were claiming that Modi government might dilute Right to Information (RTI) Act, it has done just the reverse. Right to Information (RTI) Act, which was launched by UPA government, has been strengthened by Modi government at the centre. According to sources, all replies by ministries, given under RTI Act, will be posted online. All information will be available for access to all and not just to persons who file the RTIs seeking information. All information related to a query under RTI will be posted online from Nov 2014. Earlier it was only the person, who filed RTI application seeking replies from a ministry or a government department, got the reply and that too mostly via post. According to an official statement issued by Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT), replies to queries will be put up on ministries' website and the process is most likely to begin from Oct 31, 2014. Satyanand Mishra, former Chief Information Commissioner, has been quoted as saying, "It is a very good and welcome step. It will not only improve transparency but also reduce workload of government officials as it will help eliminating possibility of repeated RTI queries on the same issue." Continuing his statement, Mr Mishra also added, "As far as person whose RTI reply is put online, someone seeking transparency in form of a RTI plea should not have any problem is government shows the same transparency and makes the reply to him public." Here it can be recalled that Sonia Gandhi's UPA too had introduced similar scheme and released instructions which were supposed to begin from April 2013. However, UPA's move could never be implemented. What is RTI? The Right to Information Act (RTI) is an Act of the Parliament of India "to provide for setting out the practical regime of right to information for citizens" and replaces the erstwhile Freedom of information Act, 2002. The Act applies to all States and Union Territories of India except Jammu and Kashmir. Under the provisions of the Act, any citizen may request information from a "public authority" (a body of Government or "instrumentality of State") which is required to reply expeditiously or within thirty days. OneIndia NewsJim Balsillie is a co-founder of Research In Motion, now BlackBerry Ltd. He currently invests in and mentors five Canadian technology companies. One frigid morning this January, I broke into a cold sweat thinking about the future for Canadian entrepreneurs. At a patent conference with some of the world's foremost innovation experts and practitioners, the lead strategist from one of the world's most valuable technology companies announced: "We don't sue Canadian companies until they start to matter to us. The money is not worth it when they're small and we don't want to look like a bully. We wait until they get big enough, then we go after them. And we kill them." What I learned in 20 years of growing Research In Motion from an idea into a global business with $20-billion in sales is that, in the realm of generating wealth from ideas, Canada isn't equipped for global competition. This lack of capacity is no longer optional, because low commodity prices and the steady decline in manufactured exports (due to competition from low-cost countries such as Mexico and China) have placed Canada at a competitive disadvantage. Story continues below advertisement The good news is that Canadian entrepreneurs have the potential to generate great wealth. Our innovators and entrepreneurs are world class. Their desire to grow a business here benefits every Canadian. But if we don't create an ecosystem where they can flourish, Canada's prosperity is at risk. Countries leading in the innovation economy do it on the back of entrepreneurs and the commercialization of their ideas. High-margin profits generated from the sale of products or services underpinned by valuable patents account for billions in profits. This has quickly made technology companies the most valuable in the world, and added great amounts of private and public wealth to their home nations. That's why the competition is always ready to point the gun at Canadian entrepreneurs if they dare to break out and scale their companies globally. Canada's terrible record of commercializing its ideas won't change until we build proper infrastructure to help our entrepreneurs succeed on the global stage, where the real money is made. The infrastructure and policies required for the innovation economy are significantly different from what's required for our traditional resource and manufacturing economies. Policies that helped us design infrastructure for traditional industries have little impact on an innovation economy. Ownership of ideas is not decided by traditional ownership rules. If a Canadian entrepreneur has an idea with potential to generate great wealth, ownership of this idea will be decided in courts beyond Canada, by foreign judicial and geopolitical systems designed to make another country prosperous. This difference fundamentally shapes a business's potential global scale. Canada's current infrastructure and our public and private leadership do not foster the needed capacity to contend effectively in the complex, predatory and state-sponsored ideas ownership game. That means that RIM will stay an anomaly until we fix critical gaps in our prosperity strategy. Why Canada lags behind In Canada, policies required for the innovation economy are either absent or inadequate. That is why we have zero growth in multifactor productivity (the standard measure of the commercialization of innovation) over the past three decades, as reported by Statistics Canada. Story continues below advertisement Story continues below advertisement Both the Canada-U.S. free-trade agreement and the subsequent North American free-trade agreement (NAFTA) have been critical for Canadian businesses trying to compete in global markets, because they allow a freer flow of goods across borders. Codified in the 1988 FTA is the government's statement that Canadian companies are "ready to compete now" in emerging technology sectors such as "computers and equipment." Our results have shown that we were not ready to compete, at least at scale. Open borders are a useful asset for Canadian oil, lumber or beef. They do enable the movement of technology products, but they don't address the ownership of ideas, which is the foundation for their profitable commercialization. Both the FTA and NAFTA contain little about intellectual property rights (IPR), the currency of the innovation economy. The only IPR reference is a mutual commitment to "National Treatment," a principle in international law that means all parties agree to treat foreigners and locals equally. The National Treatment rule may work for our traditional economies, but it does nothing for a Canadian entrepreneur trying to grow a business from an idea. Ideas are not tangible goods – their possession is ambiguous and almost always decided in foreign courts. Those courts are usually in the United States, because that's where the market for technology goods and services is created. A National Treatment case there takes years to prosecute and carries substantial risk of failure unless it presents clear evidence of mistreatment. These enforcement guidelines may be appropriate for a softwood lumber case, but they are useless for seeking justice in fast-moving high technology markets. That's why there hasn't been a single case of a Canadian company using the National Treatment clause on an IPR issue with the United States since NAFTA. While NAFTA functions well for manufacturing and resource businesses, it leaves our policy makers believing that opening more international markets is the key to success for all sectors – even as that strategy fails to provide equitable results for Canadian companies competing to scale up their ideas globally. Industry Canada's 2008 report Compete To Win lays out a broad premise that "removing legal, regulatory and policy impediments to competition [will provide] the conditions to better enable Canadian companies to compete in global markets." Compete, maybe. But win, certainly not. The report completely fails to address the conditions required to win in the innovation economy. Geopolitics is at the heart of commercializing ideas. The money is enormous and the possession of ideas (and their ensuing profits) is manipulated at the national level. Because ownership is almost always determined in the United States, and the ensuing settlements usually must be effective globally, U.S. courts are effectively the world's IPR court system. That should make anyone else concerned with Canadian prosperity sweat, too. Story continues below advertisement Working together to win Canadian politicians and policy-makers need to update their understanding of how the innovation economy works. Our American counterparts realized this long ago by jointly developing sophisticated intellectual property and commercialization expertise between the public and private sectors, and then aggressively using it. This was evident in the high-profile patent battle between Apple and Samsung, involving billions of dollars of annual royalty payments. In June, 2013, South Korea's Samsung scored a major victory over Apple in a U.S. International Trade Commission decision to ban the import of Apple products because of infringement of Samsung patents. Two months later, in August, U.S. President Barack Obama vetoed the ITC decision, the first time in more than 26 years such a veto has been exercised. Two months after that, in October, Mr. Obama declined to veto a similar ban of Samsung products in the United States, ensuring that Apple maintained its profitable leverage over its competitor. A ban of certain Samsung smartphones is still in effect. The wealth at stake is enormous, so governments and corporations work together to win. High-margin intellectual property rights account for half of U.S. exports, contribute $3.5-trillion (U.S.) a year to the American economy and employ nearly 18 million workers in high-paying jobs. That's prosperity from ideas commercialization. NAFTA is just as insufficient for the American innovation economy as it is for the Canadian, which is why U.S. policy-makers are busy making major amendments to federal copyright law to ensure that the profits generated by its creative content keep flowing. The 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act and the 2011 America Invents Act are just two examples of a legislative strategy that provides flexibility to the benefit of U.S. interests and keeps all others on unstable footing. As a major creator and distributor of creative content, the United States has a great deal to gain from lobbying for rules making it illegal to enjoy American creative work without new licences. Canada recently passed the Copyright Modernization Act, which was created in response to U.S. government and corporate interests working in a sophisticated fashion to advance American interests at the expense of other countries, including our own. Story continues below advertisement Disturbing WikiLeaks cables from the 2005-2009 period show systemic and effective lobbying by U.S. officials, who pressured Canadian politicians to implement stricter copyright laws. Cables from 2006 show Canada's industry minister promising the U.S. ambassador that final copyright legislation "would be in line" with American priorities. Another cable, from 2009, recounts a senior Industry Canada policy official asking a U.S. counterpart to put public pressure on Canada to create the needed justification to give Washington what it wanted. Our policy-makers need a reminder that Canada's interests are not served this way. Without a domestic innovation lobby that can vouch for the interests of Canadian ideas and creative content, Canadian politicians are inadvertently legislating in American interests. Canada's Compete to Win report contains the same policy gaps as the FTA and NAFTA, failing to address the infrastructure required for idea commercialization. The report has many laudable points, but the only tangible intellectual property recommendation it made was that Ottawa bow to U.S. pressure and "ensure new copyright legislation" that will "strengthen counterfeit and privacy laws." I'm supportive of appropriate IPR protection, but we need strategies that make Canada prosperous, too. A couple of years ago, I participated in a conference of CEOs in Toronto where a former head of Canada's civil service said: "The government has done everything needed, so now it's time for entrepreneurs to step up and do their job." I believe we haven't even begun to deploy smart strategic public policy options that will improve our innovation record. We need a strategy to advance our prosperity beyond the incomplete mantra of greater domestic IPR protection and open borders because these policies have not contributed to the growth of an indigenous innovation economy in Canada. Europe is equally sophisticated in its IPR strategy. This is evident in the Comprehensive Economic Trade Agreement, which ensures more prosperity in Europe for its high-margin pharmaceutical industry and higher drug costs in Canada. Canada needs to puts IPR laws at the centre of its trade negotiations. Countries that owe their prosperity to innovation rely on sophisticated engagement between entrepreneurs and policy-makers. Google executives, including co-founder Larry Page and executive chairman Eric Schmidt, have visited the White House 230 times since Mr. Obama took office, an average of nearly once a week. If Google, Apple and other U.S. tech companies get help from all branches of government to advance their collective prosperity, why are we insisting that Canadian entrepreneurs do it alone? Story continues below advertisement How we innovate better I remain bullish on Canada's prospects. Outside the country, I've seen strategic public policy work hand-in-hand with entrepreneurs to help economies rise. We can do the same. We have invested hundreds of billions of dollars in our public and private institutions to achieve greater prosperity for all Canadians. But instead of spending more money to improve performance, we need to shift strategies. Commercializing ideas does not automatically favour a large country. Israel, Sweden and South Korea are just a few of the smaller economies succeeding in this game. What they all have in common – and what we're missing in Canada – is a country-specific private and public framework designed to capture wealth from ideas. A judicial strategy is a critical place to start. Canada's Federal Court could be given greater powers to combat unacceptable behaviour by domestic and foreign "patent trolls" – companies that do not make or sell a product but sue other companies for patent infringement based on existing patent rights the troll has secured. New legislation could allow for injunctions to prevent a troll from filing a U.S. lawsuit while Canada's Federal Court rules on whether the Canadian company has infringed on an asserted patent. Trolls could be required to be much more specific about how the target company's product infringes on the patent troll's claim – right now they can send out threat letters with general claims of infringement – and they could face sanctions when they are found to be using bad-faith tactics. Canada's Competition Bureau could be given the power to target anti-competitive activity. As part of our new free-trade deal with the European Union, Ottawa could negotiate to become a member of the Unified Patent Court. The EU has made its patent enforcement system much more attractive and globally competitive by implementing the unitary European patent protection and court system, so that the ownership of ideas within the European market will be decided inside the UPC. By becoming a member of the court with a venue in Canada, Canadian companies can have the same standing as European entities. Other legal measures might include creating a sovereign patent pool and a prior art library to help Canadian small and medium-sized enterprises when they encounter litigation threats. Story continues below advertisement Our policy community can also propose strategic collaborations to better commercialize our ideas in the U.S. marketplace. A good example comes from Israel, which created a comprehensive set of idea commercialization strategies, including the Binational Industrial Research and Development (BIRD) Foundation, established in 1977 to support industrial research and development co-operation with the United States. BIRD supports an average of 20 projects a year, and the cumulative sales of products developed through it exceed $8-billion. Canadian universities play an important role helping to build the infrastructure for an innovation economy, which is why they receive most of the yearly $12-billion (Canadian) invested in postsecondary research and development. Judging by the number of incubators, accelerators and hubs that are now associated with virtually every postsecondary institution, as well as in-house university research licensing offices, it's clear that commercializing research has become one of the top priorities for these institutions. In tight fiscal times, this is a welcome development – there is a lot of money to be made by commercializing university research. We have a long way to go, however. The University of Toronto's commercialization office states that it is "in a class with the likes of MIT and Stanford." But Stanford has generated $1.3-billion (U.S.) in royalties for itself and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology issued 288 U.S. patents last year alone; U of T generates annual licensed IP income of less than $3-million (Canadian) and averages eight U.S. patents a year. Statistics Canada reports that in 2009, just $10-million was netted by all Canadian universities for their licences and IP. Even when accounting for universities that have open IP policies, this is a trivial amount by global standards. Higher education expenditures on research and development have increased every year from 2006 to 2014, totalling more than $100-billion. The federal government's granting councils provide more than $3-billion a year toward research, making Canada one of the world's highest per capita government spenders on R&D. This funding covers grants that span the spectrum from basic research all the way to business-led research partnerships. Many Canadian innovation reports speak of the importance of enhancing links between universities and business to spur commercialization of university research. Yet our universities need to create better incentives for researchers to spur commercialization. Current tenure and promotion policies at 44 Canadian higher education institutions emphasize research, teaching and service to the institution. For hiring, the same criteria are used, except that the new candidates are judged by their potential as indicated by research publication and teaching experience. There is no evidence in these evaluation practices that any tangible value is given to commercialization of university research. Indeed, incentives for commercializing are essentially seen as perverse, because if a faculty member is spending time commercializing research then, by current evaluation standards, they are not doing their real job. If we expect universities to be part of our prosperity strategy, then faculty interested in such pursuits should devise new institutional approaches for their career advancement that reward rather than punish them when pursuing commercialization of their research. A university's revenues affect the entire institution, so better incentives for successful commercialization is a prudent strategy that could also ease the pressure for more public funding. Universities also need to be part of a wider strategy to better teach and encourage the commercialization of ideas. Barry Sookman, a Toronto-based lawyer and a leading authority on IP law, recently conducted a survey of 16 Canadian law schools. He concluded that "very few programs offer courses or opportunities that focus on teaching lawyers about commercializing IP or IP law strategies." Our entrepreneurs graduating from law, business, computer science or engineering programs need to receive the proper education for commercializing on the global stage. Too many Canadian startups and small or medium enterprises lack IP strategies. Even businesses that do patent rarely have viable strategies for using or enforcing their intellectual property rights. In Silicon Valley, patent-protection strategies are present at all phases of R&D, from the outset. Our government invests heavily in R&D through tax incentives and grants, with the objective of seeing Canadian companies better commercialize their ideas globally. We should explore creating an ideas-protection strategy as part of the process to obtain government funding. Robust strategies would better equip innovative companies to achieve meaningful global sales growth. Beyond the universities, Canada has other publicly and privately funded incubators and centres of excellence, where entrepreneurs can learn to start and grow a business. These agencies and organizations represent a critical piece of our innovation economy, providing unique and intensive environments for learning, collaborating and mentoring. One of Canada's largest startup incubators, Toronto-based MaRS, has recently come under scrutiny owing to potentially outsized claims of its success in generating revenue and helping its entrepreneurs. In my experience, this is not an isolated problem. Kitchener, Ont.-based Communitech, an incubator I helped to create in 1997, boasted for years on its website that it had "helped build a tech cluster that now generates more than $30-billion in revenue." But as I write this, the site no longer makes any revenue claims. Equally troubling are superlatives that have nothing to do with business success yet are advertised as key indicators, such as the number of startups created. Creating a startup is considerably easier and cheaper than starting a traditional business. Yet the measure of success for every business, regardless of sector is the same: sales, profits, merger and acquisition expectation prospects, and value creation for shareholders. If we are looking at these centres to play a role in our prosperity, then the success needs to be measured in revenue and company valuations from external financing or M&A. The public and private financiers of these institutions should demand these metrics as a condition of future funding. The myth of lack of capital for private technology companies dominates the narrative in a lot of incubators and policy circles. Some of these myths have been around for decades, at least since I first set out to raise money for RIM. And yet, in 1996, after one day of meetings on Bay Street, we received $100-million in common equity investment orders for our private company. Four years later, in one week, we raised more than $900-million in common equity. There is plenty of investment money for ideas that can be successfully commercialized. Raising capital for technology in Canada is difficult because so many investors are losing money. Venture capital in Canada is one of the worst-performing asset classes. A 2013 study by Thomson Reuters and the Canadian Venture Capital Association reported a staggering divergence in 10-year pooled average returns between U.S. and Canadian VCs. The American VCs' return was 13.5 per cent, while the Canadian VCs' lost 3.4 per cent. A 2014 Cambridge Associates study of early-stage VCs was even more troubling, with U.S. VCs reporting a return of 20.5 per cent and Canadian VCs reporting a loss of 5.6 per cent. Meanwhile, Canada's low ranking in the OECD's business enterprise expenditure on research and development rankings is often blamed on the national tendency to "sit on dead money" because of "cultural risk aversion" or "insufficient outward-looking attitudes." But these arguments don't account for how business investment works. An investment in the ideas sector is made for the reasonable prospect of profit from commercialization – just like in venture capital. Business moves with the carrot of profit, not the stick of hectoring. If you own a good idea with a reasonable plan to address and protect your market opportunity, investment capital is virtually limitless. We are inadequate at protecting ownership of our ideas, which undermines commercialization and, in turn, return on investment. 'Mission-oriented' leadership Canadians are capable of creating national wealth when we approach prosperity systematically and strategically. Our best 20th-century example of "mission oriented" economic development leadership was Alberta Premier Peter Lougheed's 1974 establishment of AOSTRA, the Alberta Oil Sands Technology and Research Authority. The Crown corporation's original government funding of $100-million increased over time to $1-billion, with the
discharged after treatment. An Arab has reported to police that earlier he had seen four Jews carrying a barrel-shaped object. CO 537/3855 1 JANUARY 1948 During the afternoon of 1 January, a bunch of Irgun Z'vai Leumi thugs dressed in battledress and steel helmets drove at speed through Jaffa and fired at Arabs sitting outside a cafe. They killed two and wounded nine others before crashing through an Arab road block and disappearing into Tel Aviv. To emphasize the illusion that the British are responsible for all disorder in the country, they were wearing the flashes of the Royal Irish Fusiliers. WO 275/64 1 JANUARY 1948 Small party of Jews entered block of flats 40 yards in rear Shell Petrol Station, Jaffa, and placed a bomb which demolished the block of flats. So far, 1 Arab injured by flying debris. WO 275/64 4 JANUARY 1948 At 12:25 p.m. two Jewish terrorists, one driving a truck loaded with time bombs and the other driving a jeep, both as usual in British uniforms, drove to the end of a lane between the Arab welfare and relief centre in Jaffa housing children and the Barclay's Bank. The truck was driven in the lane and left there, and the driver was picked up by the jeep driver who was waiting for him. As they drove away, the whole town was rocked by a powerful explosion and many distant buildings were damaged by the concussion. The welfare centre was demolished. Seventeen Arabs were killed in this coldblooded murderous attack and 106 were wounded. Among those killed and seriously wounded were women and children. (United Nations Security Council Official Records, Supplements - 1948). 4 JANUARY 1948 Lydda. 1240 hours, Jaffa. The Old Serrai in Clock Tower Square which houses the offices of the Arab National Committee, was completely destroyed by an explosion which killed 15 and injured 98 persons. Buildings nearby including Barclay's Bank, the Central Police Station and several shops and houses were also extensively damaged. Full details of how the attack was carried out are not yet available, but it is believed the attackers arrived at the scene in two vehicles? a 3-ton truck laden with orange boxes and a saloon car. Proceeding up Bustros Street towards Clock Tower Square? the truck turned left into the narrow lane between Barclay's Bank and the Old Serrai. The saloon car was seen to park some 20 metres north of Central P.S. near the road leading to the port area. The truck was parked at a point about 20 yards along the above mentioned lane. Two persons, dressed as Arabs, were seen to alight from the truck and walk across the square. They got into the waiting car which drove off in the direction of the Ajami Quarter. Almost immediately following the departure of the car, the explosion occurred. Tons of masonry from the Old Serrai building completely blocked the land running beside it, A fire subsequently broke out in Barclay's Bank but was extinguished. A strong-room situated in the upper storey of the bank was blown in and a considerable amount of money was salvaged and taken into police custody. The entire area was wired off to facilitate salvage operations and to prevent looting. It is reported from TeI Aviv that Irgun Z'vai Leumi have claimed responsibility for this outrage. Tension has risen to a high pitch in Jaffa as a result of this attack, and a certain degree of anti-Government feeling has been expressed. Details of the casualties are as follows:- Dead: 1) Mohammed Abdul Hallak (aged 12); 2) Abudul Sattah Wahab Jaber (20); 3) Ali Kastika; 4) Mohammed Said Abu Hassan (40); 5) Ahamad Derdanji (45); 6) Ahmad Hawari; 7) Yusef Abu Sheikh (25); 8) Ahmad Faris Shehadi (25); 9) Sa'ad Abil Majid Zein (25); 10) 15 unidentified. Injured: 1) Said Kheber Said (25) - serious; 2) Abed Ahmad Duknak ( 10) - serious; 3) Abed Mahmoud Shulayeh (17) - serious; 4) Ashraf Tewfik Lufti (28) - serious; 5) Naji Said Mughrabi - serious; 6) Mohammed Ibrahim Mughrabi - serious; 7) Taha Abu Rabah (35) - serious; 8) Mohammed Hassan Ibrahim (20) - serious; 9) Rasmiyeh Saba (22) - serious; 10) Abed Mustafe Abu Wazni (30) - serious; 11) Hishan Alami (35) - not serious; 12) Ibrahim Mustafa Najar (25) - not serious. All the above named are in the Dajani Hospital. 13) Huda Abu Labm (20) - not serious; 14) Said Afif Atout (19) - not serious; 15) Rafik Salami (27) - not serious; The above three are in the Government Hospital, 16) Ahmad Mahmoud Taher (30) - serious; 17) Ahmad Ahmad Nel(25) - serious; 18) Ali Hassan Ashoura (20) - not serious; 19) Ahmad Ismail Abu Shabayeh (22) - not serious; 20) Rais Hassan Abu Chouleh (70) - not serious. The above-mentioned five are in the French Hospital. Seventy-eight other persons were treated in hospitals for slight injuries but were not detained. CO 537/3855 8 JANUARY 1948 Lydda. 0245 hours, Jaffa. Unknown persons placed a bomb against the house of Haj Abed El Jaber Lahloub, situated at the western side of Beit Dajan village. The bomb exploded causing extensive damage to the house? but no casualties. CO 537/3855 9 JANUARY 1948 Lydda. 0730 hours, Jaffa. Near Jaffa Railway Station; two 'buses conveying Arab railway employees to Lydda were fired upon from automatic weapons from Jewish houses overlooking their station. Hassan Hilu of Jaffa sustained a slight bullet wound in the leg, and two other Arabs were slightly injured by glass splinters. CO 537/3855 10/11 JANUARY 1948 Gaza, 2130 hours. Shots are reported to have been fired from a passing vehicle into an orange grove on Sawafir Sharki lands near the main GadJaffa road. At 0800 hours on 11 January, 1948, the body of a labourer, Abdul Khader Mohammed En Nasri of Jaffa, was found in the grove. He has sustained bullet wounds. CO 537/3855 14 JANUARY 1948 Lydda. 0730 hours, Jaffa. Abdul Fattah Hassan Khalil, an employee of the Palestine Railways, was shot and injured in the foot while walking in Jaffa Railway Station. The bullet came from the direction of a house occupied by Jews and situated north of the station. He was removed to the Government Hospital, Jaffa. His condition is not serious. CO 537/3855 14 JANUARY 1948 Lydda. 1000 hours, Jaffa. Two unidentified Arabs were shot and killed by unknown persons in Arlin Street, Manshieh Quarter. CO 537/3855 20 JANUARY 1948 1430 hours, Jaffa. On the Manshieh beach, Abed Mohammed Jerieh (25) and Khader Mohammed El Jaber (201, both of Manshieh, were hit by bullets fired from the direction of Tel Aviv. The first named was removed to the Government Hospital, Jaffa, but was found to be dead on arrival. Jaber was admitted to the Dajani Hospital in serious condition. CO 537/3855 20 JANUARY 1948 1430 hours, Jaffa. On the Manshieh beach, Abed Mohammed Jerieh (25) and Khader Mohammed El Jaber (201, both of Manshieh, were hit by bullets fired from the direction of Tel Aviv. The first named was removed to the Government Hospital, Jaffa, but was found to be dead on arrival. Jaber was admitted to the Dajani Hospital in serious condition. CO 537/3855 20 JANUARY 1948 1630 hours, Jaffa. In Salameh Road, a woman, Sisteh Nesrameh (33, of Jaffa, was hit in the arm by a bullet fired from the direction of Tel Aviv. She was admitted to the Government Hospital, Jaffa. Her condition is not serious. CO 537/3855 21 JANUARY 1948 Lydda. 0001 hours, Jaffa. A party of Jews opened fire on the Municipal Slaughter House on the Jaffa/Jerusalem road, causing no known casualties or damage. A quantity of first aid kit and bottles containing what is believed to be an incendiary liquid were left behind by the attackers. CO 537/3855 21 JANUARY 1948 0900 hours, Jaffa. Following a report that armed Jews, who had arrived in a truck, had been seen digging holes north of Jaffa Railway Station, police found four gun emplacements and an unexploded mortar bomb. CO 537/3855 21 JANUARY 1948 1100 hours, Jaffa. Ten Arab houses in Arlin Street were blown up by Jews, the explosions being followed by heavy firing. No casualties have been reported. CO 537/3855 21 JANUARY 1948 Jewish terrorists were seen trying to enter certain Arab houses in the border area of Jaffa-Tel Aviv. 22 JANUARY 1948 1100 hours, Bassa Lands, Jaffa. The following persons were shot on BassaLands by Jewish snipers, believed to have been positioned in the vicinity of the Spirit Factory in Abu Kebir on the JaffaIJerusalem road: Dead - Sulieman Hassan Nattar (25), of Trans-Jordan. Seriously injured - 1) Abdul Khadar Nattar (28), of Trans-Jordan; 2) Harned Naher Saleh Tadder (25), of Trans-Jordan; 3) Mohammed Hajeh Hijaz, of Bassa; 4) Mohammed Zafer Hijazi, of Bassa. CO 537/3855 22 JANUARY 1948 1800 hours, Jaffa. The body of Abdul Natif Omar (25), of Nablus, was admitted to the Government Hospital, Jaffa. He had been shot dead by Jewish snipers near the Spirit Factory in the Abu Kebir area. CO 537/3855 23 JANUARY 1948 1345 hours, Jaffa. At Salama village, Sheikh Ibrahim Moghrabi, aged 21, of Salama, sustained severe bullet wounds in the back when fired upon by Jewish snipers. CO 537/3855 23 JANUARY 1948 1511 hours, Jaffa. Arab traffic was fired upon from one of the Miqveh Israel Colony orange groves, and the fire was returned by the crew of an armoured car. No casualties have been reported. CO 537/3855 25 JANUARY 1948 Lydda. 1145 hours, Jaffa. Two Arab houses in Arlin Street, Manshieh Quarter, were blown up by Jews and completely destroyed. No casualties have been reported. CO 537/3856 25 JANUARY 1948 Lydda. 1300 hours, Jaffa. The body of Mohammed Khalil Khalaf, aged 20 of Manshieh Quarter, who is stated to have been killed by a bomb thrown from the Manshieh Quarter during the morning, was admitted to the Government Hospital, Jaffa. CO 537/3856 25 JANUARY 1948 Lydda. 1700 hours, Jaffa. The following casualties were caused when a bomb exploded in an Arab house in Jabaliya Quarter: Dead - Shafic El Asfar (25); Sami El Asfar (30). CO 537/3856 27 JANUARY 1948 Lydda. 1745 hours, Jaffa. In Manshieh Quarter, Mohammed Khalil Omar, aged 20 of Qalqiliya, was seriously wounded in the stomach by a bullet fired by a Jewish sniper from the direction of Tel Aviv. CO 537/3856 1 FEBRUARY 1948 Lydda. 1645 hours, Jaffa. Hula1 Salim (451, of Jaffa, was admitted to the Government Hospital with a bullet wound in his side. His condition is serious. He was shot from the direction of Tel Aviv while walking on Bassa Lands. CO 537/3856 1 FEBRUARY 1948 Lydda. 1700 hours, Jaffa. Ismail Salmi Hussein (43, of Jaffa, was shot on Bassa Lands by a bullet from the direction of Tel Aviv. He was removed to the Government Hospital, where his condition is not serious. 2 FEBRUARY 1948 Lydda. Approximately 1645 hours, Jaffa. Unknown persons blew up the houses of Mohammed Natour and Ali Sambo, the bakeries of Abu Sbuhi El Asfour and Subhi El Asfour and an Arab Girls' School, all situated in Hassan Bey Street. Damage is roughly estimated at LP, 70,000. CO 537/3856 4 FEBRUARY 1948 Lydda. 0730 hours, Jaffa. Whilst walking near an Arab road block on the Jerusalem road on the outskirt of Jaffa, Ibrahim Hanna Bamdah, aged 20 of Jaffa, and a thirty-yearold Arab woman from Jaffa named Hameeni were shot and killed by unknown persons. CO 537/3856 8 FEBRUARY 1948 Lydda. 1450 hours. In the Manshieh Quarter, Naif Yusef Saleh Ed Din of Syria, who was living in Jaffa, was shot and slightly wounded by snipers. He was removed to the Government Hospital where his condition is reported to be not serious. CO 537/3856 10 FEBRUARY 1948 Lydda. The house of Mohammed Salim Kalha in the Manshieh Quarter of Jaffa was burnt and completely destroyed by Jews. The damage is estimated at LP.8,000. CO 537/3856 11 FEBRUARY 1948 Lydda. 2200 hours, Jaffa. In Ajami Road, Jaffa, Yousef Salah Ed Din (30) of Beit Rima, Ramallah Sub-District, was shot in the head and killed by unknown persons. CO 537/3856 12 FEBRUARY 1948 Cemeteries of all the Christian communities in Jaffa are grouped in one locality, each having its own guard. Zionist terrorists from the neighbouring Jewish settlement of Bath Yom opened fire and hurled hand grenades on the Christian cemeteries. Five Christian Arabs were killed, including three girls aged five, eight and eleven. United Nations Security Council Official Records, Supplements - 1948. 12/13 FEBRUARY 1948 Lydda. Night, 12/13 February, 1948, Jaffa. It is reported that the house of Eid Hasim Esh Shatra in Jebaliya Quarter was destroyed by Jews. The damage is estimated at LP. 7,200. CO 537/3856 13 FEBRUARY 1948 Lydda. 1030 hours, Jaffa. A party of Jews directed fire from three mortars at the Jaffa Railway Station Goods Yard. The bombs exploded causing no damage or casualties. The attack was accompanied by small arms fire for approximately five minutes. CO 537/3856 13 FEBRUARY 1948 Lydda. 1300 hours, Jaffa. The following persons were! injured when a mortar bomb struck their house in Jabaliya Quarter: Seriously Injured - Fattah Sawan (20). Slightly injured - Othman Sawan (12); Ina'am bint Mahmoud Sawan; Mafeedem bint Mahmoud Sawan (10). All were removed to the Government Hospital, Jaffa. CO 537/3856 15 FEBRUARY 1948 Lydda. 1230 hours, Jaffa. Three of four mortar bombs, believed to have been fired from Tel Aviv, exploded in the area of Jaffa Railway Station. There were no casualties. Municipal Police replied with rifle fire with no known results. CO 537/3856 16 FEBRUARY, 1948 Lydda. 1500 hours, Jaffa. In the Jabaliya Quarter, Ihsan Said Masri (35) of Jaffa was shot dead by a Jewish sniper from Holon. CO 537/3856 17 FEBRUARY 1948 Lydda. 0030 to 0600 hours, Jaffa/T.A. border area. Numerous explosions and automatic fire were heard from the Abu KebirJSalameh Road and Tel Er Rish areas. No casualties were reported. Jews were alleged to be firing from the Hatiqva Quarter to Holon under cover of this fire. CO 537/3856 20 FEBRUARY 1948 Lydda. 21 30 hours, Jaffa. Abdul Mahdi El Azzar (23) of Jebeliya Quarter was shot and killed by Jewish snipers. CO 537/3856 22 FEBRUARY 1948 Lydda. 1130 hours, Jaffa. In Manshieh Quarter, Ali Abu Adwan (35) of Manshieh Quarter was shot in the head by a Jewish sniper firing from Tel Aviv. He died in the French Hospital at 1430 hours. CO 537/3856 22 FEBRUARY 1948 Lydda. 1200 hours, Jaffa. At Tel Er Rish, Kassim Mohammed Saleh (20) of Tel Er Rish was shot by a Jewish sniper and died from his wounds upon admission to the French Hospital. CO 537/3856 22 FEBRUARY 1948 1230 hours, Arab bus fired on between Jaffa and Ramle. 2 Arabs wounded. WO 261/573 22 FEBRUARY 1948 Lydda. 1500 hours, Jaffa. Mohammed Othman Khalil Boutanji (22) of Dura village was shot and slightly wounded by unknown persons on Bassa lands. He was removed to the Dajani Hospital. CO 537/3856 22 FEBRUARY 1948 Lydda. 1600 hours, Jaffa. In Manshieh Quarter, Amneh bint Sulieman El Ashi (12) of Manshieh Quarter was shot in the abdomen and seriously wounded by unknown persons. She succumbed to her injuries at 2130 hours in the Dajani Hospital. CO 537/3856 23 FEBRUARY 1948 Lydda. 0930 hours, Jaffa. In the Jabaliya Quarter, Hassan Hussein Saleh (3 1) of Jabaliya was wounded in the right hand by a bullet from the direction of Bat Yam brewery. He was slightly injured and discharged after treatment at the Govemment Hospital, Jaffa. CO 537/3856 23 FEBRUARY 1948 Lydda. 1515 hours, Jaffa. In Jaffa Port, Abed Abdullah Halabi (30) of Jaffa was shot and slightly wounded in the leg by unknown persons. He was removed to the Government Hospital. His condition is not serious. CO 537/3856 25 FEBRUARY 1948 Lydda. 2200 hours, Jaffa. The body of Samis Khorub (27) of Jabaliya Quarter was admitted to the Government Hospital. He had been killed when a mortar bomb exploded in the Jabaliya Quarter. Two other Arabs were at the same time admitted to the hospital, suffering from shock caused by the same explosion. CO 537/3856 1 MARCH 1948 Lydda. Morning, Jaffa. In Tel Er Rish, Ahmed Mustafa Ahmed (27) of Tel Er Rish was shot and killed by unknown persons. His body was taken to the French Hospital, Jaffa. CO 537/3856 2 MARCH 1948 Lydda. 0940 hours, Jaffa. Jewish snipers positioned in a house between the Migdem Chocolate Factory and a distillery on the Assem Bey Road commenced firing into the area between the Jaffa/Jerusalem road and the Abu Kebir track. An Arab woman, Aisha Hassan Sadem (45) of Jaffa, was seriously wounded. She was removed to the Government Hospital. A military armoured car in the vicinity was fired on. A police armoured car returned the fire with no known result. CO 537/3856 2 MARCH 1948 Lydda, Jaffa. Ahmed Taher of Manshiya Quarter, complains that during recent disturbances, his house and shop in Carmel Street were blown up and completely destroyed. The value of the property is estimated at LP. 5,500. CO 537/3856 4 MARCH 1948 Lydda. 0200 until 0230 hours, Jaffa. Several explosions and heavy firing were heard from the Bassa lands area. It was subsequently revealed that an Arab owned textile factory on Salameh Road was blown up and completely destroyed. There were no known casualties. CO 537/3856 5 MARCH 1948 Lydda. 1645 hours, Jaffa. A police armoured car patrolling the Abu Kebir area reported that a low-flying monoplane opened fire with automatic weapons into Abu Kebir. Arab witnesses state that this machine also dropped two grenades in the vicinity of the Iron Foundry on the JaffaIJerusalem road. Mohammed Ibrahim Berbasi was admitted to the Dajani Hospital with a bullet wound in the thigh which he stated was caused by fire from a low-flying plane over Tel Arish. A later account described the 'plane as being light grey or white with R.A.F. markings on both wings, and the letters 'VOL' and some figures on the fuselage. CO 537/3856 8 MARCH 1948 Lydda. 0700 hours, Jaffa. Ahmed Arhan Abu Fammad (32) of Tell Er Rish, who was admitted to the French Hospital at 0500 hours, suffering from wounds received from an exploding mortar bomb in the Tell Er Rish quarter, succumbed to his injuries. The bomb is said to have been fired from the direction of Holon. CO 537/3856 8 MARCH 1948 Lydda. 0930 hours, Jaffa. Mohammed Abdullah Yanani (30) of Jaffa, was shot and fatally injured in Arlin Street, Manshieh, by a Jewish sniper. The body was removed to the Dajani Hospital. CO 537/3856 8 MARCH 1948 Lydda. Approximately 2200 hours, Jaffa. Hassan Khalil Sarkoury (26) of Jebeliya Quarter was injured in the right shoulder when a bomb was thrown by Jews on the Bat Yam/Jebeliya border. He was removed to the Government Hospital, Jaffa. His condition is not serious. CO 537/3856 9 MARCH 1948 Lydda. 0930 hours, Jaffa. In the Jabaliyeh Quarter, Shafiq Ahmed (22) was wounded in the head by splinters believed to have been caused by a mortar bomb. He was removed to Government Hospital, condition not serious. CO 537/3856 10 MARCH 1948 Lydda. 1510 hours, Jaffa. Arabs employed at the iron foundry situated on the JaffaIJerusalem road near Holon were fired upon by Jews from the direction of Miqve Israel colony. The Arabs returned the fire, which ceased when police armoured cars appeared on the scene. There were no casualties. CO 537/3856 13/14 MARCH 1948 Jerusalem. Night, Jaffa. On Bassa lands, the ice factory of Hassan Tewfic Abu Ghazaleh, of Jaffa, was attacked by Jews, with mortars and small arms fire. The factory watchman, Ibrahim Getani (22) of Jaffa, was slightly injured and removed to the Dejani Hospital. The building was partly demolished, damage being estimated at approximately LP. 6,000. CO 537/3856 14 MARCH 1948 Lydda. 0130 hours, Jaffa. In the Abu Kebir Quarter, Ali Hassan el Weish (23) of that quarter was killed by snipers. His body was removed to the Government Hospital, Jaffa. CO 537/3856 16 MARCH 1948 Lydda. 1530 hours, Jaffa. In Tel er Rish Yousef Ali Abdul Khalil(26), of Mi'ilya village, was shot and fatally wounded by snipers from the Holon area. His body was removed to the Government Hospital, Jaffa. CO 537/3856 18 MARCH 1948 Lydda. 1430 hours, Jaffa. On Bassa lands, Ahmed Hussein Tustani (35), of Hebron, was shot and fatally wounded by a sniper from the direction of Tel Aviv. The body was removed to the Dajani Hospital. CO 537/3856 18 MARCH 1948 Lydda. 1500 hours, Jaffa. The body of Said Butros (25) of Tel er Rish was admitted to the French Hospital in Jaffa. He had been killed by snipers' bullets in Tel er Rish. CO 537/3856 18 MARCH 1948 Lydda. 1630 hours, Jaffa. Jews blew up eight unoccupied Arab houses in Arlin Street, Manshieh Quarter. They also fired at the Manshieh Police Station and at a police armoured car which approached the scene. The fire was returned by the police, but there were no known casualties. CO 537/3856 19 MARCH 1948 Lydda. 1030 hours, Tel Aviv. A Jewish snipers' position in Abu Kebir Quarter directed moderate automatic fire into Salama Road, Jaffa. A police arrnoured car proceeded to the scene at approximately 1 100 hours, and the area then became quiet. No casualties have been reported. CO 537/3856 22/23 MARCH 1948 Lydda. Between 2350 hours 22 March, 1948, and 0145 hours 23 March, 1948, Jaffa. Jebeliya Quarter was attacked by Jews. During the course of the attack, eleven houses and a small mosque were demolished, believed by mortars. The following casualties were admitted to the Government Hospital from the quarter on the morning of 23 March, 1948: Seriously Injured- Dahiel Eissa Ed Dibis (45); Mohammed Marouf El Kaban (35); Abdul Fattah Samara (27). CO 537/3857 23 MARCH 1948 Lydda. 1130 hours, Jaffa. Jewish snipers near Bassa lands commenced firing into King George Avenue, Jaffa. Two Arabs were killed, Ali Darwish Wazieh (12) of Jaffa and Hassan Muharram (30) of Jaffa. At approximately 1230 hours, the Jewish snipers post was silenced by military using two pounders. CO 537/3857 24 MARCH 1948 Lydda. 0230 hours, Jaffa. Several heavy mortar bombs fired from the direction of Tel Aviv in the area of the Hassan Bey Mosque. Some damage was caused to the surrounding wall of the Mosque and to a nearby house. No casualties have been reported. CO 537/3857 24 MARCH 1948 Lydda. 1500 hours, Jaffa. Ahmed Sabri el Rehawi (20) of Syria, was slightly wounded in the leg by a bullet fired by unknown persons near the Bat Yam Mental Home. He was admitted to the Government Hospital. CO 537/3857 24 MARCH 1948 Lydda. 1935 hours, Jaffa. Jews from Abu Kebir opened fire with mortars on the flour mill in Salama Road. Arabs replied and firing was still continuing at 2000 hours. No further details are yet available. CO 537/3857 25 MARCH 1948 Lydda. 1600 hours, Jaffa. Ali Morffi el Rahidi (35) of Egypt was admitted to the Government Hospital suffering from a bullet wound in the back which he sustained when a Jewish armoured car fired at him in Zarmuqa village. His condition is serious. CO 537/3857 25 MARCH 1948 Lydda, Jaffa. The house of Farid Jaber in Karton Quarter was destroyed by fire in unknown circumstances. The damage caused is estimated at L.P. 5,000. On the same day at Jaber's orange grove, situated in Salameh village, damage estimated at L.P. 13,000 is stated to have been caused by Jews using explosive charges. CO 537/3857 1 APRIL 1948 Lydda. 0955 hours, Jaffa. A mortar bomb, believed to have been fired from Bat Yam, exploded on the house of Assad El Dejani, near Ajami P.S. Slight damage was sustained by the building, but no casualties were caused. CO 537/3857 1 APRIL 1948 Lydda, Jaffa. Salim Rajab Sha'aban El Moghrabi reports that his house on the Bat YamlJebeliya border was demolished by Jewish mortar fire. CO 537/3857 2 APRIL 1948 Lydda. 1700 hours, Jaffa. Ali Abu Hajas (30), of Manshieh Quarter, was shot and seriously wounded by Jewish snipers in Arlin Street. He was removed to the Dajani Hospital. CO 537/3857 3 APRIL 1948 Lydda. 0700 hours, Jaffa. Mohammed Ahmed Eissa (291, of Egypt, was shot and slightly injured by Jewish snipers in the Karm Et Tut area. He was removed to the Government Hospital, Jaffa. CO 537/3857 3 APRIL 1948 Lydda. 1100 hours, Jaffa. Four mortar bombs, believed to have been fired from Tel Aviv area, and one mine exploded in the Suq El Yehud causing damage to unoccupied property. The exploding of the mine is believed to have been detonated by one of the bombs. No casualties have been reported. CO 537/3857 3 APRIL 1948 Lydda. Night, Jaffa. An Arab house, situated in the Jebaliyeh Quarter of Jaffa, was blown up and extensively damaged by Jews and an occupant, Fathmi Shlean (68), was killed. CO 537/3857 3 APRIL 1948 Lydda, Jaffa. Mohammed Ahmed Eissa, of Kami Et Tut, was shot and seriously injured, by unknown persons, whilst in his village. He was removed to the Government Hospital, Jaffa, where he died shortly after admission. CO 537/3857 6 APRIL 1948 Lydda. 1630 hours, Jaffa. Jews opened fire on swimmers near the Jaffa Club. The following casualties were caused: Dead - Subhi Ibn Adib Jabour (27), of Jaffa. Serious - Mohammed Ibn Akawi (12), of Jaffa. Slight - Mohammed Mahmoud Kana'an (20), of Jaffa. CO 537/3857 8 APRIL 1948 Lydda. 0 100 hours, Jaffa. Jews opened mortar fire on the Manshieh Quarter and bombs fell near the Manshieh Police Station and in the Jaffa railway yard. A municipal policeman, No. 1 13, Abdullah Eissa Salim (26), of Jaffa, was slightly injured by splinters whilst on duty in the Suq el Yehud. A house in the railway yard was destroyed, and Hassan Abu Shimes (35), of Manshieh, was seriously injured. Three mortar bombs exploded in the vicinity of the C.S. Jaffa, and the following two Arabs were injured: Deeb Ahmed Hamed (60), of Jaffa - serious; Yousef Abu Jabrin Bader (25), of Jaffa - not serious. CO 537/3857 10 APRIL 1948 Lydda. 1445 hours, Jaffa. Ahmed Abu Kalim (23), of Manshieh Quarter, was shot and seriously wounded by Jewish snipers whilst in Qaswan Street. He was removed to the Dajani Hospital. CO 537/3857 10 APRIL 1948 Lydda. 1730 hours, Jaffa. Moussa Madon (23), of Ajami Quarter, was shot and killed and Lutfi Ghawi (25), also of Ajami, was slightly wounded while they were walking in El Lisaf Street. Both were hit by shots fired from the direction of the Railway Station and were removed to the French Hospital. CO 537/3857 10 APRIL 1948 Lydda. 1810 hours, Jaffa. Mohammed Abdul Rahman Jainaf (55), of Jaffa, was shot and slightly injuredin Manshieh Quarter by a Jewish sniper. He was removed to the French Hospital, Jaffa. CO 537/3857 14 APRIL 1948 0230 hours to 0600 hours, 14 April, Jews mortared Jaffa, particularly Manshiya Quarter. No known casualty. WO 275/66 25 APRIL 1948 Irgun Z'vai Leumi attack Jaffa. Army intervenes and fighting stops. Approximately fifty Arab casualties. Jews blow two gaps in the bridge at Jisr al Majami. Army reoccupies Sheikh Jarrah, meeting initial resistance from Hagana, but later a truce is negotiated and both sides ordered cease fire. Two Jews killed and two wounded. Four British Soldiers slightly wounded. Jews attack At Tireh, south of Haifa. WO 261/574 26 APRIL 1948 1030 hours, 26 April, 2 R IR F road block at Jaffa congested by Arab lorries and buses carrying refugees. Congestion cleared and traffic passing road block estimated at rate of 20 vehicles per hour. Refugees fired on by Jewish sniper as they moved off. No casualty. WO 275/66 26 APRIL 1948 At 1135 hours, 26th April, there was heavy mortaring of Manshieh Quarter, Jaffa, and Manshieh Police Station was attacked by Jews with arrnoured cars, grenades and small arms. No casualties yet reported. CO 733/477 26 APRIL 1948 Tel Aviv-Jaffa. Jews attacked Arab quarter Jaffa with mortars and automatics and penetrated as far as the railway station. The Mayor of Tel Aviv was told that unless attack was stopped, military would employ force. This had the desired effect, and the situation is now quiet. Fifty Arab civilians are believed killed. CO 537/3875 Our brethren are right when they say that the Arab honours only those who show valour and fortitude; On 24 April 1948, the Irgun militant Zionist organization opened an attack on the Manshiyeh residential quarter of Jaffa, a narrow Palestinian suburb located beside the sea and largely surrounded by Tel Aviv. For four days and nights, under the direction of Menachem Begin, the Irgun indiscriminately shelled the quarter with mortars. Hansard, the official record of proceedings in the U.K. Parliament, reported: "On the 5th of May, 1948, the question of the attack by the Irgun Z'vai Leumi on Jaffa was raised. The Secretary of State for the Colonies was asked whether he had any statement to make on the present situation in Jaffa. Mr. Rees-Williams, the Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies answered as follows: In the early hours of 28th [sic] April a heavy attack on the Arab town of Jaffa was made by the Irgun Zvai Leumi, the method adopted being an indiscriminate mortar bombardment, apparently designed to create panic among the civilian inhabitants. British forces intervened, supported by aircraft, and in the course of the afternoon the Jews retired to their original positions. By nightfall the border was quiet except for occasional sniping. A cease-fire was ordered for both sides by the military commander and was observed. British troops then occupied a line between Arabs and Jews on the Tel-Aviv- Jaffa border. On the evening of 30th April, the cease-fire order was broken by fire from the Jewish side, which was quickly silenced by military action. Latest reports indicate that the town is now quiet. As a rough estimate, some 30,000 Arabs left Jaffa and more are leaving. The Arab mayor is still in Jaffa and municipal services are functioning, although with difficulty... ". (Hansard, House of Commons Debates, May 5, 1948, p. 1238). The day after the Irgun offensive began, Haganah troops launched Operation Chametz
es seleccionado para un ataque: puedes negar el ataque. Sólo puedes usar este efecto de "Artistamigo Trompanda" una vez por turno. Japanese Japanese Ｐ（ペンデュラム）効（こう）果（か） ①：１ターンに１度、自分メインフェイズに発動できる。このカードのＰスケールを１つ上げる（最大１２まで）。モンスターの効（こう）果（か）「ＥＭラ・パンダ」のモンスター効果は１ターンに１度しか使用できない。①：自分のＰモンスターが攻撃対象に選択された時に発動できる。その攻撃を無効にする。"The Moment After The Show" is a new book being put out by photographer Matthias Willi and journalist Oliver Joliat. The book documents over 100 different rock stars in the moments after they get off stage after playing a show. It covers various artists from the likes of Kid Rock and Queens Of The Stone Age to people like Peaches and Gnarls Barkley. Check out some of the pictures from the book and if you would like to purchase a copy, it can be found here. Personally I think this is a brilliant idea for a series and a book. Rock stars are interesting characters, and normally have interesting personalities which I always think photograph well. Being someone who has played in bands and toured, I can tell you that when you get off the stage you are in a completely different zone and state of mind. Depending on the set and the night you could be pumped up and ready to party, or completely drenched in sweat, worn out, and ready to get back on the road for the next show. I love seeing this side of rock stars, it feels more human to me. [Via ComplexPrime Minister Shinzo Abe said Monday he has earned U.S. President Donald Trump’s backing in seeking closer ties with Russia in a bid to resolve a long-standing territorial row over islands off Hokkaido that Japan wants returned. “President Trump understands Japan’s (policy) to promote dialogue with Russian President Vladimir Putin to resolve the territorial issue,” Abe told a TV program after returning from the United States, where he held his first summit with Trump on Friday and Saturday in Washington and Florida. Trump has adopted a softer stance toward Russia than his predecessor, Barack Obama, who was at odds with Putin over the conflicts in Ukraine and Syria. The Obama administration had been cautious about Abe courting Putin with economic cooperation and even requested that he refrain from visiting Russia at one point, government sources said earlier. Abe also said that he agreed with Trump on the need to engage in dialogue with Putin to resolve outstanding global issues, including Syria and Ukraine. At their summit Friday, Abe and Trump confirmed the strength of the bilateral alliance, with Trump affirming that the United States is committed to the defense of Japan, including if the Japanese-administered Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea, which are claimed by China, come under attack. They also agreed to launch a high-level economic dialogue to be headed by Japanese Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso and U.S. Vice President Mike Pence covering trade, macroeconomic policy as well as infrastructure and energy projects, Japanese officials said. Following the summit at the White House in Washington, the leaders flew together to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago vacation estate in Palm Beach, Florida, where they played golf and had dinner on both Friday and Saturday. Abe said in the TV program he had “frank talks on the bilateral alliance and regional matters” with Trump over golf. The prime minister said he believes Trump is “gradually” gaining understanding of the significance of the 12-party Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, although Trump has announced the United States will withdraw from it. Abe also said Trump, who has been critical of the United States’ trade deficit with Japan, now knows that the “(current) structure is different from that of the trade frictions in the 1980s and 1990s.” Abe said he explained to Trump that exports of Japanese cars are decreasing compared with the 1980s and 1990s, and more Japanese cars are produced in the United States. In another TV program on Monday, Abe said that the Trump administration would take a “stronger stance” in addressing the North Korean nuclear threat. “The Obama administration was cautious about using military power. (But) Mr. Trump has various options on the cards. He thinks he wants to resolve the issue diplomatically,” Abe said. In the program, Abe also said Trump did not bring up the subject of Japan’s financial contributions for hosting U.S. military forces during any of their meetings. The Japanese government had been concerned that Trump could urge it to pay more after he repeatedly said during the presidential campaign that Japan and other U.S. allies should cover more of the costs of stationing U.S. forces or else defend themselves. The issue is “over,” Abe said. “The president made no reference to it. Rather, he expressed gratitude to us for warmly hosting the U.S. Marines.”Even before Josh Gordon's Saturday arrest on suspicion of DWI, the Cleveland Browns were busy preparing for life without their troubled star wide receiver. Browns general manager Ray Farmer said in a statement Saturday that the team was "disappointed" in Gordon. But the feelings are much stronger than that, according to NFL Media Insider Ian Rapoport, who was told that "doubt and some resignation" has crept in as to whether Gordon will play another down for the team. In fact, Cleveland's coaches and front office began rethinking their offense long before the wideout's latest off-the-field adventure. The NFL has yet to weigh in on Gordon's potentially lengthy suspension for a positive drug test, but none of that changes the fact that the Browns are just two months away from traveling to Heinz Field to face the Steelers in the regular season opener. The offense Cleveland runs that day will look remarkably different than last year's attack: » One season after leading the NFL in pass attempts under Norv Turner, the Browns are a candidate to finish this year topping the league in rushing attempts under new coordinator Kyle Shanahan. The play-caller's zone-blocking scheme is a natural fit for free-agent addition Ben Tate and rookie Terrance West. Coach Mike Pettine has promised all spring that his team will employ a committee approach that might ultimately remind fans of the 1985 campaign that saw Kevin Mack and Earnest Byner both rumble for 1,000 yards on the ground. Third-down option Dion Lewis adds depth while undrafted rookie Isaiah Crowell brings tantalizing skills and game tape. Everyone will eat. » A Gordon-free passing game all but assures a monster season from Pro Bowl tight end Jordan Cameron. Around The League scribe Chris Wesseling completed an outstanding study on Cameron's film from last season, comparing him to a young Tony Gonzalez and "90 percent of Jimmy Graham -- without the benefit of Drew Brees." If the tight end stays healthy, a 1,000-yard campaign is a fair request. » The Browns signed free-agent jitterbug Andrew Hawkins as a vast upgrade over last year's ghastly slot man Davone Bess. The former Bengals wideout was the star of offseason practices and will be relied on heavily as a starter who plays inside and out. The rest of the receiving corps is a whirlwind of aged veterans and inexperienced youngsters. I'm still not convinced Miles Austin or Nate Burleson will even make this roster. A healthy Travis Benjamin brings a deep threat, but the depth chart is otherwise a rash of enigmatic prospects and camp bodies. » We've gotten this far without mentioning Johnny Manziel. While we still expect the rookie to open the season in Pittsburgh, the coaches believe in veteran Brian Hoyer and might ultimately opt for the more conservative choice under center to kick off the year. » Depending on who starts at quarterback, Shanahan will be asked to formulate two playbooks like he did in Washington for Robert Griffin III and Kirk Cousins. Still, the attack he unfurled this spring led The Plain Dealer to remark: "It's for Johnny Manziel." » That's the beautiful mystery here: If Johnny Football's development propels him into the lineup by September, his playmaking ability brings a wild-card aspect to this attack. After all, a difference-making quarterback can cover many sins. Even without Gordon in the lineup, the Browns won't be easy to prepare for if Manziel can flip the switch out of the gate. The latest "Around The League Podcast" ranked the best (and worst) quarterbacks in the NFL today.Though he was inaugurated only weeks ago, Russian President Vladimir Putin already faces serious challenges to his administration. Following his March election, in which fraud was alleged by numerous observers, the inauguration itself was clouded by street protests in which hundreds were detained. And in an extensive new survey of Russian voters, the Center For Strategic Studies in Moscow now finds that public support for Putin’s government is eroding steadily, raising the possibility of a political crisis before he finishes his six-year term. If the report is accurate, then the Kremlin is going to have to find new ways to contain the discontent, especially if the economy starts to decline because of the downturn in Europe and lower oil prices. Judging from a controversial cabinet appointment that Putin made last week, one way the Kremlin may try to combat growing opposition is to reinvigorate propaganda in the area of history—a traditional Soviet weapon. The person running this propaganda machine will be the new Minister of Culture, 41-year-old Vladimir Medinsky, who some Russian commentators have already dubbed the Russian Goebbels. Medinsky, who is well spoken, smooth, and projects a professorial air, is certain to take a more activist role than his predecessor as Minister of Culture, Aleksander Avdeev, a former diplomat, who was expelled from France in 1983 for spying. (The 2009 movie Farewell was based on this episode.) Medinsky’s portfolio includes overseeing state policy regarding arts, film, cultural heritage, archives, libraries, and museums. But instilling patriotism and nationalism among the Russian people, by sponsoring the rewriting of Russia’s history, will doubtless be on the top of his list. An ardent Kremlin loyalist, Medinsky supported Putin actively in his 2004 presidential campaign as well as in the one this year. Since 2008, he has also been known as the author of a series of best-selling books about Russian history called Myths About Russia, which are designed to instill national pride among the population and debunk the idea (allegedly propagated by Western historians) that Russia’s past has many negative features. Thus, for example, Medinsky asserts that Ivan the Terrible was actually a humane leader and suggests that the notion that Russia has a strong history of anti-Semitism is a gross exaggeration. He also denies that Soviet troops invaded and occupied the Baltic states and Poland during World War II or that vast numbers of Soviet prisoners of war were sent to labor camps when the war ended. As Medinsky explained in a 2009 interview: Dirty myths are purposely forged as an instrument of political propaganda or psychological warfare against certain countries. And no other nation in history [except Russia] has endured such prolonged demonization….If we do not squeeze out the poison of dirty myths, they will be passed on, like a baton, to future generations. Given his strong views, it is not surprising that Medinsky also served on Dmitry Medvedev’s Presidential Commission Against the Falsification of History, set up in 2009 and recently disbanded, apparently because it did not really accomplish anything. In the opinion of British historian Robert Service, the commission’s stated aim—to counter the increasingly “severe, evil and aggressive” distortions of Russia’s past—is “absolute poppycock…History is all about argument. There is no absolute historical truth about anything in history.” (Of course independent Russian organizations like Memorial have talked about historical truth in their struggle to have documents from the Soviet and Russian archives released, but their goal has been simply to open up debates that have been smothered by Russian authorities, who have persistently refused to give scholars access to what they need for objective research.) To many critics, Medinsky’s appointment means that Putin has begun to view Russian culture as a key field in which he can extend his control over the electorate and buttress his own reputation as a strong leader. Medinsky’s background reinforces this impression because it suggests possible connections with the foreign intelligence branch of the KGB (now known as the SVR), the organization which, in the Soviet era, turned propaganda (or disinformatsia) into a sophisticated political strategy. (Putin, as we know, has built his power base around his former KGB colleagues, although most worked for counterintelligence, now the FSB.) In 1987, Medinsky became a student at the elite Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO), then known as a breeding ground, or to coin the phrase of the independent paper Novaya gazeta, an “incubator” for employees of the Foreign Intelligence Service. To be sure, MGIMO has traditionally trained diplomats as well as spies, but the line between the two in the former Soviet Union and Russia has always been thin. The fact that Medinsky studied journalism and English and was posted to the press office of the Russian Embassy in Washington, D.C. from 1991 to 1992 raises the possibility that he was on the foreign intelligence rather than the diplomatic track. Journalism has long been a cover for spying among Russians, as illustrated by the well-known spy-turned-defector Oleg Kalugin and Evgenii Primakov, who was chief of the SVR from 1991 to 1996. After the Soviet Union was disbanded, Medinsky returned to Russia, where, rather astoundingly—he was only twenty-two—he became chief of the Russian branch of Ya Corporation, a global public relations firm. Six years later, in 1998, Medinsky took a position in the press office of the powerful tax police (who subsequently arrested oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky), but soon moved into politics, getting elected to the State Duma as a member of Putin’s United Russia party in 2003. Since then, he has used his political clout—he has been head of the Duma Committee on Culture—to help establish his success as a nationalist historian. Ironically, Medinsky’s credentials as an historian were seriously questioned when it emerged early this year that his doctoral dissertation, “The Problem of Objectivity in Elucidating Russian History From the Second Half of the 15th through the 17th Centuries,” which he successfully defended in 2011, was extensively plagiarized. Medinsky has denied the charges, claiming that he simply used general phrases that happened to have been used by others, but a textual analysis posted on a Russian website for historians makes it clear that the plagiarism was substantial. But then, of course, Medinsky’s mentor, Vladimir Putin, also lifted chunks of his doctoral thesis directly from other sources. According to Clifford Gaddy at the Brookings Institute, several pages of Putin’s dissertation, “The Strategic Planning of Regional Resources Under the Formation of Market Relations,” which he completed at the St. Petersburg Mining Institute in 1997, were copied directly from the Russian translation of a 1978 business textbook written by two American professors. (It is common practice in Russia for officials to pay researchers to ghost-write their dissertations, so Putin and Medinsky might not have been aware of the plagiarism. But this of course puts them in even worse light. ) It is worth noting that Putin’s thesis sponsor, the rector of the Mining Institute, Vladimir Litvinenko, who also ran Putin’s recent reelection campaign in St. Petersburg, has become a very wealthy man through his ties to the Kremlin. He owns five per cent of the stocks of Russia’s largest producer of phosphate-based fertilizers, Phosagro (which used to be owned in part by Khodorkovsky). The shares are reportedly worth $260 million. Why is it so important for the Russian regime to actively promote its version of history, instead of opening up its archives and encouraging honest scholarship? Because, as Service has observed, controlling history, for the Kremlin, is a means of controlling the present: “a classic George Orwell scenario.” Despite Putin’s disregard for scholarly standards in his own case, Gaddy and a colleague from Brookings have also pointed out that: For Putin, the interpretation and reinterpretation of history is a crucial matter… He appreciates the power of ‘useful history,’ the application of history as a policy tool, as a social and political organizing force that can help shape group identities and foster coalitions. It remains unclear how Medinsky will attempt to assert himself further into Russia’s cultural life by promoting patriotism and nationalism in films and other art forms. There is also the possibility that his appointment will be part of a broader Kremlin effort to use its law enforcement capabilities to crack down on dissent by writers and artists, who have been playing an active part in the opposition movement, or even begin censorship of the Internet, which is probably a more serious threat. But the new Minister of Culture could be fighting an uphill battle if he expects to make a real difference in how people feel about their country and the way it is run by imposing the Kremlin’s view of history on them. Judging from the polls and from the above-mentioned report, most Russians are much more interested in having their economic and social needs met than in being made proud of their history. And, as plans for another “march of millions” against Putin on June 12 move forward, it seems clear that they are increasingly demanding the right to have a say in politics. In other words, do the Russian people really care whether or not Ivan the Terrible was a nice guy?Recently there has been much speculation that the US government will do anything, anything, to rekindle the housing bubble. Even if that means providing Option ARMs at blue light special prices and hiring Angelo Mozillo as Mortgage Czar (we hope we are kidding about the latter). Yes, those very same Option ARMs which banks' balance sheets are still expecting to be neutron bombed by, courtesy of the long gone days when there was private sector mortgage origination risk. Now that all the mortgage exposure is borne by taxpayers, we decided to analyze how the ARM spread to the traditional 30 Year Mortgage has moved throughout the year. Somehow we were not surprised that the 30 Yr - 1 Yr ARM spread for Freddie Mac just hit a record wide this past week. The government is presumably actively encouraging borrowers to approach the GSEs, and using the same NINJA protocols, to ask, nay, demand, an Adjustable Rate Mortgage. Who cares what happens one year down the line? Certainly not the US government which has $3 trillion in T-Bills to roll by this time next year. First, we present a chart of the Freddie 30 Year compared to the Freddie 1 Year ARM for 2009. The spread which was at 6 bps at the beginning of the year, after briefly crossing into negative territory in April, has ballooned to a record wide of 60 bps. The situation in the 5/1 ARM camp is even more obscene: the absolute spread has collapsed from 5.49% at the beginning of the year to 4.37% (and at times being tighter than the corresponding 1 yr ARM spread): a 112 bps contraction! There is no point in charting this. It is mighty obvious that reading between the lines, and courtesy of the near-vertical yield curve, Uncle Sam is pushing every deadbeat "homeowner" in foreclosure to go ahead and get a mortgage with FNM and FRE. And not just any mortgage, but a 1 or 5/1 ARM if possible. Did we learn anything from the subprime bubble and subsequent collapse in housing? Not a thing... except how to get the US taxpayer to pay for it all when it collapse the next time around. Another observation is the spread tightening between the 10 Year TSY and the 30 Year Freddie Fixed as well as the 1 year ARM. What is notable is the near 1.000 R2 that lasted thru late May, followed by a very dramatic divergence in spreads at that time. Did the government have a closed door meeting in early June informing the GSEs they are now supposed to peddle ARM mortgages to anything with a pulse and a signature? That sure did not work out too well for New Century and all of its peers. As we progress into 2010 keep an eye out on this divergence. In its "all in" gamble to get every renter back to homeownership status, the ARM spread, both absolute and relative, will be the most indicative light of just how much money the Fed and the administration are willing to burn in order to extend and pretend until there is nothing left to either extend or pretend. Last but not least, also keep an eye out on underlying core interest rates. While the move in the Treasury curve is a whole new topic altogether, from here on out near term rates can only blow out (zero is a hard bottom). This will likely wreak some major havoc on not only the current and future ARM contingent, but the fixed mortgage population. Observe that the 30 year Freddie has not budged since the beginning of the year: it started the year off at 5.01% and is now at 4.94%. This has occurred even as the 10 year has blown out from 2.21% on January 8 to 3.75$ today: a massive 154 basis points. It appears the 30 year Fixed (wholesale or otherwise) is the primary bastion behind which the mortgage vigilantes are fortified: if they can retain it, look for the next round of action to happen in the 1 Yr ARM and 5/1 ARM arena. And for those who are interested in some of the regime change observations form a macro perspective, the chart below demonstrates just why it is that mortgage securitizations may not be all the lucrative or even interesting to securitizers going forward: the key take home from this chart is that while the Mortgage spread return as a percentage of total return has collapsed from 40 bps to sub 20 bps, so has securitization, and for a reason. Remember: securitization is merely a massively leveraged way to express an "off balance sheet" bet. If you assume that leverage multiple was between 20-40x, the potential return has been cut in half from 8-16% down to 4-8%. At these return expectations, investors are willing to put money into HY and other fixed income funds (and judging by mutual fund flows, are actively doing so). The Fed has singlehandedly eliminated the "risk" in the mortgage market, and as long as it continues intervening in it, will make the much needed resecuritization phenomenon impossible. Bernanke has created the biggest Catch 22 imaginable, guaranteeing that the longer the Fed continues in being the market in mortgages, the less likely it is that the private sector will ever get involved.As we reported at the time of NBC’s eleventh-hour renewal of Community, there had been interest in bringing back series creator Dan Harmon for what I hear is expected to be the final 13-episode season of the cult comedy. (It is not on NBC‘s fall schedule). I have learned that both Harmon and key former Community writer-producer Chris McKenna have been approached about rejoining the show for its final chapter. Harmon is currently unattached, while McKenna is under an overall deal at NBC sibling Universal TV. McKenna, who served as co-executive producer on the Sony TV-produced Community for its first three seasons, left last May to move to Uni TV. Creator/executive producer Harmon was replaced as showrunner by David Guarascio and Moses Port a couple of weeks later. I hear Guarascio and Port had a one-year deal and were approached about coming back but opted to move on. Related: ‘Community’ Is Coming Back, Will Dan Harmon Return Too?Author of ‘shock and awe’ doctrine says elite threatened by non-state actors like Edward Snowden Paul Joseph Watson Prison Planet.com January 17, 2014 Writing for the Atlantic Council, a prominent think tank based in Washington DC, Harlan K. Ullman warns that an “extraordinary crisis” is needed to preserve the “new world order,” which is under threat of being derailed by non-state actors like Edward Snowden. The Atlantic Council is considered to be a highly influential organization with close ties to major policy makers across the world. It’s headed up by Gen. Brent Scowcroft, former United States National Security Advisor under U.S. Presidents Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush. Snowcroft has also advised President Barack Obama. Harlan K. Ullman was the principal author of the “shock and awe” doctrine and is now Chairman of the Killowen Group which advises government leaders. In an article entitled War on Terror Is not the Only Threat, Ullman asserts that, “tectonic changes are reshaping the international geostrategic system,” arguing that it’s not military superpowers like China but “non-state actors” like Edward Snowden, Bradley Manning and anonymous hackers who pose the biggest threat to the “365 year-old Westphalian system” because they are encouraging individuals to become self-empowered, eviscerating state control. “Very few have taken note and fewer have acted on this realization,” notes Ullman, lamenting that “information revolution and instantaneous global communications” are thwarting the “new world order” announced by U.S. President George H.W. Bush more than two decades ago. “Without an extraordinary crisis, little is likely to be done to reverse or limit the damage imposed by failed or failing governance,” writes Ullman, implying that only another 9/11-style cataclysm will enable the state to re-assert its dominance while “containing, reducing and eliminating the dangers posed by newly empowered non-state actors.” Ullman concludes that the elimination of non-state actors and empowered individuals “must be done” in order to preserve the new world order. A summary of their material suggests that the Atlantic Council’s definition of a “new world order” is a global technocracy run by a fusion of big government and big business under which individuality is replaced by transhumanist singularity. Ullman’s rhetoric sounds somewhat similar to that espoused by Trilateral Commission co-founder and regular Bilderberg attendee Zbigniew Brzezinski, who in 2010 told a Council on Foreign Relations meeting that a “global political awakening,” in combination with infighting amongst the elite, was threatening to derail the move towards a one world government. Ullman’s implied call for an “extraordinary crisis” to reinvigorate support for state power and big government has eerie shades of the Project For a New American Century’s 1997 lament that “absent some catastrophic catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor,” an expansion of U.S. militarism would have been impossible. In 2012, Patrick Clawson, member of the influential pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) think tank, also suggested that the United States should launch a staged provocation to start a war with Iran. Ullman’s concern over failing state institutions having their influence eroded by empowered individuals, primarily via the Internet, is yet another sign that the elite is panicking over the “global political awakening” that has most recently expressed itself via the actions of people like Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, Bradley Manning and their growing legion of supporters. Facebook @ https://www.facebook.com/paul.j.watson.71 FOLLOW Paul Joseph Watson @ https://twitter.com/PrisonPlanet ********************* Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Infowars.com and Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a host for Infowars Nightly News. This article was posted: Friday, January 17, 2014 at 7:20 am Print this page. Infowars.com Videos: Comment on this articlePresident Donald Trump fumed at his daughter Ivanka Trump’s criticism of Alabama Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore, the New York Times reported Saturday, citing three unnamed staff members who heard his reaction. Ivanka Trump had said in an interview, when asked about Moore, that “there’s a special place in hell for people who prey on children.” “Do you believe this?” Trump told several aides “in the hours after” Ivanka Trump’s comments, the Times reported. The comments were later included in an ad by Moore’s Democratic opponent, Doug Jones. Moore has been accused by several women of pursuing relationships with them when they were teenagers and he was a grown man. One woman, Leigh Corfman, told the Washington Post in a Nov. 9 article that Moore attempted to initiate sexual contact with her when she was 14. Beverly Young Nelson alleged in a press conference days later that Moore attempted to rape her when she was 16. Moore has denied all wrongdoing. The White House’s message on the race has changed day-to-day. Initially following the Post’s reporting, the White House said in a statement that Moore should step aside from the race if Corfman’s allegations were true. In subsequent days, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders refused to engage with further questions about Moore, saying Alabama voters should choose their next senator, and Trump did not answer shouted questions about the race. On Tuesday, Trump said “We don’t need a liberal Democrat in that seat,” indicating he stood by an endorsement of Moore made before the revelations about him pursuing teenagers. White House adviser Kellyanne Conway said a day prior that a vote for Jones would mean a vote against Trump’s promised tax cuts — an implicit endorsement that is now the subject of a Hatch Act investigation. The law forbids officials from using their government positions to boost candidates for office. The Times also reported Saturday, without citing a specific source for the claim, that Trump had suggested to a senator earlier this year — and to an adviser more recently — that the so-called “Access Hollywood” tape “was not authentic.” In the tape, Trump is heard bragging that he can kiss and grab women without their permission because he is famous. The Times noted that Trump verified the accuracy of the tape and apologized for his recorded comments when they were first unearthed in October 2016.Constantine Phaulkon (Greek: Κωνσταντῖνος Γεράκης, Konstantinos Gerakis; γεράκι is the Greek word for "falcon"; 1647 – 5 June 1688), also known as Κωσταντής Γεράκης or Costantin Gerachi[1], Constantino Falcão in Portuguese and simply as Monsieur Constance in French, was a Greek adventurer, who became prime counsellor to King Narai of Ayutthaya,[2] assuming the Thai noble title Chao Phraya Wichayen (เจ้าพระยาวิชาเยนทร์).[3]:59,64 The French ambassador Chevalier de Chaumont presents a letter from Louis XIV to King Narai. Constance Phaulkon is seen kowtowing in the lower left corner of the print, making a gesture telling the ambassador to raise the letter up to the king. Thailand. Ban Wichayen (residence of Constantine Phaulkon), Lopburi Born within the fortress of Asso in the region of Erisso (pertinenza di Erisso) on northern Cephalonia (then under Venetian rule) to a Greek father and a Venetian mother. The Gerakis (Γεράκης) / Gerachi family was already established there, in the village of Plagia (Πλαγιά), since the 16th century.[4][5] Phaulkon came to Siam (today's Thailand), as a merchant in 1675 after working for England's East India Company. He became fluent in Thai in just a few years and began to work at the court of King Narai as a translator (he was also fluent in English, French, Portuguese, and Malay). Due to his experience with the East India Company, he was soon able to become a prime counsellor of the king. He worked in the treasury.[6] In 1682, Phaulkon abandoned Anglicanism for Catholicism[7]:254–265 and soon after married a Catholic woman of mixed Japanese-Portuguese-Bengali descent named Maria Guyomar de Pinha.[8] They lived a life of affluence as Phaulkon rose to become highly influential at the Siamese court of King Narai. Their marriage brought two sons, João and Jorge, the first of whom died before his father.[9] Following troubles with the English and the Dutch, Phaulkon engineered a Franco-Siamese rapprochement leading to the exchange of numerous embassies between France and Siam, as well as the dispatch of an expeditionary force by the French in 1687. Phaulkon, called Monsieur Constance by the French and addressed cher ami by their king, was their main ally for several years. In recognition King Louis XIV of France awarded him with the knighthood of the Order of Saint Michael, a hereditary title in the French nobility as well as French citizenship for him and his family.[10] The Abbé de Choisy, who was part of the first French embassy to Thailand in 1685, wrote about M. Phaulkon's character: "He was one of those in the world who have the most wit, liberality, magnificence, intrepidity, and was full of great projects, but perhaps he only wanted to have French troops in order to try and make himself king after the death of his master, which he saw as imminent. He was proud, cruel, pitiless, and with inordinate ambition. He supported the Christian religion because it could support him; but I would never have trusted him in things in which his own advancement was not involved." Abbé de Choisy, Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire de Louis XIV, 1983:150.[11] Phaulkon's closeness to the king earned him the envy of some Thai members of the royal court, which would eventually prove to be his undoing. When King Narai became terminally ill, a rumor spread that Phaulkon wanted to use the designated heir, Phra Pui, as a puppet and actually become ruler himself. As unlikely as this was, it provided an excuse for Pra Phetracha, the foster brother of Narai to stage a coup d'état, the 1688 Siamese revolution. Without the king's knowledge, both Phaulkon and his followers as well as the royal heir were arrested and executed on 5 June 1688 in Lopburi. When King Narai learned what had happened, he was furious—but was too weak to take any action. Narai died several days later, virtually a prisoner in his own palace. Phetracha then proclaimed himself the new king of Siam and began a xenophobic regime which expelled almost all foreigners from the kingdom. The different interpretations of Phetracha's motivation for ordering the arrest and execution of Phaulkon have made the Greek's position in Thai history somewhat controversial. Supporters of Phetracha's actions have depicted Phaulkon as an opportunistic foreigner who sought to use his influence to control of the kingdom on behalf of Western interests. More skeptical historians believe that Phaulkon was simply a convenient scapegoat – a means for Phetracha to seize the throne from the rightful heir by capitalizing on the envy and suspicion Phaulkon had engendered.This liveblog has been retired, future updates will appear here July 25, 2011 Latest (12:46pm ET) Norway killer tells judge two more cells exist : Johan Ahlander and Aasa Christine Stoltz, Reuters Police updates via BBC liveblog Investigation into Mr Breivik’s links to Poland still going on – Norwegian police. Nobody has been arrested in Poland with links to the Breivik case – Norwegian police. Police point out that Mr Breivik appeared to contradict himself, saying variously he had acted alone and had worked with two other “cells”. Police say today’s hearing was held in a closed court because they were “worried about giving out too much information”. “One of the reasons was that we thought that other people might be implicated.” (9:39am ET) Reuters Picture of Anders Behring Breivik arriving at court. @ketilbstensrud said: TRANSLATED QUOTES FROM ANDERS BEHRING BREIVIK ON HIS MOTIVE, READ OUT BY JUDGE KIM HEGER (THIS INFORMATION HAS EMERGED IN POLICE INTERROGATION): “The objective for the attacks was to hand people a powerful message. The accused wanted to cause the Labour party as much damage as possible, so that recruitment would be limited in the future. “The operation was not about killing as many as possible, but to provide a significant signal that simply could not be misunderstood [because] as long as the Labour party maintains their ideological line of politics, whereby they deconstruct Norwegian culture and ‘mass-import’ Muslims, they must be held accountable for treason. One cannot allow one’s country to be colonised by Muslims.” Reuters TV image of Anders Behring Breivik being transported to a hearing this morning. Full slideshow here. Video of Anders Behring Breivik transported out of court. The alleged Norway bomber/shooter Anders B. Breivik was in court this morning. Updates via Michelle Shephard of the Toronto Star July 23, 2011 Latest (7:58pm ET) VG Nett claims Anders B. Breivik has confessed to police both the shooting in Utøya and bombing in Oslo. His lawyer has also told Norway’s NRK television channel he made the confession, according to The Australian. (5:25pm ET) Reuters reports through shooting suspect’s lawyer, he believed his actions were ‘atrocious’ but ‘necessary'; He’s willing to explain himself in court. YouTube has now pulled the alleged #Utøya shooter’s manifesto video citing violation of terms of service. Some are reposting it, one mirror is here but is likely to be pulled as well. Storyful has a copy here as well. Here’s a Twitvid version via @alphaleah (4:56pm ET) Norweigan police verify the authenticity of the YouTube video posted below alleged to be posted by alledged Utøya shooter Anders B. Breivik according to Sky News senior correspondent Ian Woods. Alleged manifesto of alleged Utøya shooter Anders B. Breivik, via @ketilbstensrud in the form of a Word doc seen here below: 2083+ +a+European+Declaration+of+Independence Google translation of NRK report on Breivik’s manuscript via @avinunu (3:59pm ET) Video for informational purposes only. It has not been established that this video is connected to the alledged Utøya shooter Anders B. Breivik, though he is featured at the
the USA, but his tournament got off to a shaky start. He was caught well off his line against the Republic of Ireland in the opening match, as Ray Houghton lobbed him to record a shock 1-0 victory. In Italy’s second game, against Norway, Pagliuca was shown a straight red card for handling outside the area. This gave him the unwanted record of being the first goalkeeper to be sent off in the World Cup finals. Italy went on to win 1-0, but their first choice keeper would serve a two match ban. Pagliuca returned for the quarter-final tie against Spain, which Italy won 2-1 in extra time. They won the semi-final against Bulgaria by the same scoreline to book a final date with Brazil. In the Pasadena Rose Bowl, following a goalless 120 minutes, the final went to penalties. Pagliuca created another record by being the first goalkeeper to save a penalty from a shootout in the World Cup Final. It ultimately mattered little, however, as Brazil were the ones who held their nerve to lift the trophy for the fourth time. Inter Regardless of the many millions spent by Inter during the 1990’s, Pagliuca’s time at the San Siro was not exactly trophy-laden. Despite boasting talents such as Ronaldo, Dennis Bergkamp, Roberto Baggio and Youri Djorkaeff, they continually flattered to deceive. Year on year, after a lavish spending spree by new owner Massimo Moratti, they would be tipped as title contenders. In this time, Pagliuca regularly showed just why Inter had splashed out so much money on him. He seemed to improve year after year, unlike his club. What probably didn’t help matters was that Moratti was fond of hiring and firing managers on a regular basis. Such a platform does not make a stable club, and this was shown with the results on the pitch. Inter finished 6th and 7th, respectively, during Pagliuca’s first two seasons in Milan, and suffered early UEFA Cup exits in both campaigns. Towards the end of the 1995-96 season, future England manager Roy Hodgson took charge and results began to improve. Inter secured a European place by virtue of Juventus winning the Champions League. Unfortunately for Pagliuca, the emergence of Angelo Peruzzi at Juventus had not gone unnoticed by the national team. He would soon usurp the Inter goalkeeper as his country’s number one, although Pagliuca remained an important squad member. The following season saw them secure a third place finish and reach the UEFA Cup Final, which they lost to Schalke on penalties. Despite their fortunes improving, Hodgson was replaced by Luigi Simoni. It also meant that Pagliuca had now been on the losing side in the final of all three of UEFA’s cup competitions. The only season in the 1990’s where Inter actually challenged for the Serie A title was 1997-98. Once again, Pagliuca was magnificent, but this was helped in no small part by the goals of Brazilian striker Ronaldo. They finished runners-up to Juventus, but went one better in the UEFA Cup by beating Lazio 3-0 in the final. Inter’s league position meant that they also qualified for the Champions League for the first time since its restructure. A poor start to the campaign meant that Simoni was dismissed in November 1998. Before the end of the season, Inter would have a further three managers at the helm. Once again, this turmoil affected matters on the pitch and Inter finished a disappointing 8th in Serie A. They were also eliminated from the Champions League in the quarter-finals, by eventual winners Manchester United. Marcello Lippi was placed in charge of the Nerazzurri at the beginning of the 1999-2000 season. One of his first acts was to replace Pagliuca with the same man who had taken his number one spot at International level. Just as Pagliuca had replaced Zenga for club and country five years earlier, Peruzzi had now done the same to him. Later Career Despite several offers, Ginaluca Pagliuca joined his hometown club Bologna, where he stayed for seven seasons. In this time he was their first choice goalkeeper, and even stayed with the club when they were relegated to Serie B in 2004-05. After a season of playing in Italy’s second tier, he helped his club back to the top flight. He then joined Ascoli for one season, and retired in the summer of 2007. Pagliuca held the record for the most appearances in Serie A for a goalkeeper at the time of his retirement. He was only recently overtaken by Gianluigi Buffon. He can also boast that nobody has saved more penalties in Italy’s top division, with 24 in total. Another record he can be proud of is that he was never on the losing side in the Milan Derby. In the five years he was at the San Siro, Inter never lost to their city rivals. Final Thought Because Gianluca Pagliuca did not play in a team that dominated either at home or abroad, he is often overlooked. He played in the final of the World Cup, European Cup, Cup Winners’ Cup and UEFA Cup, winning the latter two, but none of the sides he played for consistently dominated over a significant period of time. It’s because of this that Pagliuca becomes the first goalkeeper to be featured in the Forgotten Idols series. A world class player who never received the accolades he probably deserved. Previous instalments in the Forgotten Idols series are below: Part 1: Dejan Savićević Part 2: Stefan Effenberg Part 3: Guiseppe Signori Part 4: Miguel Ángel Nadal Part 5: Darko Pančev Part 6: Oliver Bierhoff Part 7: Nuno Gomes Part 8: Mark Hateley Part 9: Andrei Kanchelskis Part 10: Jari Litmanen Main PhotoFormer Chicago Bears linebacker Brian Urlacher, now an analyst for Fox Sports 1, lifted the lid Tuesday off a commonly used practice in college and the NFL. Urlacher revealed that, during his tenure with the Bears, the team -- like other clubs around the league -- would fake injuries to slow high-powered offenses. "We had a guy who was the designated dive guy," Urlacher said, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. Urlacher went on to say that a Bears coach would simulate the diving motion a swimmer makes with his arms, and the player designated as the dive guy "would get hurt." Urlacher said the team wasn't coached on how to fake injuries but said the practice was part of the Bears' game plan. Urlacher played for the Bears from 2000-12. He was selected to eight Pro Bowls and was an All-Pro on five occasions.The Basics Instant runoff voting (IRV) is a ranked choice voting system for single-winner elections that, in a single round of counting, accomplishes the goal of a two-round runoff election. Sometimes called "ranked choice voting," "preferential voting," "majority voting" and "the alternative vote," IRV avoids the undemocratic outcomes of plurality voting that occur when so-called "spoilers" split the majority vote. By allowing voters to rank candidates in order of preference, IRV enables voters to vote their hopes instead of their fears, upholds the principle of majority rule and avoids the expenses and campaign spending associated with two rounds of voting. Instant runoff voting is used to elect the national parliaments of Australia and Papua New Guinea, the president of Ireland and the leaders of governments in a growing number of cities, including London (United Kingdom), Wellington (New Zealand), Minneapolis and St. Paul in Minnesota, San Francisco and Oakland in California, and Portland (ME). IRV is also used to select the Best Picture Oscar and for leaders of hundreds of major private associations and student governments. Explore this website for more information on how IRV works and where it is used. For more information on the benefits of IRV, see Why Use IRV? How Instant Runoff Voting Works: Option One Instant runoff voting uses ranked choice ballots to simulate a traditional runoff in a single round of voting. Voters rank candidates in order of preference. They typically are given the option to rank as many or as few candidates as they wish. Indicating support for a lesser choice never counts your higher choices. Every voter has one vote. That vote is counted initially for a voter's first choice.. If there are more than two candidates who receive votes, the last-place candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated. More than one candidate can be eliminated simultaneously if their combined vote is less than the total of any other remaining candidate. Ballots counting for the eliminated candidate are added to the totals of the candidate ranked next on each ballot. This process of eliminating last-place candidates and adding ballots cast for those candidates to the totals of the next-ranked choice on that ballot continues until two candidates remain. The candidate with the majority of votes in this final round is declared the winner How Instant Runoff Voting Works: Option Two Voters rank the candidates and those first choice rankings are tallied as in Option One. The count is stopped at any point that a candidate as a majority of votes cast for continuing candidates - either by having a majority of first choice rankings or a majority of total votes in any round of counting. Alternative approaches: Some jurisdictions limit potential winners to candidates who finish in the top two or top three in first choices. Some jurisdictions establish a limit on rankings. Some jurisdictions establish a winning threshold that is less than 50% of the vote (in which case they must limit winners to those in the top two in first choices.) How Instant Runoff Voting Work: Video Animation This animation explains the instant runoff voting counting process: Other ExplanationsBy now, “Once Upon A Time” fans are well aware that “Frozen” character Elsa will be making her way to Storybrooke. But the question on everyone’s mind is: Will the Snow Queen be good … or evil? For those who are unfamiliar with the popular Disney movie, Elsa was the princess of Arendelle. She grew up with the power to create ice, frost and snow, but was unable to fully control her strength. As a child, Elsa accidentally injured her younger sister, Anna, and put a strain on her family’s relationship. [SPOILER ALERT: Do NOT continue reading unless you want to know what happened in “Frozen.”] Elsa and Anna’s parents, the king and queen, kept the siblings apart for fear that Elsa would once again injure her sister. And in order to protect Anna, had her memory of Elsa’s powers erased. Their decision ultimately ended up causing problems between the sisters, which erupted after the king and queen died at sea. When Elsa came of age she took over the kingdom, but fled after a fight with Anna triggered her powers. Her magic accidentally cast an eternal winter upon the kingdom of Arendelle, and it was left up to Anna to bring her sister home and end the storm. In “Frozen” Anna ended up succeeding in reuniting with her sister and ending the eternal winter. But will the same happen in ABC’s “Once Upon A Time”? TV Line asked “OUAT” co-creator Adam Horowitz if Elsa will be introduced on the show before she and Anna are “happily reunited,” but Horowitz wasn’t ready to spill such a juicy spoiler just yet. “Maybe yes, maybe no,” he teased. “It could be after. Once can be in a snit for many reasons.” “Once Upon A Time” viewers will remember that Elsa appeared in the final moments of the Season 3 finale. When Emma and Hook returned from the Enchanted Forest of the past they accidentally brought a stowaway with them from Rumpel’s dungeons … an urn. In the last few minutes of the episode, the urn spilled and formed “Frozen’s” Snow Queen. With that said, fans should remember that after the finale Horowitz promised that they’re trying to “honor” the movie.” “You know, there’s a backstory to how she appeared in Rumpel’s vault, and what she’s up to now when she’s walking out of the farmhouse that we’ll get into very quickly, most likely in the premiere,” the co-creator told Entertainment Weekly. “And in doing so, we very much want to honor what came in the movie. We’re not trying to redefine the character; what we’re trying to do is take the beloved character and fit her into our world.” As of mid-July, the ABC show was working on casting Anna for Season 4. TV Line is reporting that Elsa is expected to be featured in nine upcoming episodes, while Anna and Kristoff, a mountain man who befriends Anna, will appear in approximately six. How would you like to see Elsa in “Once Upon A Time”? Tweet your thoughts to @AmandaTVScoop.Tympanic dares you to brave The Den and explore several dystopias with us for the final show in our eighth season: TODAY WE ESCAPE: Plays Inspired by OK COMPUTER. Enter a sterilized future inspired by one of the most haunting -- and touching -- albums ever recorded. TODAY WE ESCAPE: Plays Inspired by OK COMPUTER March 13th through April 4th Fridays and Saturdays at 7:30 p.m. and Sundays at 3 p.m. Special industry performance on Wednesday, March 25, at 8 p.m. The Den Theatre (1333 N. Milwaukee Ave.) Tickets $20 general, $15 students/industry/seniors A companion piece to Tympanic's critically-acclaimed 2012 play festival, Deliver Us From Nowhere -- itself drawn from Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska -- Today We Escape pairs twelve Chicago playwrights and directors to create an evening of theatre inspired by Radiohead's experimental album, OK Computer. Each writer will use a song on the record as the springboard for a short play before an ensemble of musicians composes original music based on the plays themselves. Like Deliver Us....Today We Escape is a meditation on how art reflects art; a live album in the most unique sense of the word, and a celebration of music that is at times detached, yet strangely comforting. THE PLAYWRIGHTS: Michael Patrick Thornton - co-founding Artistic Director of The Gift Theatre. Randall Colburn* - Hesperia (Writers Theatre), Verse Chorus Verse (Tympanic Theatre), Happy. Happier Then. (Deliver us from Nowhere Festival - Tympanic Theatre) Ted Brengle* - Assistant Literary Manager at Tympanic Theatre, Daughters of Necessity (Deliver us from Nowhere Festival - Tympanic Theatre) Wren Graves - The Boy Who Fell (Tympanic Theatre) Joe Zarrow - Principal Principle (Stage Left and Theatre Seven of Chicago) Natalie DiCristofano - Burn the Black Dog (Wayward Productions), A Play (Tympanic Theatre), SUGAR (You're Welcome Productions) Justin Gerber - Film Editor/Senior Staff Writer at Consequence of Sound, Man Will Meddle (Deliver Us From Nowhere Festival - Tympanic Theatre), The Timey Wimey Fantastic Brilliant Extravaganza (Geronimo!) (co-writer, The Right Brain Project) Chris Bower - Found Objects, Curious Theater Branch, When You're Dead (Deliver Us From Nowhere Festival - Tympanic Theatre) Scott Barsotti - Company member with WildClaw Theatre, current member of the Goodman Playwrights Unit, The Revenants (WildClaw), Jet Black Chevrolet (the side project), Brewed (Tympanic Theatre) & The Stray (Deliver Us From Nowhere Festival - Tympanic Theatre) Brooke Allen - The Deer (The Ruckus), The Life And Death of Madam Barker (Red Tape Theatre), Ruby Wilder (Tympanic Theatre) Alex Lubischer - The Xylophone West (The Fine Print Theatre Company), Survey No. 5 (Collaboraction) Rory Jobst - Film Producer and Company Member at Oracle Productions, Daniel Day- Lewis and the Big Potatas (Prop Thtr), Samuel Beckett, Andre the Giant, and the Crickets (Oracle bsides) THE DIRECTORS: Allison Hendrix: co-Artistic Director of Kokandy Productions, actor with Kokandy Productions, The Hypocrites, The Ruckus Dennis Frymire: Company Member with The Ruckus and Founding Member of Broken Road Theatre Company, Fault Lines (Broken Road) Allison Shoemaker: Director of Marketing & PR at The Ruckus; Heist Play and The Strange (The Ruckus), The Stray (Deliver Us From Nowhere Festival - Tympanic Theatre) Richard Paro: Artistic Director of Mudgeonsoul Productions and Indie Boots Theatre and Film Festivals Amanda Dunne Acevedo: Genesis Ensemble, Director of Education at Northlight Theatre, Resurrecting Beauty (Deliver Us From Nowhere Festival - Tympanic Theatre) Lindsey Barlag Thornton: Genesis Ensemble, School of the Art Institute, We Are The Things of Ghosts, Phenomena (Genesis Ensemble) Josh Sobel: Literary Manager/Ensemble Member at Strawdog Theatre, Artistic Director at Haven Theatre, The Hunting of the Snark/Just So Stories (Strawdog), How We Got On (Citadel) Spenser Davis: Literary Manger of Broken Nose Theatre, the Artistic Director of Hobo Junction, From White Plains (Broken Nose Theatre) Scott Weinstein: Titanic & Spelling Bee (Griffin Theatre), Seussical (Chicago Shakespeare Theatre) Rebecca Willingham: Assistant Directed Cicada (Route 66), strangers, babies (Steep Theatre), The Seafarer (Seanachai Theatre Company) Eric Turner: The Tempest (City Lit) Joshua Ellison: Assistant Literary Manager at Tympanic Theatre, Vacation (Area IV Theatre), Julia Pastrana... (Tympanic Theatre), Daughters of Necessity (Deliver Us From Nowhere Festival - Tympanic Theatre) Michael Carnow: Artistic Associate at Tympanic Theatre, 200 Feet & Counting (The Ten Festival - The Gift Theatre), The Drive (Deliver Us From Nowhere Festival - Tympanic Theatre) THE BANDS: McKenzie Gerber The Barbarians PRODUCTION TEAM: Stage Manager: Erin Altekruse* Production Manager: Dan Caffrey* Casting Director: Kelly Parker Sound Designer/Original Music: Maxwell Shults* Props Designer: Holly McCauley* Video Director: Chris Waldron* Poster Design: Joshua Mikel* Artistic Director: Dan Caffrey* Managing Director: Brenda Scott Wlazlo* Literary Manager: Chris Acevedo* Co-director of Development: Ali Delianides* *denotes Tympanic Company Member or Artistic Associate About Tympanic Theatre Company - After moving to Chicago in the Fall of 2006, a handful of fellow alumni from Florida State University founded The Tympanic Theatre Company. Producing seven seasons thus far of thrilling new work, the collective has since expanded to 31 members and associates, and is helmed by Artistic Director Dan Caffrey and Managing Director Brenda Scott Wlazlo. Besides being a resident company at the side project from 2007 to 2011, Tympanic has participated in the Department of Cultural Affairs' Incubator Series, extensively workshopping Randall Colburn's Verse Chorus Verse (directed by Kyra Lewandowski) before mounting the full world premiere, as well as Mary Arrchie's Abbie Hoffman Festival and Curious Theatre Branch's Rhino Fest. Recent productions include Deliver Us From Nowhere-a collection of short plays each based on a song from Bruce Springsteen's album Nebraska-the world premiere of Dan Caffrey's Sandalwood (directed by Aaron Henrickson and co-produced with the side project), the world premiere of Scott T. Barsotti's Brewed, (directed by Anna C. Bahow and co-produced with The Ruckus), and the Midwest Premiere of Shaun Prendergast's The True History Of The Tragic Life And Triumphant Death Of Julia Pastrana, The Ugliest Woman In The World (directed by Joshua Ellison), which was performed entirely in the dark. The Tympanic Theatre Company is dedicated to producing new and developed work with fantastical, frightening, or absurd subject matter that provokes, inspires, and entertains. Through our use of vibrant storytelling, dynamic language, and colorful characters, we invite our audience to plunge headfirst with us into theatrical worlds that are fresh, energetic, and visceral. Related Articles Shows View More Chicago Stories More Hot Stories For YouOwn all of the epic action with the Spartacus Complete Collection! Blood and Sand Betrayed by his country. Beaten into slavery. Reborn as a warrior. Spartacus: Blood and Sand' is a graphic and visceral account of Rome's most famous gladiator. When he's separated from the love of his life, Spartacus is forced into the gruesome and bloodthirsty arena, where a grisly death is primetime entertainment. Gods of the Arena The House of Batiatus is on the rise, basking in the glow of its infamous champion Gannicus, whose skill with a sword is matched only by his thirst for wine and women. These are the times a young Batiatus has been waiting for. Poised to overthrow his father and take control, he'll freely betray anyone to ensure his gladiators are in the highest demand. And he'll have his loyal and calculating wife Lucretia by his side for every underhanded scheme. Vengeance On the heels of the bloody escape from the House of Batiatus that concluded 'Spartacus: Blood and Sand', the gladiator rebellion continues and begins to strike fear into the heart of the Roman Republic. Containing all of the blood-soaked action, exotic sexuality, villainy and heroism that has come to distinguish the series, the tale of Spartacus resumes in epic fashion. War of the Damned Gaius Claudius Glaber is dead. The rebellion has swelled to thousands of freed slaves, and Spartacus, alongside his generals Crixus, Gannicus and Agron, prepares for war with Rome. The epic conclusion of a legendary journey, "Spartacus: War of the Damned" unleashes a battle unlike anything ever seen before.Image copyright US Army Image caption The XM25 weighs about 14lb (6.3kg) excluding ammunition, making it a portable weapon A computerised weapon designed to attack enemies protected by walls or otherwise sheltered is set to be tested by the US Army early next year. The XM25 "smart grenade launcher" lets combatants set its ammunition to explode when it reaches a set distance. It means a grenade can be set to go off just after it passes through a window or is just over the target's head, without having struck an object. One expert called it "revolutionary" but warned there were risks involved. An earlier prototype was tested in Afghanistan but was withdrawn from use in 2013 after a flaw caused a soldier to be injured during a training exercise. Air-bursts The XM25's developer - Virginia-based Orbital ATK - revealed in an interview with the Defense News website that the US Army planned to carry out new "qualification tests" in the spring. Image copyright Orbital ATK Image caption An built-in computer makes use of laser-generated data to inform gunners how to adjust their aim "It provides combat overmatch," said spokesman Jarrod Krull, who added the weapon could be in use by early 2017. The shoulder-fired machine uses a laser rangefinder to help its user determine the distance to their target and then tells them how to adjust their aim to take into account the force of gravity. The settings can be altered, so, for example, if a window is measured to be 200m (656ft) away, the grenade can be set to explode after 201m to travel just past the wall for maximum effect. Each of the five 25mm (1in) grenade rounds contained in a clip can be programmed to detonate at a specific distance, which they measure as they speed towards their target. Orbital ATK says the weapon can be used to "precisely" kill hidden enemies up to 500m away or hit them with a powerful air-burst from up to 700m. Image copyright Orbital ATK Image caption Air-bursts can be used to disable an enemy without killing them "When it was combat-trialled in Afghanistan, it was reportedly incredibly effective," Justin Bronk, from the defence think tank Rusi, told the BBC. "It's extremely useful in fairly open areas with longer ranges where there tends to be fairly hard cover in abundance - so ditches, thick walls or irrigation dykes. "The ability to destroy targets behind cover easily and without having to wait for other fire assault is hugely useful, added to the fact that it is man-portable and usable by the average soldier." 'Indiscriminate' shooter The weapon has been in development since the 1990s and was originally scheduled to be widely deployed by August this year. Soldiers who tested in Afghanistan dubbed it "the Punisher", and an army press release from the time said the Pentagon expected to spend $35,000 (£22,650) per weapon, with each round costing a further $55. Image copyright US Army Image caption The XM25 was tested in Afghanistan before being returned for adjustments But the launcher was withdrawn from service in April 2013 after a grenade primer ignited in one of 12 test units being used at the time. Two grenades had accidentally been fed into the firing mechanism at the same time. Although a safety mechanism prevented the grenade's warhead from exploding, the gunner testing the weapon received "minor" injuries. Orbital ATK now believes the problem has been addressed. "Apparently the other reliability rates were very good despite Afghanistan's dusty conditions," said Mr Bronk. But he added the launcher would still be ill-suited for many other environments. "It would be of questionable value in urban situations where you are trying to do room clearing and there might be lots of civilians involved," he said. "It is by nature quite indiscriminate - you can't see behind the cover of what you are trying to shoot behind. "Yes, you can shoot the grenades behind windows, for example, but you'd have to be very, very sure that [the target aside] there was no-one else in the room."Helium is atomic number 2 on the periodic table, with the element symbol He. It is a colorless, flavorless gas, best known for its use in filling floating balloons. Here is a collection of facts about this lightweight, interesting element: Helium Element Facts Helium Atomic Number: 2 Helium Symbol: He Helium Atomic Weight: 4.002602(2) Helium Discovery: Janssen, 1868, some sources say Sir William Ramsey, Nils Langet, P.T. Cleve 1895 Helium Electron Configuration: 1s2 Word Origin: Greek: helios, sun. Helium was first detected as a new spectral line during a solar eclipse, so it is named for the Greek Titan of the Sun. Isotopes: 9 isotopes of helium are known. Only two isotopes are stable: helium-3 and helium-4. While the isotopic abundance of helium varies depending on geographical location and source, 4He accounts for nearly all of the natural helium. Properties: Helium is a very light, inert, colorless gas. Helium has the lowest melting point of any element. It is the only liquid that cannot be solidified by lowering the temperature. It remains liquid down to absolute zero at ordinary pressures, but can be solidified by increasing the pressure. The specific heat of helium gas is unusually high. The density of helium vapor at the normal boiling point is also very high, with the vapor expanding greatly when heated to room temperature. Although helium normally has a valence of zero, it has a weak tendency to combine with certain other elements. Uses: Helium is widely used in cryogenic research because its boiling point is near absolute zero. It is used in the study of superconductivity, as an inert gas shield for arc welding, as a protective gas in growing silicon and germanium crystals and producing titanium and zirconium, for pressuring liquid fuel rockets, for use in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), as a cooling medium for nuclear reactors, and as a gas for supersonic wind tunnels. A mixture of helium and oxygen is used as an artificial atmosphere for divers and others working under pressure. Helium is used for filling balloons and blimps. Sources: Except for hydrogen, helium is the most abundant element in the universe. It is an important component in the proton-proton reaction and the carbon cycle, which account for the energy of the sun and stars. Helium is extracted from natural gas. In fact, all natural gas contains at least trace quantities of helium. The fusion of hydrogen into helium is the sources of a hydrogen bomb's energy. Helium is a disintegration product of radioactive substances, so it is found in ores of uranium, radium, and other elements. Most of Earth's helium dates back to the planet's formation, although a small amount falls to Earth within cosmic dust and some is produced via beta decay of tritium. Health Effects: Helium serves no biological function. Trace amounts of the element are found in human blood. While helium is considered to be non-toxic, it displaces oxygen so inhaling it can lead to hypoxia or asphyxiation. Fatalities from inhaling helium are rare. Liquid helium is a cryogenic liquid, so risks include frostbite from exposure and explosion from expansion if the liquid is stored in a sealed container. The mixture of helium and oxygen (heliox) can cause high-pressure nervous syndrome, however the addition of nitrogen can remedy the issue. Compounds: Because a helium atom has a valence of zero, it has extremely low chemical reactivity. However, unstable compounds called excimers can be formed when electricity is applied to the gas. HeH+ is stable in its ground state, but it is the strongest known Bronsted acid, capable of protonating any species it encounters. Van der Waals compounds form with cryogenic helium gas, such as LiHe. Element Classification: Noble Gas or Inert Gas Usual Phase: gas Density (g/cc): 0.1786 g/L (0 °C, 101.325 kPa) Boiling Point (°K): 4.216 Critical Point: 5.19 K, 0.227 MPa Ionic Radius: 93 Specific Heat (@20°C J/g mol): 5.188 Evaporation Heat (kJ/mol): 0.08 First Ionizing Energy (kJ/mol): 2361.3 Lattice Structure: Hexagonal Lattice Constant (Å): 3.570 Lattice C/A Ratio: 1.633 Crystal Structure: close-packed hexagonal Magnetic Ordering: diamagnetic Quiz: Ready to test your helium facts knowledge? Take the Helium Facts Quiz. References Meija, J.; et al. (2016). "Atomic weights of the elements 2013 (IUPAC Technical Report)". Pure and Applied Chemistry. 88 (3): 265–91. doi:10.1515/pac-2015-0305 Shuen-Chen Hwang, Robert D. Lein, Daniel A. Morgan (2005). "Noble Gases". Kirk Othmer Encyclopedia of Chemical Technology. Wiley. pp. 343–383. doi:10.1002/0471238961.0701190508230114.a01. Weast, Robert (1984). CRC, Handbook of Chemistry and Physics. Boca Raton, Florida: Chemical Rubber Company Publishing. pp. E110. ISBN 0-8493-0464-4.Veteran Israeli military analyst Amos Harel on Thursday assessed that a future war between Israel and Hezbollah seems increasingly likely and that Hezbollah may use the deterioration to launch a spectacular ground operation against Israel: While a balance of mutual deterrence has prevailed since the end of the Second Lebanon War nearly eight years ago, it is enough to look at the events of the past year — an air strike against a weapons convoy in Lebanon and the assassination of a senior Hezbollah figure, which the terrorist organization attributes to Israel, growing threats by the Hezbollah leadership, an explosive charge on Mount Dov and a series of terror attacks in the Golan Heights that Israel suspects are tied to Hezbollah — to bear witness that the quiet on the border won’t necessarily last long. The suggestion is not a new one, and was being publicly analyzed by Israeli military experts well over a year ago. Harel unpacked a more recent anonymously penned analysis in Israel’s military magazine Maarachot: An article by a lieutenant colonel in intelligence, published in the military magazine Maarachot presented an alternative scenario. The officer, N., argued Israel should take into account the possibility that Hezbollah changed its strategy to something completely different. He wrote there are signs Hezbollah is weighing trying to shorten the next campaign through ground operations in Israel. He referred to comments by Hezbollah leadership about “conquering the Galilee.” While these declarations sound arrogant, perhaps unrealistic, Israel should give them weight, because they might reflect Hezbollah’s intentions. N. wrote Hezbollah’s 2006 strategy reflected its deep understanding of Israel’s technological, intelligence and air superiority as well as of Israel’s weak spots: high sensitivity to casualties, aversion to a long campaign and the need for clear victory. The article in turn described an August 2012 Hezbollah military exercise that involved 10,000 fighters and included attacks on targets deep in Israeli territory. The concerns come alongside other ones involving Hezbollah boasts – by and large backed by genuine capabilities – that the Iran-backed terror group intends to saturation bomb Israeli population centers. Israeli leaders have for their part been explicit that they will take whatever measures are necessary to shorten a future conflagaration with Hezbollah, and that Lebanese institutions and infrastructure used by the organization will not be immune. [Photo: Channel 4 News / YouTube]There has been a fair amount of traffic on my twitter TL on an article that was taken down in the DNA. People have, rightly, asked for an explanation. Fact checking, misrepresentation of facts etc all good excuses/explanation to give when u pull down an article. However, they all sound rather silly – especially given that you have published it. Sometimes silence is better than a hastily cobbled together justification. And, everything doesn’t have to be a conspiracy theory. Nor does everything have to be high drama. Sometimes there are simpler explanations. I could say editorial prerogative. But, that would be arrogance. I could blame the author, but that would be cowardice. I could blame the government or my ‘bosses’ but that would be a lie. I could say i didn’t know it went up, but that would be cop out. Fact remains, I should have caught onto something that was in the piece, but I didn’t. I did exactly what I have ranted about, and outraged about for the last decade – that is in the need for speed, the desire to be first, to put out a piece, I didn’t look at it with the attention that it deserved. We have run far more scathing pieces by the author on Mr.Shah and they are still on-line. If I pulled down this one, it was for a good reason, and that reason is not fear. I can understand readers ire on this, and appreciate the author’s anger – i would have felt the same way if i was in her place. If I had the time on the day to make a call and sort it out, I would have. Unfortunately, I didn’t. I was in a very long conference, where our phones were tucked safely away in our bags. Which is also the reason why I couldn’t respond to newslaundry. Now to something else – when other TV editors/websites write about this, they obviously suffer from selective amnesia. they have pulled out, pulled back, changed tack on issues. Was it fear, favor or fickleness? Or all three – that made them do this? And i am not even going into other areas of breach of ethics such as the cash for votes sting, or radia tapes, I am simply looking at spiked stories, and stories that disappeared. Seriously, i can appreciate reader ire, I can’t figure the hypocrisy of other media professionals. They know exactly what they had suppressed in their entire career Am sure if you follow any good news monitoring website you will know some of what has been taken off, what they have changed tack on, and where they have spiked their own stories. I have not responded to this on twitter as there are no 140 character explanations for things like this. Hence, this blog. And finally, far as the ToI piece is concerned – cute, very cute. Must be the first time that the ToI has run a piece naming a competitor without routing it through medianet.By Victoria Cavaliere SEATTLE (Reuters) - Every dog has its day - at least on one Seattle bus route. A black Labrador named Eclipse has been riding city buses without her owner to a local dog park, local transportation officials said on Tuesday. Seattle is a pet-friendly city, and dogs are allowed on public transportation, with few restrictions, though normally they are accompanied by a human, a spokesman with King County Metro Transit said. The transit agency confirmed the unusual tale, saying Eclipse's journeys have been documented by both customers and drivers. "There's no reason to doubt the veracity of it," spokesman Jeff Switzer said. Over the past few weeks, Eclipse has boarded a bus alone near her home in the Seattle neighborhood of Belltown, riding about four stops to a nearby dog park, both commuters and transit employees said. Miles Montgomery, a radio show host on Seattle station KISW, was riding the bus last week when he noticed a black Lab in the aisle, eyeing the empty seat next to him. "She jumps up and sits down, and I start petting her and the guy beside me says 'oh yeah, that's that dog that rides the bus to the dog park every day, by herself,'" Montgomery said. As the bus rolled on, Montgomery realized Eclipse was indeed alone and staring intently out the window. "She started to wag her tail when she saw her stop. Then she jumped down from the seat and she just ran off the bus, and she ran to the dog park," he said. Montgomery was the first to report seeing the solo-riding pup on his radio show, and the story garnered a lot of attention - and disbelief, he said. "It was really difficult to convince people that I actually just saw this happen," he said. Eclipse's owner told local broadcaster KOMO he is OK with her independent activities. "We get separated.
decide to do, young fellas, please, for the love of God…. Sign. That. Pre. Nup. Appendix B: The edited Player X column that appeared in ESPN The Magazine By my count, Tiger got to 15. It's a big number, sure. But I know some guys in the NBA, MLB, and NFL who juggle even more girls than that. Some of them are married too. So Tiger, we feel you. Advertisement The temptation pro athletes face is crazy, and the cards are stacked against those of us who get married. We're going to cheat; how can we not? We're constantly on the road, and we've got targets on our chests. I'm telling you, we see and experience things you can't even dream of. And the caliber of the women is just ridiculous. When they put on those dresses, do up their hair and get their makeup going, they look fine as hell. I'll tell you one thing — our natural instinct isn't to ask them out to lunch. Being home is no picnic, either. You've been apart from each other so long you've changed a bit. Over time it adds up, and after a while you begin to feel you don't know each other anymore. Plus, there's another side to the story. Our wives are prone to wander too. And the truth is, that can be okay — provided you've got a strong relationship and have agreed to certain arrangements. The first arrangement is a prenuptial agreement. Elin supposedly took Tiger for $100 million because they didn't have one. I'm sorry, no woman is worth that! I tell every young player who will listen: Get the prenup. If she won't sign, don't marry her. You have to protect what you've worked for, and a prenup does that for you. If she ever wants out, she can't touch your money. And without the money, she can't keep living like she's been living. Advertisement A few guys I know in the NBA have another type of marital arrangement: an open-door policy. They experiment with other women, just not behind their wives' backs like Tiger did. These guys tell their wives about the temptations they face, answer all their hard-hitting questions and come to an understanding. Part of that is they know they have to let their wives play too. Free the bird, ladies. Your man will come back, you can get yours and your relationship will be the stronger for it. I know some of what I just said sounds crazy, but something has to be done. Athletes let stuff happen to them way too much, and it affects their family and their kids. One thing that is not acceptable, though, is messing with your teammates' partners. That's the road some folks are saying Tony Parker went down, getting into it with Brent Barry's girl. Whatever happened, I can tell you that wives and girlfriends don't know our code. They don't know what goes on in a locker room, how important trust is among teammates, even former teammates like Tony and Brent. I've seen wives throw themselves at other players, and I've seen some of those guys give in. It's bad news. That's why a lot of guys keep their ladies far away from the team. It spares everybody the headaches. Whatever is going on with Tony and Eva, dating a celebrity isn't easy. Their jobs are similar to ours — lots of travel, no shortage of partners to choose from. Their book hasn't finished being written. I wouldn't be shocked to learn someday that Eva had something on the side as well. Advertisement Not that marriages to "civilians" are much easier to maintain. A lot of us feel for Steve Nash and his wife. He's probably the most down-to-earth star there is in the league, and he's getting divorced. That was a big surprise to us all. Relationships that predate pro careers have the best shot, but sometimes not even that's enough. Dwyane Wade and his wife are done too, and that's sad because she was with him before he was D-Wade. By the way, we're all watching Dwyane's custody battle very closely. It's a bold move, fighting to be your kids' sole caretaker despite the daily demands of life in the NBA. But if you feel you're in a better position than the mom to take care of them, you've got to fight for the right. Thankfully, I married someone I love. We're happy, but that hasn't always been the case. The early years were difficult for us. I think we could have avoided a lot of problems if my wife and I knew then what we know now. But we overcame and have a stronger marriage because of it. Advertisement It can happen when you're older and wiser. Still, whatever you do, young fellas: Sign. That. Pre. Nup.School administrators in South Windsor are investigating complaints about what some people are calling an anti-Semitic chant during a soccer game against a team from town that has a large Jewish population. The South Windsor boys varsity soccer team traveled to West Hartford on Wednesday to play Hall High School and witnesses said people from the South Windsor side of the field were singing part of the “Dreidel Song,” which is usually sung during Hanukkah. West Hartford has a large Jewish population. Parents said only part of the “Dreidel Song” was chanted and they did not hear other anti-Semitic taunts for the rest of the game. “There’s a big group of soccer fans, which are students. There were parents there and, unfortunately, no one stopped what was going on,” Kerry Rausch, of West Hartford, said. Students were also disturbed by what happened. “I just think it’s completely disrespectful to the Hall community,” Tyler Strickling, a senior at Hall high School, said. Exclusive Future Uncertain for State CHAMP Fleet NBC Connecticut reached out to South Windsor Public Schools and Supt. Dr. Kate Carter responded with a written statement: “Thank you for bringing this serious matter to our attention. We hold our students to very high standards and a thorough investigation will be conducted immediately,” she wrote. Liah Kaminer, a recent graduate from Hall High School, started a program at the school to help fight back against anti-Semitism and said she hopes people learn a lesson from this. “Not even just tolerance, because tolerance is the lowest level but, you know, acceptance,” Kaminer said. Hall High School and the West Hartford Public Schools have not returned requests for comment. Hall ended up defeating South Windsor, 3-1.Hey fountain pen friends, We’ll cut to the chase – our shipment of Lamy Safari Dark Lilac (both pens & ink) has been delayed again. We are now expecting our shipment to arrive later this week. UPDATE as of 4/26/16!!! The pens arrived today, on 4/26, sooner than we thought after posting this blog post! We have a good stock of pens, but the ink sold out in hours in both bottle and cartridge form. We’re told more ink will be available at the end of May, sorry for the shortage 🙁 But the pens we anticipate being well-stocked. We are so sorry for the additional delay – we are as disappointed as you are. So what’s happening? A series of misfortunate events. Two of our core values are “Be Honest” and “Trust is our currency”, so we wanted to be upfront with you and let you in on the situation at hand. We knew this would be a highly anticipated release, so we placed a much larger-than-normal order for these pens. The pens arrived from Germany to the US two weeks ago. Because of the size of our order, it took several extra days for Lamy USA to box and label the pens up for us. They also suffered an internet/power outage which added an extra day before shipment. It finally shipped out last Tuesday. We were originally told the shipment would arrive on Thursday. After the shipment left Texas, the tracking was updated to Friday delivery instead of Thursday. We called FedEx to see if there was anything they could do to expedite it and get it to us sooner, but once it was on the truck/train, there wasn’t much they could do. On Wednesday, we called FedEx to see if they could at least deliver it on Friday morning (as opposed to Friday afternoon). At that point we learned that it was rescheduled to arrive in Richmond Va. on Sunday, with delivery on Monday. With that information, we told all of you to expect it to arrive on Monday. We then called FedEx this morning to see if we could arrange a morning delivery instead of afternoon, and learned that it’s still not in Virginia. As of this morning, our shipment is sitting in a train yard in another state, waiting to be unloaded and put on a truck to Virginia. Based on where the shipment is, we don’t think a delivery tomorrow is realistic; we’re now expecting the shipment to arrive here on Wednesday or possibly later in the week. We’re hesitant to announce a specific launch date after all of these delays because FedEx hasn’t given us a confirmed delivery date yet. We are so very sorry for continuing to push out the launch date. We’ve done everything we can to try to get these pens to you as soon as possible, and sometimes things just don’t go according to plan. We know other retailers received their shipments last week, and that’s been hard to watch – but we are so very thankful for all of you who are waiting to purchase from us. We’re as committed as ever to provide the best level of service that we can. We realize this situation may have taken some withdrawals out of your trust bank with us. We felt the right thing to do was to continue to be honest and share all of this information with you. So if you are still waiting patiently to purchase from us, we thank you for waiting another several days. Our team really appreciates your support! Write On, Brian & Rachel GouletThe Recording Industry Association of America just announced it will now count streams when determining if a record qualifies for a gold or platinum certification. The RIAA has been bestowing albums with gold and platinum labels since 1958. Up until now, only album sales counted toward a gold or platinum certification, despite the recent emergence and proliferation of streaming services. An artist needs to sell 500,000 copies of a single record for it to reach a gold benchmark and 1 million to go platinum. But this doesn't mean a single stream will now carry the same weight as an album sale — instead, the RIAA says 1,500 song or video streams will be equivalent to ten track sales or one album sale. Hey, we just remembered streaming! "We know that music listening – for both albums and songs – is skyrocketing, yet that trend has not been reflected in our album certifications," Cary Sherman, CEO of the RIAA, said in today's announcement. Despite their struggles with profitability, streaming services account for millions of listeners, many of whom likely never purchase full albums. RIAA's move is a necessary one that finally recognizes the influence of streaming on the music industry. Plus, the RIAA has been stuck playing catch-up with Billboard, which has been counting streams on its own charts since the end of 2014. The RIAA's new methodology was implemented today, which means several albums earned a gold, platinum, or double-platinum certification after the announcement, including Big Sean's Dark Sky Paradise, Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly, and The Weeknd's Beauty Behind the Madness.Wadha Khalaf sits cross-legged on the rough ground, throwing dough between her hands like she’s done it a million times before. The 45-year-old mother of 13 is a new arrival among the thousands of displaced Yazidis living on top of Mount Sinjar, in northern Iraq — a sacred place for people of her faith. But it is not the first time she has sought safety here. Nearly three years after fleeing a murderous rampage by ISIS fighters, Khalaf is part of a wave of Yazidi families who have been forced to escape again, this time because of fighting between groups that have sworn to protect them. “It has made me feel like we would never feel happy again in our life,” she says as she piles the bread high. Wadha Khalaf makes bread for her family on Mount Sinjar. This is the second time she and her family have had to flee up the mountain for safety. Credit: Richard Hall/PRI Fleeing to the mountain This tent city on the mountain where Khalaf is taking shelter has been here since 2014, when thousands fled an ISIS invasion of dozens of towns and villages in the Sinjar region, in what the United Nations says was genocide against the Yazidi people. ISIS kidnapped thousands of Yazidi women to use as sex slaves and killed civilians by the hundred. Nearly 4,000 Yazidi women are still being held by the militant group, according to the Women and Girls Support Center. Those were the atrocities that prompted the United States, in August 2014, to launch its first strikes against ISIS in Iraq, opening a long campaign against the group that has extended to Syria, and been overseen by two presidents. Related: This 84-year-old woman crawled on her knees to safety to escape ISIS Years later, despite huge international attention for their plight, many Yazidis are still searching for safety. In March, long-simmering tensions between rival Kurdish groups boiled over into armed clashes in the Sinjar region. With ISIS to the south and Kurdish infighting in the north, there is now a sense among Yazidis that they are once again trapped on Mount Sinjar. It has become both a sanctuary and a prison. After being stranded on the mountain for nearly two weeks in 2014, Khalaf and her family made their way to a refugee camp in Syria, where they lived for two years. They later came back to the Kurdish region in northern Iraq and stayed in a relative’s house in the town of Sinuni. They were there for nine months when fighting broke out in March between Kurds in a neighboring town. “We don’t dare to go back again. There are people getting killed in these fights,” she says. “When we got to Sinuni, we thought everything would be OK. But it is not safe there.” The map above shows areas of influence around Mount Sinjar, where Yazidis are caught in the middle between rival Kurdish groups. Fighting broke out in the town of Khanasor on March 3, between local affiliates of the PKK and Syrian Peshmerga fighters. The fighting led many in the town and neighboring Sinuni to flee back to Mount Sinjar. Sources: ESRI, Imago Pyrenaei, PRI reporting Credit: Alex Newman/PRI A battle for influence At the root of the fighting is a battle for influence in the Sinjar region and the presence of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK. The PKK was founded in the late 1970s to fight for autonomy and greater rights for Turkey’s more than 20 million Kurds. It is considered a terrorist organization by Turkey, the US and the European Union. More recently, it has played a key role in the fight against ISIS. The peshmerga, the semi-autonomous Kurdish region’s official army in northern Iraq, fled as ISIS advanced in 2014. But PKK fighters based in the mountains farther north, together with their Syrian affiliates, raced to the area to support the few Yazidis who had weapons to fight. These Kurdish militants carved out an escape route that led the minority group through Syria and back into Iraq. Many Yazidis credit the PKK and its affiliates with saving thousands of lives. The PKK has since trained Yazidi fighting groups and taken them under its banner, and stayed in the Sinjar region ever since. The fighting in March broke out after a dispute between one of the Yazidi fighting groups operating under the PKK's umbrella and Syrian peshmerga fighters trained by the Kurdish region's president, Masoud Barzani. Now, the Kurdish government in northern Iraq says Sinjar is secure and the PKK has no authority to stay — they should return to where they came from. Turkey, which is allied with President Barzani's government, is adamant that they do so. The Turkish government wants to prevent the PKK from setting up a permanent base in Sinjar, from which it says the group could traffic weapons to fighters in Turkey. In a sign of growing impatience on the matter, the Turkish air force bombed a PKK building in the foothills of Mount Sinjar on Tuesday and declared it would continue to target the group there until it leaves the area. For the US, the fighting has highlighted precariousness of the united front it has built among anti-ISIS groups. The US has provided significant support to the peshmerga to take on ISIS. But it has also supported the Syrian offshoot of the PKK, the People’s Protection Units or YPG. This support has strained the US relationship with Turkey, which views the PKK and its affiliates as one and the same — a terror organization on the same level as ISIS. The US State Department expressed “deep concern” over Turkey’s airstrikes on Tuesday, but has since not taken any decisive steps to de-escalate tensions in Sinjar. Fares Saido, 60, a Yazidi man from Tal Uzair who now lives on Mount Sinjar, is pictured here. Credit: Richard Hall/PRI The threat of airstrikes is just another danger to add to the list for Yazidis, a religious group that’s been persecuted for centuries for its beliefs. Some of the displaced Yazidis think the PKK should leave, while others say they do not yet feel safe enough. “If it were not for the PKK, most of the Yazidis would have been dead by the hands of ISIS,” Khalaf says. “As long as one Yazidi is in danger, we don’t want the PKK to leave. If we are given international protection and Yazidis feel safe, and the US keeps an eye on our situation, then we won’t have any problem with the PKK leaving our areas.” Higher up the mountain road that snakes through the peaks here on Sinjar, 41-year-old Hassan Selo is putting a fence up around his tent. He recently moved here from another part of the mountain, which he has called home for the last three years. Hassan Selo, 41, has recently moved farther up Mount Sinjar. Credit: Richard Hall/PRI “At the beginning, the PKK came to help us,” he says. “They brought us food, water, they aided our wounded people, they protected us from ISIS. We didn’t have military experience but they did.” But when the situation changes, he adds, the PKK should consider leaving Sinjar. “To say they should leave now is wrong because there is not complete safety in our area yet. But when our situation gets better and security is restored, they should leave. We are Iraqi people, they are not even Iraqis themselves. They are from other countries such as Syria and Turkey, they cannot rule here.” No way back In the shadow of the mountain, to the south, lies the town of Sinjar, where most of the displaced people here are from. Before ISIS arrived in 2014, it was home to some 360,000 Yazidis. Today, they are scattered in camps across northern Iraq. For those on the mountain, stability has been elusive. There are a number of aid organizations active here providing food, water and medical care, but work opportunities are limited. One man who got bored of waiting is Kassem, a 25-year-old from Sinjar who has set up a small shack as a barbershop by the side of the road. It’s filled with young men waiting for their turn in the chair. Kassem, a 25-year-old Yazidi barber, set up shop in a shack on top of Mount Sinjar. Credit: Richard Hall/PRI Kassem, who asks that only his first name be used, says the most popular haircut in his shop is the American style, or more specifically, the American soldier style. He jokes that the man in his seat is getting an “Obama.” “Maybe later we will we do this for Trump soon,” he says. For Kassem, a young man with ambition, every day that passes here feels like an eternity. He says the Yazidis feel forgotten. “The humanitarian services are very low, things such as water, tents. It is around three years that we are under these tents, I have a feeling that the international community have closed their eyes, and I don’t know why.” Kassem learned to cut hair on the fly. He watched other people do it and just practiced. He seems like an optimistic person, but like most people on Mount Sinjar, he foresees a difficult time ahead for the Yazidis. “We have nothing left, and there is nothing that didn’t happen to us. We as Yazidi people don’t see much safety in the Middle East. Especially with the racist ideology that is here. We hope that someday it will vanish, and we can live together peacefully. For now, he says, “nobody can reach the mountain.” Richard Hall reported from Mount Sinjar, Iraq.Did Adnan Syed really kill Hae Min Lee? It’s possible that we may never know the answer. But perhaps the greatest mystery about Serial, the astounding podcast success, was whether it would even be a success at all. As part of my reporting for Vanity Fair’s New Establishment, the annual ranking of business and media elite, which will be published on September 8, it became clear that Serial’s producers had far more modest goals for their project—so modest, in fact, that they lost out on millions of dollars in unrealized revenue. “When we launched, we hoped for 300,000 downloads,” co-creator and co-producer Julie Synder told me. So the producers sold the first season to MailChimp, an e-mail-marketing service provider that you’d probably only know about if you listened to copious hours of podcasts. Snyder wouldn’t share the C.P.M. rate at which MailChimp agreed, but she noted that “expectations weren’t huge.” MailChimp bought Serial spots, in other words, well before Serial knew just how valuable they actually were. Serial, after all, would eventually reach 5 million downloads on iTunes faster than any podcast in iTunes history, and has now been downloaded a staggering 97 million times. Sarah Koenig, the show’s host—and also a co-producer and co-creator—has become a legit celebrity, at least in a Vassar sort of way. She appeared on The Colbert Report, where even Stephen Colbert couldn’t resist a MailChimp joke. After the show’s first few episodes, once Serial’s producers figured out what they had, they began to take on more established sponsors, at presumably higher rates. It seems clear that the show forfeited income on those early episodes, but when I asked Snyder if she thought that the show had lost out on tens of millions of dollars in undiscovered revenue, she pushed back. “We’d love it if it were possible to garner tens of millions in revenue on a podcast, but as things stand now, that’s impossible,” Synder told me. “We are still just a podcast.” But she did defend her signature sponsor. “MailChimp got a pretty sweet deal and probably way more downloads than they expected,” she said. “They were visionaries and risk-takers and reaped the reward of having faith in us.” Related: Is Silicon Valley in Another Bubble... and What Could Burst It? Related: Does Bill Simmons Have Yet Another Trick Up His Sleeve?In Part II of the 2016 Pre-Season coverage, our own Daniel Casey takes a look at the upper echelons of the NASL, and how they rank. The Top 1. New York Cosmos The New York Cosmos are a better team than yours. Do you know why I can say that and have it stand as fact? Because since the team entered the NASL (Fall of 2013), it is the winningest team in the league: 9-4-1 in 2013 to win the Fall and eventually the Championship, 11-9-7 in 2014 which was good enough to make the four team playoffs, and 15-11-4 in 2015 winning the Spring and the Championship for the second time. At 35-24-12 over two and half years, the New York Cosmos have four trophies. The Cosmos closest rival, Minnesota United, only have one more win over the same time but fewer trophies. Simple fact is, Giovanni Savarese’s team wins and is always near the top. Expect nothing to change in 2016. Although left winger Leo Fernandes, the battery for much of 2015, is gone and Raul retired taking his star-power with him, New York has done an admirable job of replacing them. Striker Jairo Arrieta, formerly of DC United and Columbus Crew, joins veteran attacking midfielder Juan Arango to continue the Cosmos tradition of mature, deadly attack. Buttress these signings with a slew of others (Yasmani Duk, Michael Lahoud, and Gabriel Farfán) who will find themselves exact fits within Savarese’s stratagems and you can’t ignore the fact that New York Cosmos are again poised to lead the league. 2. Tampa Bay Rowdies Stuart Campbell will be at the helm for his first full season as Tampa Bay’s manager. There are more than a few expectations, especially among supporters who saw their team winnow away to insignificance after a relatively strong Spring in 2015. Since winning the Championship in 2012, Tampa Bay have been a non-factor in league standings despite profoundly impressive individual performances and organizational growth. Campbell has assembled what could arguably be the deepest and best all-around midfield in the NASL with speed and technical skill (there is, however, a stark lack of physicality). This midfield will make or break the Rowdies. If it does not gel, then target forwards Tom Heinemann and Danny Mwanga will be left looking foolish and/or bored. It will be up to Freddy Adu and Georgi Hristov to make a conscious effort to not just be creative but unselfish; it will be up to wide players like Michael Nanchoff, Eric Avila, and Kalif Alhassan to not just be pacey but provide pin-point service. Should this all happen, the attack of the Rowdies will certainly overcome most defenses. 3. Minnesota United During the off-season, Minnesota landed itself a new stadium deal. Ahead of the organization’s move into MLS, Minnesota are hoping to have a strong final season in the NASL. However, it may be a more difficult road for the team than it has been in the past. Although no longer the manager, Manny Lagos is still guiding the team in his position as technical director yet his presence will be less felt this season. Standing squarely in the spotlight will be long time assistant coach now manager, Carl Craig. There will likely be very little disruption with the move of Lagos to a more executive position and Craig taking the helm on the pitch. Players know their roles, but every season it seems, Minnesota has one or two bad apples causing the team to stutter. Last season, it was Jonny Steele, and a few seasons ago, it was Etienne Barbara. I doubt new star left winger Lance Laing, last season’s Golden Boot winner Stefano, or the new attacking midfield trio of Danny Cruz, Ben Speas, and Bernardo Anor will be problems. I do, however, worry just how long it will take this team to get on the same page. Preseason friendlies convey very little and thank god, because in its first preseason tournament, Minnesota was soundly thrashed accumulating more red cards than goals. Concerns persist about the team’s defense, which lacks any depth at centerback or fullback. If the attack takes its time to meld and the defense suffers any sort of injury or lack of form, then Minnesota will find itself in a hole. However, look for the Loons to get sorted and maintain its place as one of the league’s premier teams. The Middling 4. Indy Eleven The crowds in Indianapolis have been amazing since the team debuted in 2014. Unfortunately, the results have not mirrored supporter enthusiasm. This year, however, that looks to change. The major factor in this will be the return to the league of manager Tim Hankinson, who last managed the San Antonio Scorpions. Hankinson has kept assistant coach turned interim manager Tim Regan on as his assistant assuring a continuity that is vital during times of change. Formerly, Indy Eleven rarely signed players of notable quality, but Hankinson has changed that. Pulling from the Best XI ranks of the NASL, Hankinson has signed former Ottawa centerback Colin Falvey and San Antonio workhorse leftback Stephen DeRoux. He looked to the jewel of the USL, Sacramento Republic, to sign former Defender of the Year centerback/leftback Nemanja Vuković and striker Justin Braun. A need for veteran talent lead to the signings of former Chicago Fire players Lovel Palmer and goalkeeper Jon Busch. Finally, in order to bolster a traditionally anemic attack, Hankinson picked up two international forwards: Libyan-Irish striker 5. Jacksonville Armada New managers is the theme of 2016 for the NASL. Perhaps the manager with the most to prove and who most of us are looking forward to seeing is Tony Meola with the Jacksonville Armada. The ex-star goalkeeper has a lot to fix in Jacksonville but has already made moves that have substantially improved the Armada. More than any other team in the league, Jacksonville is flooded with attacking players. The team has seven strikers plus Pascal Millien, a purely attack-minded midfielder. Of those seven, there are two that will be the first choice pairing to receive Millien’s support: Matt Fondy and Alhassane Keita. Fondy scored 21 goals last season with the USL’s Louisville City, and he’ll be getting service from a familiar face, fullback Bryan Burke. Burke was the USL’s Defender of the Year last season with Louisville, not so much for his defending (which was more than adequate) but for his 10 assists from the leftside. Attacking fullbacks do well in the NASL, and the relationship already existent between Fondy and Burke can only improve the Armada. Strength has been added to the midfield as well in the form of Pekka Lagerbloom and Richie Ryan, two tenacious and skilled central players. A team that was woefully short, weak, and sloppy last season is now tall, strong, and with technique, which can only translate into better results on the pitch. Jacksonville still don’t have that spark player yet that can set them apart from the middle of the pack, but it’s coming and should be an exciting season.These photos and videos provide a detailed look at this project’s development. Appearance and function match the final product, but is made with different manufacturing methods. Looks like the final product, but is not functional. Demonstrates the functionality of the final product, but looks different. A prototype is a preliminary model of something. Projects that offer physical products need to show backers documentation of a working prototype. This gallery features photos, videos, and other visual documentation that will give backers a sense of what’s been accomplished so far and what’s left to do. Though the development process can vary for each project, these are the stages we typically see: Stretch Goals Unlocked Infernal Contraption was first featured on Robot Wars in 2002, featuring our current Captain Gary Ewer. Infernal Contraption has always been a drum spinner capable of doing huge amounts of damage to its opponents. In its historical televised battles Infernal Contraption has been unlucky, falling foul of a few judges decisions. You can find out more about our history here In late 2016 Infernal Contraption was resurrected in under three weeks to compete in the new Series 1 of Robot Wars (Series 8 for the purists). The series 8 team We were once again unlucky as the link in our weapon came loose and we ended up skidding into the pit during the melee. Infernal Contraption Up and running for Series 8 in 2016 Now we're back with plans for: New tyres (less sliding around planned) Upgraded links that can't come out! 40kJ vertical spinning disk that will fling our opponents across the arena Even with some amazing sponsors we still need your help to make it happen! Just the steel wear plate armour is going to cost us well over £1500 (including a few spares), so we need you to make the Infernal Contraption return a reality. Our sponsors are: Cambridge Consultants - Use of their facilities and design tools Complete Fabrication - Manufacturing some of our more complex parts GPS PE Pipe Systems - Kindly donating some off cut pipe, used as armour and the base of our tyres Most people aren't aware, but Robot Wars robots are almost entirely competitor funded and modern robots do not come cheap so we wanted to give all of you the opportunity to be a part of our team. Without our sponsors and without your help this project would not be possible! So what will your funding go towards? In no particular order: Motors - Infernal Contraption has 3 separate motors, one for each wheel and one for the weapon. We have one complete system, however we'd like to have at least one spare of each. - Infernal Contraption has 3 separate motors, one for each wheel and one for the weapon. We have one complete system, however we'd like to have at least one spare of each. Batteries - 6 batteries are required to power up Infernal Contraption. - 6 batteries are required to power up Infernal Contraption. Specialist materials and manufacturing - We'd love to share more but we can't give everything away.... - We'd love to share more but we can't give everything away.... Hardox wear plate - trust us this stuff is expensive! Our Hardox plate is so thick that it can only be cut by a high pressure water jet. - trust us this stuff is expensive! Our Hardox plate is so thick that it can only be cut by a high pressure water jet. Electronics - Speed controllers, radio gear etc. - Speed controllers, radio gear etc. Bearings - Our design features lots of high speed/load bearings, we're not planning for them to end up spread across the arena floor. - Our design features lots of high speed/load bearings, we're not planning for them to end up spread across the arena floor. Safety Equipment - Many teams don't test their robot until it's time to fight. We'd like to be able to test it in a safe environment. We plan to purchase a disk with no teeth so we can tune Infernal Contraption to cope with the huge gyroscopic forces the disk produces. - Many teams don't test their robot until it's time to fight. We'd like to be able to test it in a safe environment. We plan to purchase a disk with no teeth so we can tune Infernal Contraption to cope with the huge gyroscopic forces the disk produces. Growing our Community - We want as many people to be part of Infernal Contraption's community, join us by showing your support today. - We want as many people to be part of Infernal Contraption's community, join us by showing your support today. Education - Help inspire robotics and engineering in schools. We'd love to travel to more trade fairs and educational events. The more you fund the more we can do! We'd love to share more with you, but we cannot break our NDA with the production company! Hundreds of hours of work has created a really robust design. You're going to get truly top notch entertainment. Stretch Goals Unlocked! £1200 - Choose Our Pose - If we reach £1200 rasied we'll upload a load of possible "hero poses". All backers will get a vote on what we do....suggestions welcome! £ 2000 - IC Summer Party - Over the summer we'll host an event in Cambridge for all our backers to come and visit Infernal Contraption (and have a drive if it isnt in a bin bag!) You can check out some other cool projects at http://kickingitforward.org(CNN) Hurricane Irma's powerful center crossed the Florida Keys and tore into the state's Gulf Coast, downing trees, hurling street signs and debris, and knocking the power out to hundreds of thousands of residents throughout the state. The National Hurricane Center said Irma is expected to remain powerful as it heads north along the state's Gulf Coast. This is the scene in Florida as Irma blasts the state with torrential winds and rain. Miami Waves batter a seawall in Miami as Hurricane Irma arrives on September 10. CNN's Derek Van Dam, reporting from Miami Beach, said the roaring winds felt like a jet engine. "It just stings every time one of these gusts comes through." JUST WATCHED Reporter: Wind speeds like jet engine Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Reporter: Wind speeds like jet engine 01:36Video games industry wins backdown from South Australian Government over anti-gambling advertising campaign Updated Video game companies are upset with a South Australian Government advertising campaign they say is inaccurate, arguing the "Gambling starts with gaming" campaign went too far. Ron Curry of the Interactive Games and Entertainment Association said the claims in the advertising were unsupported. "Just to make a blatant statement that games leads to gambling, as an unqualified statement, we think is a bit over the top," he said. The Association wrote to the Premier Jay Weatherill's office to criticise the heavy-handed approach. "We're asking the Government to ensure, if they are going to advertise, that the advertisement is fair, it's accurate and it's tempered - that it doesn't tar all games with the same brush," Mr Curry said. It claimed the research the campaign was based on showed no clear link between gaming of any type and gambling in later years. The Government's children, technology and gambling policy was announced just weeks ago, with a new classification for game apps with gambling themes, and the ad campaign followed. The games industry agreed with a classification review but wanted the whole system looked at, not just the issue of gambling. A researcher involved in development of the State Government's policy, Paul Delfabbro, said his team's work suggested there was an association between gaming and gambling but not a clear link that one would always lead to the other. Robert Chappell of the Independent Gambling Authority doubted it would never be possible to show a clear link. "You'll never get any research to prove conclusively that anything's linked to anything in this social sciences space," he said. Premier Jay Weatherill conceded the ads went too far and said they would be removed. "We acknowledge that immediately and we're remedying that," he said. Topics: games, arts-and-entertainment, community-and-society, family-and-children, children, games-industry, government-and-politics, states-and-territories, gambling, advertising, sa, adelaide-5000, australia First postedJohn McClane is
, has capitalized on a sense that establishment politicians care more about their own survival than about the fate of those who have not prospered for decades. But unlike the American billionaire, Le Pen has been more careful than Trump to avoid embracing policies that seem outright racist or directed against specific religions. She declined last week to endorse his proposal to temporarily ban Muslims from entering the United States. Le Pen “has a punch that the rest of the political class doesn’t,” said Nonna Mayer, a political analyst at the Center for European Studies at Sciences Po. “Even if they are not in office, they weigh on the political debate, and many of the mainstream political parties try to copy them.” Cléophée Demoustier contributed to this report. Read more: France’s triumphant far right and the echoes of Donald Trump France’s far-right family feud turns epic France says it will take 30,000 Syrian refugees, while U.S. Republicans would turn them awayView from a train window in Norway While traveling in Norway last year, we were impressed by the amazing views and luxurious nature that Norwegian people could enjoy daily. And the best part was that they weren't moving from home, but just by sitting in the comfort and warmth of their houses, they could stare outside at the magnificence of Mother Nature. During these moments I was recalling the view that I'm used to see from my parent's apartment in Rome, not the worst of the city actually, but still just a never-ending series of buildings; the same from the window of Oti's house in Romania with other communist blocks just a few steps in front to obstruct the view. The following is just a small selection, since only the one with the window frame visible were chosen, but it's probably enough to give an idea of the Norwegian spirit. The first image is showing the landscape also from a moving point of view: the window of a train. Traveling by train in Norway is like watching a National Geographic documentary, with the difference that what you are experiencing is real. Fjords, forests, rivers, snow, sun, mountains, sea: just a few of the beauties you can see directly from your seat. In the next photo is shown the apartment where we were hosted in Øverbygd. In the living room there was a huge window covering almost all the surface of the wall: the feeling was like being in the nature, even if we were indoor. You can sit on the couch and enjoy the river flowing through the snowy forest. Not bad isn't it? Outside view of the river in Øverbygd In the same place we also used the family sauna, located outside of the house and even closer to the river. It was amazing staying in this steamy room and sweating like being in tropical climate, while enjoying the icy landscape outside separated only by a piece of glass. And of course at the end of the treatment we dived naked on the snow! Also the sauna is immersed in nature and visually connected to it And also while moving from one location to the other by train, ferry or hitchhiking a car, in Norway we had plenty of views opening over the landscape to enjoy! No ride was boring if we were just looking out of the window. Snowy road in Norway seen from the car window This is the scene that was visible from the window of our hosts in Hol i Tjeldsund, very close to Lofoten Islands. We were invited by a nice couple that picked us up while hitchhiking to stay at their house, and we had a great experience. More details here about this hitchhiking story. View over the fjord in Hol i Tjeldsund And in the next image we are moving not too far away, still in Hol i Tjeldsund, in a recreational area built over a rocky cape. The view is from a hut built to shelter the visitors, with the possibility to make a fire inside. The structure is right on top of an old military bunker, still partially visible through the window. During the right season it might even be possible, if not probable, to spot killer whales in this stretch of sea. View from the visitors' hut in Hol i Tjeldsund By moving further and further north, we are arrived with our photo story in Olderdalen, Lyngen Fjord, where we saw the best Northern Lights of our lives. Right in front of the window are the Lyngen Alps, one of the most famous Norwegian mountain chains, not far from Tromsø. Being right outside of a small village almost in the middle of nowhere it was the perfect location to see Aurora Borealis. And when a strong one was coming, it was possible to enjoy it directly from the window! Lyngen fjord and mountains seen from a house in Olderdalen Going a little bit to the west we reached Svolvaer in Lofoten Islands. Right outside the window is still nature to dominate with the snowy peaks dipping into the water. It looks like in Norway to have an amazing view out of the window, is the rule rather than an exception: this is part of the Norwegian spirit. Backyard lake in Svolvaer, Lofoten Islands And to finish, the view from another bunker, this time in Kristiansand, in the very south of Norway, the only picture not taken over the Arctic Circle. As you can judge by yourself, also Norwegian soldiers were able to enjoy, even while in duty, a quite remarkable landscape that we would dream of in our gray, busy cities! View through the window of a bunker in KristiansandThe race is on to build the next-generation battery that could help the world switch over to clean energy. But as Bill Gates explained in his blog last year: “storing energy turns out to be surprisingly hard and expensive”. Now Harvard researchers have developed a cheap, non-toxic battery that lasts more than 10 years, which they say could be a game changer for renewable energy storage. Image: REUTERS/Mike Blake Their new type of battery stores energy in organic molecules dissolved in neutral pH water. This makes the battery non-toxic and cheaper. It’s suitable for home storage and lasts for more than a decade. “This is a long-lasting battery you could put in your basement,” Roy Gordon, a lead researcher and the Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Materials Science, said in a Harvard news article. “If it spilled on the floor, it wouldn’t eat the concrete and since the medium is non-corrosive, you can use cheaper materials to build the components of the batteries, like the tanks and pumps.” The energy storage problem There’s a big problem with renewable energy sources: intermittency. In other words, how to keep the lights on when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing. Image: International Energy Agency In recent years, universities and the tech sector have been working on better batteries that they hope could help solve the energy storage problem. Despite significant improvements though, batteries are riddled with issues such as high cost, toxicity and short lifespan. Solar power customers usually have two options to store power: lithium-ion batteries such as the ones found in electronics, which are still very expensive; or lead-acid batteries. These cost half as much, but need a lot of maintenance and contain toxic materials. Image: Bloomberg New Energy Finance An emerging and promising technology is the “v-flow” battery, which uses vanadium in large external tanks of corrosive acids. The bigger the tanks, the more energy they store. But there’s a catch: vanadium is an expensive metal and like all other battery technologies, v-flow batteries lose capacity after a few years. Have you read? These next-generation batteries could end energy poverty The quest for the next-generation battery The US Department of Energy has set a goal of building a battery that can store energy for less than $100 per kilowatt-hour, which would make stored wind and solar energy competitive with energy produced from traditional power plants. The Harvard researchers say their breakthrough puts them within sight of this goal. “If you can get anywhere near this cost target then you change the world,” said Michael Aziz, lead researcher and professor of Materials and Energy Technologies at Harvard.Labor certainly thinks so. It has high hopes of claiming two big Coalition scalps in Queensland: Mr Christensen in Dawson and Immigration Minister Peter Dutton in his outer suburban Brisbane seat of Dickson. George Christensen campaigning in the Queensland seat of Dawson. Credit:Facebook "They're very much in play. They're clearly in our target seats list," a senior Queensland Labor figure told Fairfax Media. "They're two candidates that are both divisive in their electorates." Mr Dutton and Mr Christensen, widely despised by the political left, hold their seats by relatively comfortable margins of 6.7 per cent and 7.6 per cent respectively. But Labor strategists believe the two men are on the nose locally. Labor claimed to have third party polling showing Mr Dutton down to a slim 51-49 two party preferred margin in Dickson, but would not provide the data. The party has also been circling the seat of Dawson, dispatching the likes of Bill Shorten, Kate Ellis and Kim Carr to boost their candidate Frank Gilbert's fortunes. Mr Shorten spent much of the first week of the campaign in north Queensland. Peter Dutton at the official sod turning for a new men's shed in his electorate. Credit:Facebook "We made a point of going [to Dawson] when we were up there last - and it wasn't just to play with George Christensen's mind," another senior Labor source said. What Labor strategists see in Dawson and Dickson mirrors what they believe is happening around regional Queensland and suburban Brisbane: disaffection with Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, and lingering resentment over the dumping of his predecessor Tony Abbott. They also believe the Coalition is getting nervous, evidenced by an increasingly loud scare campaign about refugees and border protection. "There are places where unemployment is rising, the economy's not doing too well, and they're pretty cranky with the Turnbull government," the Queensland strategist told Fairfax Media. They haven't adjusted to having a Point Piper millionaire as prime minister "Working class punters in Mackay liked Abbott. He's a straight talker, not a spiv. They haven't adjusted to having a Point Piper millionaire as prime minister." Coalition figures privately rubbish Labor's ambitions, pointing to a recent Fairfax-Ipsos poll which put the government ahead 58-42 in Queensland. It was by far the Coalition's strongest state. Even with a 5.7 per cent margin of error, Labor would be hard-pressed to pick up many Queensland seats if those results were reproduced on polling day.GAINESVILLE – OK, all of you nattering nabobs of negativity – all of you message-board malcontents and Gator Nation naysayers – go up to the blackboard in the aftermath of National Whining Day and write it 100 times. “I believe in Jim McElwain. “I believe in Jim McElwain. “I believe in Jim McElwain.” “There's no doubt, the negative piece out there is something you always have to battle,” McElwain said on a triumphant National Signing Day when he shooed away the vultures, shut up his critics and pulled in a top-10 recruiting class. “I think the biggest thing is to understand that every coach that has been here before me has told me that, all right? They're aware of it. In fact, it might have driven a couple of ’em out.” A week ago, the Gators were 31st in the composite recruiting rankings and McElwain was being barbecued on the UF message boards as being the worst recruiting bust in Gainesville since Bobby Sabelhaus. Coach Mac was suddenly a terrible recruiter. His staff was terrible. His personality was terrible. Even his wife, Karen, was being blamed for letting recruits feed carrots to the family horses. “Recruits don’t relate to horses,” one grumpy Gator fan complained. Now, after McElwain’s recruiting success on National Signing Day, they are seeing a horse of a different color. McElwain’s class is ranked No. 9 by Rivals.com – ahead of Penn State, ahead of Notre Dame and a whopping 13 spots ahead of national championship-winning Clemson. No, McElwain’s class isn’t as good as the one hauled in by Alabama’s Nick Saban, who recorded a seventh consecutive No. 1-ranked recruiting class but, then again, Saban is in a class of his own. The Sabanator doesn’t have to reel in the big fish anymore; he just waits for them to jump in the boat. For what it’s worth, Florida’s class is few spots behind Florida State (ranked No. 5 by Rivals). If there is one criticism of UF’s class, it’s that it doesn’t have any elite “five star” recruits compared to four for FSU. However, there are 15 four-star signees – six more than FSU. Of course, the star rankings are mostly arbitrary and certainly aren’t accurate predictors of how good a player will turn out to be. Here’s all you need to know: Alabama signed twice as many four- and five-star recruits than Clemson over the last six years, but Clemson beat Alabama for the national championship. And according to 247Sports, a college football recruiting service, 61 percent of the starters in Sunday’s Super Bowl weren’t ranked among the top 500 overall in their recruiting class. The point is this: When it comes to recruiting, fans should trust their coaches more than the recruiting services. And it’s certainly time for many Florida fans to start trusting McElwain, not trashing him. In his first two seasons at Florida, he’s 13-3 in the SEC and has taken UF on back-to-back trips to Atlanta for the SEC Championship Game. That’s not so easy to do. Although McElwain says he doesn’t read the fan message boards, he has assistants who do. “They tell me, ‘Mac, you’re taking shots from all over the place,’ ” McElwain said. “… People love to harp on the negative. It's human nature. Well, we're harping on the positives. We got a lot of really good things going on. I know where we're headed. I know the direction. The administration knows the direction.” Obviously, McElwain had more faith in himself Wednesday than many fans and media members had in him. Some of us showed up at McElwain’s signing-day news conference expecting to write his recruiting obituary, but instead we were met by a pep band playing the fight song and cheerleaders chanting, “It’s great to be a Florida Gator.” It was the first time in history the Gators have ever held a pep rally on National Signing Day. “No matter what the event, let’s shake it up a little bit,” McElwain said of the change in format. “Let’s not do the same old song and dance.” As McElwain left the building, he went over to where the pep band was playing and did a little two-step. He was headed home to celebrate — and perhaps even feed the animals. His horses got the carrots. His critics got the stick. Email me at mbianchi@orlandosentinel.com. Hit me up on Twitter @BianchiWrites and listen to my Open Mike radio show every weekday from 6 to 9 a.m. on FM 96.9 and AM 740.If you visit the wikipedia page for Common Lisp and looked at the code examples, you probably noticed all the parentheses. The heavy use of parentheses marks Lisp off from other languages and makes it feel unfamiliar. But once you are able to read and write the basics, it all falls together naturally. The unusual syntax of Lisp is actually the key to many of its coolest features. Matching up parentheses and indenting things properly is best handled automatically by a text editor with support for editing Lisp code, such as Vim, which can be used with Slimv — the Superior Lisp Interaction Mode for Vim. I myself use the GNU Emacs text editor along with Slime. Using one of these options—Emacs with Slime, or Vim with Slimv—is probably the best way to develop and test Lisp code made with Xelf. With Slime or Slimv you can edit Lisp code efficiently, send commands to the underlying Lisp environment that Xelf is running in, or redefine methods and functions in order to alter object behaviors while the system is running. Both Emacs and Vim are highly customizable development environments, not just text editors; in fact, I have developed and tested Xelf (all ~10,000 lines of code) entirely with GNU Emacs as my IDE. Furthermore, Emacs and Vim are Free software, will run on basically any platform, are of very high quality, and have large, friendly user communities. That being said, you can edit Lisp code in basically any text editor, and it's quite possible that the text editor you already use has a plugin or script available for editing Lisp code and matching those parentheses. If you're unsure about Vim and Emacs, try looking around to see if you can find Lisp support for your existing editor. The instructions below assume Slime is being used.Some quick house-cleaning/sausage making updates before I proceed with today’s post. Since we here at Chasing Amazing pride ourselves on creating content that both looks back and looks forward at the Spider-Man universe (two days a week and sometimes a third, if I’m feeling saucy), I thought I’d use the “look back” slot on this blog to occasionally examine some ASM runs from past and present rather than focusing exclusively on the minutiae of my acquisition of said comics. These entries will be categorized under “Random Runs of Spidey.” In the case of this post, part two of the run will run in the “retro” post slot next week. Amazing Spider-Man #143 captures everything I love and everything I abhor about the Bronze Age era of Spider-Man in one neat, tidy little package. The bulk of the Gerry Conway/Ross Andru run on ASM is mostly lost and/or disregarded by me, so much so that when an homage to ASM #143’s one extremely historic panel was featured in a recent issue of Superior Spider-Man, I had to do some sleuthing to determine where the original moment transpired. Granted the bulk of the Bronze Age occurred before I was even born, but beyond that, these ASM comics – even the more famous ones – just fail to make an impression on me. Outside of the “Death of Gwen Stacy” arc in ASM #121-122 and the first Punisher (ASM #129), the title offers me very little until Roger Stern jumps on board as head writer in the mid-1980s. Of course the moment in question here is the extremely passionate first kiss between Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson. At this point in history, Peter is barely 20 issues removed from the death of his first true love, Gwen Stacy and MJ was evolving from flighty party girl to a more serious supporting character (which we first saw in ASM #122’s dramatic ending). What I always thought was so great about this scene beyond just the implications it held for the two characters (which would later come to pass under the editorial reign of Jim Shooter in the 1980s) was how Peter’s romantic gesture was in many ways a tactic geared towards proving Mary Jane wrong. The two are at the airport (Peter is going to Paris with Robbie Robertson to retrieve J. Jonah Jameson, who’s been kidnapped and being held for ransom by a mysterious person) when Peter asks MJ about her “Tiger” nickname for him (made most famous here). MJ’s response is, to be honest, a little emasculating – “I call you tiger because you’re not.” So Peter goes all “how do you like them apples,” on MJ, creating probably one of the more memorable panels of the Andru-era. Meanwhile, Conway aptly predicts that something has “changed” for the couple – though it would take nearly another decade for that to be consummated. All the same, it’s a great character moment for Peter. Despite the fact that he was romantically involved for years with one of the most beautiful and intelligent women in the entire Marvel universe, MJ’s comment, inadvertently or not, harkens back to the Parker “wallflower” days of ASM’s early issues. But rather than being wounded by the comment, Peter assets himself and proves he indeed, IS a tiger. Meanwhile, MJ finds herself all alone at one of the world’s biggest airports. Sure the panel isn’t remotely based in reality, but at least it conveys just how much MJ’s socks were knocked off by the moment. While I love this scene, I think it’s also worth considering the context. Readers today have the power of hindsight to look back on this as a significant moment between two characters who would go on to have legitimate history with each other. But if I was reading this at the time it came out, I have to wonder if I would think the wounds of Gwen’s death would still be too fresh for Peter to be taking a chance like this. Of course the second part of this arc (to be discussed next week), ultimately deal with those fresh wounds when a certain clone makes her presence known. Alas, once this moment has passed, the issue falls into pure ASM Bronze Age mode. The issue marks the debut of the villain Cyclone – one of many lame and promptly forgotten villains introduced as fearful adversaries for Spidey during this era (see also Grizzly and Gibbon). The issue’s second half also features a number of potentially problematic plot devices that ultimately back Conway and Andru into a corner (How is Peter REALLY going to explain how Spider-Man followed him to France? And why is this French “supervillain” so interested in JJJ?). So while we’ll always have that fantastic kiss between Peter and MJ, the issue is completely forgettable afterwards, which explains why I had to research when that kiss happened when Dan Slott and Ryan Stegman referenced it in Superior Spider-Man #2 a few months ago. Tune in next week as I talk about European stereotypes and clones in the second part of “The Delusion Conspiracy” arc in ASM #144. This is Part 1 of the “Delusion Conspiracy” arc. Click here for Part 2Yellow and green cab medallions are not “a shield against the rapid technological advances of the modern world,” a Queens judge declared as he dismissed lawsuits by taxi companies that claimed Uber operates illegally. A coalition of cab companies and credit unions that finance costly medallions argued that only yellow or green cabs can pick up street hails under the law. But Queens Judge Allan Weiss wrote in a decision released on Wednesday that the idea that the medallions would protect the struggling industry against app-based car services was unreasonable. “In this day and age, even with public utilities, investors must always be wary of new forms of competition arising from technological developments,” Weiss wrote in a 13-page ruling against Glyca Transportation and other medallion companies. “Passenger communications to Uber-type companies via a smartphone are not street hails, which are requests made by passengers standing on the street who gesture or make an utterance.” Taxi & Limousine Commission chief Meera Joshi hailed the ruling. “This decision is a victory for the riding public and leaves no question as to the appropriateness of our regulatory approach to app-dispatched services,” Joshi said in a statement. “Passengers will remain free to continue to enjoy the many transportation options available to them, whether new, more traditional, or both.” The ruling was another setback for the battered yellow-taxi industry in the face of increasing competition. At an earlier hearing, lawyers argued that the value of a once-coveted Big Apple taxi medallion had dropped 40 percent. Taxi-industry advocates will appeal the ruling. “An e-hail is a hail, and no amount of distortion, misdirection or mischief will change that,” said Todd Higgins, the lawyer representing the coalition of taxi companies and credit unions. “In the meantime, however, a catastrophe is unfolding, as an entire industry continues to be illegally destroyed,” he said.President of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker listens at a news conference during the European Union Tallinn Digital Summit in Tallinn, Estonia, September 29, 2017. REUTERS/Ints Kalnins BRUSSELS (Reuters) - German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker have discussed the Catalan crisis in a phone call, an EU official told Reuters on Saturday, in a sign of growing unease over potential disruption across Europe. The call signals fresh concern over a possible declaration of independence next week by the Catalan regional parliament and the reaction of the Spanish government, which could exacerbate what is already Spain’s worst political crisis for decades. Juncker spoke to Merkel from India on Friday on the sidelines of an EU-India summit. “They discussed the situation in Spain, among other things,” the EU official said, without adding details. Concern is growing in EU capitals about the negative impact of the crisis on the Spanish economy, the fourth largest in the euro zone, and on possible spillovers to other economies of the bloc. European finance ministers, gathering in Brussels on Monday and Tuesday for a regular meeting, could discuss the issue, although it is not formally on the agenda, EU officials said. The EU Commission has repeatedly urged Catalan and Spanish leaders to find a political solution. The support given in public statements by EU leaders to Spain’s Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy is combined with concern expressed in private about how the Spanish government’s use of police to prevent Catalans from voting last week in an independence referendum could backfire. The Spanish government apologized for the first time on Friday for the police use of violence.. Some EU states are worried that talk of Catalan independence could fuel secessionist feelings in other parts of Europe.Attackers continually modify malware in order to evade antivirus software. Attackers will pack or encrypt malicious files using various packers. Blocking each and every malicious executable is a challenging task for antivirus vendors. Most malicious files, once installed, try to download additional malware or send HTTP GET/POST requests to malicious servers controlled by attackers. Malicious files can gather sensitive information and then send it to the controlled servers. Given the networking capabilities of malware, beyond simply trying to identify the malicious binary itself, we can also detect malware by identifying certain patterns in network traffic. This blog will explain how someone with limited reverse engineering skills can monitor network traffic to identify malicious binaries. You need a separate controlled environment to run the malicious samples. It is never advisable to run the samples on your production network. There are chances that not all HTTP requests are fired by the malicious binary depending upon the availability of malicious severs. http://%s%s?act%sor&v=1&a=%d&id=%s&hardid=%s %s?action=%sgen&v=%s For this tutorial, we will use the example of a real-world malicious server - “hxxp://uaetoon.net/scan/”. This website hosted a fake antivirus program, designed to convince a victim that their PC was infected. The site displayed different security alerts, such as “Your Computer is Infected”. Here is the screenshot of the malicious website once visited, The website would then convince the victim to download a malicious binary file called “setup.exe” in order to remove fake threats found on the system. Installing the binary was of course actually installing a Trojan on the machine as opposed to an AV solution. The malicious binary would then send various HTTP requests to malicious servers controlled by the attackers. We can study the network traffic by allowing the binary to execute in a virtual machine, but this approach has some limitations:Due to the above limitations, we sometimes need to first reverse the malicious binary in order to retrieve strings such as the destination servers. This can easily be done, with limited reverse engineering knowledge and without running the sample. Let’s begin with some static analysis. Download the malicious file on your machine or VMware image, but don’t run it.Let’s first find out if the file has been packed using some well-known packer. To do so, you will need to open the malicious file in a hex or text editor. Here is the screenshot of file when opened in a text editor: Here, a little knowledge of commonly used packers will be helpful. UPX (Ultimate Packer for Executables) is often used by attackers, as it is a free and open source packer. You will generally find strings like “UPX” and “UPX1” in the malicious file in plain text if the file is packed using UPX. Now that we know the file has been packed by UPX, we need to unpack it and open it in the IDA pro dissembler. To unpack the malicious file, download UPX packer. Unzip the packer and copy the malicious file into the UPX folder. Unpack the malicious file with the simple command shown in below screenshot, Now, the file has been unpacked and can be opened in IDA pro. We are not going to fully reverse engineer the file for the purpose of this blog, rather we’ll look for potential domains where traffic is sent. In the next screenshot, you can see the binary in IDA Pro: Allow IDA Pro to complete its analysis and then open the “Strings window” to identify strings used by the file. Going through the strings window, you will learn a great deal about the activities conducted by this binary, such as registry changes or network traffic sent. Let’s look at some interesting strings: From the above strings, we can conclude that this malicious binary creates registry entries under “Run” in order to run this executable each time the computer is rebooted. This binary can also send HTTP POST requests with content type x-www-form-urlencoded, which refers to the URL format. This is valuable information when writing pattern matching signatures, in order to block further infection. Copy and save the URL format which is “http://%s%s?act%sor&v=1&a=%d&id=%s&hardid=%s”. The malicious file later will substitute domain strings and other data in place of the %s (string) variables.Here is another set of strings: We now have all the malicious domains, along with another URL pattern. That’s it! We now have all the domains and URL patterns necessary to write network-based signatures. While this approach won’t work in every case, it does represent an efficient way to write network signatures without the need to conduct a full and time consuming reverse engineering exercise. Now we have 2 URL patterns:We can now easily block all HTTP requests, including the above patterns. Even if the attacker changes the domains used, chances are high that the URL format will remain the same. It turns out that this traffic relates to the now well-known Koobface worm.Blocking all variants of malware can be difficult but we can greatly improve detection rates by additionally monitoring network traffic.Hope this will be useful.UmeshTed Cruz wins Texas GOP Senate nomination TEXAS Texas Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst is backed by supporters outside a Houston deli as he answers reporters questions Tuesday, July 31, 2012. Dewhurst faces former Texas Solicitor General Ted Cruz in the Republican primary runoff election for U.S. Senator. (AP Photo/Pat Sullivan) less Texas Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst is backed by supporters outside a Houston deli as he answers reporters questions Tuesday, July 31, 2012. Dewhurst faces former Texas Solicitor General Ted Cruz in the Republican... more Photo: Pat Sullivan, Associated Press Photo: Pat Sullivan, Associated Press Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close Ted Cruz wins Texas GOP Senate nomination 1 / 1 Back to Gallery Houston -- Ted Cruz, an insurgent backed by the Tea Party, defeated the candidate favored by Gov. Rick Perry on Tuesday in a runoff election for the Republican Senate nomination that revealed a wide rift in Texas between the party establishment and restless anti-incumbent activists on the right. With the come-from-behind victory, he is heavily favored to win the Senate seat being vacated in November by Kay Bailey Hutchison and appears likely to become a star of the national conservative movement. Cruz, 41, is the latest conservative rebel to bring down an established party leader, tapping into simmering anger within the Republican ranks nationwide. Cruz, who is Cuban American, has drawn comparisons to Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, another youthful Cuban American who quickly became an icon of fiscal and religious conservatives around the country. Cruz's opponent was David Dewhurst, 66, a wealthy rancher and businessman who has held the powerful elected post of lieutenant governor for nine years and was endorsed by Perry and most other top party leaders as well as business and farm groups. Dewhurst will continue as lieutenant governor. Dewhurst has a deeply conservative record, and often during the campaign the two candidates seemed to mimic each other on the issues. But Cruz relentlessly portrayed his opponent as a creature of the establishment who is too quick to compromise.NEW DELHI: Women in India will now have equal rights in guardianship and adoption of children with the President giving assent to an Act to amend laws governing marriages in the country.Parliament had recently passed the Personal Laws (Amendment) Bill, 2010 to amend the Guardians and Wards Act, 1890 and the Hindu Adoptions and Maintenance Act, 1956."The President assented to the Personal Laws (Amendment) Act, 2010 on August 31, 2010 and it is published in the Gazette of India as Act 30 of 2010 on September 1, 2010," an official statement said on Wednesday.According to the Guardians and Wards Act, which applies to Christians, Muslims, Parsis and Jews, if a couple adopts a child, the father is the natural guardian.The amendment to the 120 year-old Act allows the mother along with the father to be appointed as a guardian, making the process gender neutral.The Act provides for the mother to be appointed as a guardian along with the father so that the courts do not appoint anyone else in case the father dies.The second amendment in the Hindu Adoption Maintenance Act, 1956, (applicable to Hindus, Jains, Buddhists and Sikhs) aims to remove the hurdles in the way of a married woman to adopt and also give a child for adoption.Presently, unmarried and divorced women as also widows are allowed to adopt a child but women separated from their husbands and engaged in lengthy divorce battles cannot adopt a child.The new amendment would allow a married woman separated from her husband to adopt with the consent of her husband even during the time of divorce proceedings.However, if he changes his religion or is declared to be of unsound mind, no consent from the estranged husband will be required.Please share this article: by Theodore de Macedo Soares According to the exit polls conducted by Edison Research, Clinton won four key battleground states (NC, PA, WI, and FL) in the 2016 Presidential Election that she went on to lose in the computerized vote counts. With these states Clinton wins the Electoral College with a count of 306 versus 232 for Trump. Clinton also won the national exit poll by 3.2% and won the national vote count by 2.1% or about three million votes. Exit polls were conducted in 28 states. In 22 states the discrepancies between the exit polls and the vote count favored Trump. In 12 of these states the discrepancies favoring Trump exceeded the margin of error of the state’s exit poll. See Table and its footnotes below. Readers may find the following answers to questions in the comments section very helpful: [1] Exit polls (EP) conducted by Edison Research and published by CNN shortly after the closing of state polls and downloaded by TdMS. Edison Research conducted one national EP and EPs in 28 states. As these first published exit polls are altered/adjusted to conform to the unverified computer vote counts, the discrepancies shown above are adjusted to near zero in the final EPs. [2] Official 2016 Presidential General Election Results. Federal Election Commission. January 30, 2017. Available at: www.fec.gov/pubrec/fe2016/2016presgeresults.pdf and archived HERE. [3] The margin columns subtracts the Clinton totals from Trump’s. A Trump win is shown by a positive sign and a Clinton win by a negative sign. [4] Note that the Margin of Error (MOE) is for the differences between the two candidates (at 95% CI). This MOE is about double the usual MOE for each candidate. MOE calculated according to: Franklin, C. The ‘Margin of Error’ for Differences in Polls. University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin. October 2002, revised February 2007. Available at: https://abcnews.go.com/images/PollingUnit/MOEFranklin.pdf Note: The exit poll vote proportions for Clinton and Trump were derived from the gender category (all the other categories would have approximately the same result). Clinton’s proportion of the male vote was multiplied with the total male proportion and added to Clinton’s proportion of the female vote multiplied with the total female vote to arrive at Clinton’s vote share in the state. The same procedure was applied to arrive at Trump’s proportions of the exit poll vote. Updates: May 8, 2017: Table updated with the official vote count published by the Federal Election Commission on January 30, 2017. The table is now marked final. Some of the introductory text has been modified in accordance with the official results and table. November 14, 2016: As requested by a few people attached is the zip file (very large at 5,300KB) containing all the exit polls downloaded from CNN shortly after the polls closed in each state. If using these files please credit www.tdmsresearch.com and Theodore de Macedo Soares as the source and most importantly cite the article that shows the results of the exit polls: http://tdmsresearch.com/2016/11/10/2016-presidential-election-table/ November 17, 2016: The table below was updated to reflect the most current vote counts. Electoral College count updated to include states not previously decided. Michigan results will not be formally decided until the end of November but as it is expected that Trump will win its 16 Electoral College votes it has been noted as a Trump win. Electoral College results calculated with the interactive map at http://www.270towin.com/ COMMENT SECTION FUNCTIONALITY UPDATED ON NOVEMBER 19, 2016. Readers can now rate and sort comments.Frank Amedia, an Ohio pastor who served for some time as the volunteer “liaison for Christian policy” to the Donald Trump campaign, told Charisma’s Steve Strang in a podcast recorded on Friday that Trump’s continued competitiveness in the presidential election is a “tremendous testimony of the spirit of God,” and that God is using events like the recent developments about Hillary Clinton’s emails to expose a “Jezebel spirit” in the country. Amedia credited God with the FBI’s recent revelation that it may have found more emails relevant to its investigation of Clinton’s use of a private
put on hold. But now Senate Republicans are frantically rushing ahead, hoping to put some kind of bill up for a vote early next week. It’s a mad dash to the finish line, the end of a six-month debate in Congress and a seven-year Republican promise to repeal Obamacare. As senators left town Thursday afternoon, no clear path forward had emerged. This is the bottom line: Senate Republicans are promising a vote next week, but nobody is sure what they’re going to vote on. There are competing bills, one to repeal and replace Obamacare, one to partially repeal it but with no replacement. It’s not clear whether there are even the votes to start debate, because senators don’t know what is being put up for a vote. Underscoring the absurdity of the week, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) floated to reporters — perhaps half jokingly — that Senate Republicans effectively draw the competing plans out of hat to decide the order that they’d be voted on. “I think they’re pretty equal in support. Let’s do a random selection, let’s have three or four of them. Put them in random order on the first day, equal billing,” he said. “I think that’s a compromise.” It’s been a busy, bewildering week. Here’s where things stand right now. There are two bills in play — one to repeal Obamacare, one to replace it One reason the debate has become so hard to follow: Senate Republicans are considering two health care bills right now. One is the Better Care Reconciliation Act, the repeal-and-replacement plan that Republicans has been discussing and drafting in private for the past two months. That’s the health care bill you’ve been hearing about for most of the Senate debate. The other is the Obamacare Repeal Reconciliation Act, an updated version of 2015 legislation that repeals all funding for Obamacare’s insurance expansion but keeps its regulations on insurers. It was released Wednesday. Neither bill has the votes to pass. But the Senate is still trying. Earlier this week, the Senate health care push seemed dead. Monday night, two more Republican senators came out against the current version of the BCRA, bringing the total to four, enough to block the bill. Then Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said the Senate would instead vote soon on the repeal-only legislation. But by midday Tuesday, three Senate Republicans said they would oppose the repeal bill, enough to stop that bill as well. McConnell said the Senate would vote soon nonetheless, perhaps just to bring the six-month health care saga to an end. Then the White House intervened. President Trump told senators at the White House Wednesday to keep working on the BCRA. (Trump has been all over the place: He has endorsed repeal only, letting Obamacare fail, and repeal and replace this week alone.) Vote counts haven’t changed for either bill. But Senate Republicans are still discussing the BCRA. One bill would lead to 22 million fewer people with insurance. The other: 32 million. The BCRA, the bill to repeal and replace Obamacare, would do a few big things: It would scale back Obamacare’s financial assistance for people who buy private coverage. Insurers could sell health plans that don’t comply with Obamacare’s insurance regulations — for example, they could charge people more based on preexisting conditions or offer insurance that doesn’t cover maternity care or hospitalization. It would eventually end Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion and overhaul the entire Medicaid program by instituting a hard federal spending cap. It provides about $200 billion to stabilize the insurance market, but experts have said that likely isn’t enough money to offset the negative effects. The most recent version of the BCRA hasn’t yet been reviewed by the Congressional Budget Office. But the CBO found that the original version would lead to 22 million fewer Americans having health insurance in 2026, versus Obamacare, and out-of-pocket costs would rise dramatically. Medicaid spending would be cut by $772 billion over 10 years, versus current law, and 15 million fewer people would be enrolled in the program. The ORRA, on the other hand, would repeal broad swaths of Obamacare and not replace any of it: Tax subsidies for private coverage, Medicaid expansion, taxes on the wealthy and health care industry, and the law’s individual mandate would be repealed. Obamacare’s insurance regulations would not be repealed, however, because the Senate can’t do that and bypass the possibility of a filibuster. Repeal would happen in two years. Republicans say they would craft a new replacement plan in the two years before repeal takes full effect, though experts warn that passing the bill would have immediate consequences for the insurance market. Without a replacement, the CBO projected that the ORRA would lead to 32 million fewer Americans having health insurance in 2026, that insurance premiums would double over the next 10 years, and that most of the country would have no health plans available on the individual market. The Senate is preparing to vote early next week. But they don’t know what they’re voting on. Based on comments from Sens. John Cornyn (R-TX) and John Thune (R-SD), both members of Senate leadership, the plan is for Republicans to keep working on the BCRA, their plan to replace Obamacare, to see if they can strike a deal that gets 50 votes. But if they can’t, then the Senate could instead take up ORRA. Either way, the first vote is a procedural vote, not a vote on final passage, known as a “motion to proceed.” That starts the debate. It would need 50 votes. Another possible compromise, as suggested by Paul, would be for Senate Republicans to agree that they will vote to open debate, and then the first two votes after that would be on ORRA and BCRA. But leadership hasn’t decided yet what they’ll do. John McCain’s newly diagnosed brain cancer will make it even harder for a bill to pass Republicans are using a Senate process that prevents Democrats from filibustering, so they need only 50 votes to pass a bill. There are 52 Republicans in the Senate. Right now, neither bill has the votes to pass. At least six senators — Susan Collins of Maine, Paul, Mike Lee of Utah, Jerry Moran of Kansas, Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska — have said they’d oppose the most recent version of the BCRA. At least four senators — Collins, Capito, Murkowski, and Rob Portman of Ohio — have said they would oppose the ORRA. But after Sen. John McCain’s cancer diagnosis, there are effectively only 51 Republicans in the Senate for the foreseeable future. (It’s not clear how long McCain will be out.) That means two Republican “no” votes are enough to scuttle the plan. Repeal and delay is almost certainly not going to pass If Republicans end up voting on the repeal-only bill, ORRA, its chances of passing are slim to none. Too many Republicans simply refuse to vote for repealing Obamacare without replacing it. The BCRA also has problems — namely, conservative and moderate senators want very different things — but it will be the focus of the discussions over the next few days. Something would likely have to change in the BCRA for any of the current holdouts to come around and support it. Negotiations on a repeal-and-replace bill are ongoing A large group of senators, including most of the holdouts, met in a Senate office building on Wednesday night to discuss a path forward. They didn’t say much as they came out of the meeting, so it’s unclear if much progress was made on the BCRA. Medicaid has been a sticking point, particularly for a half-dozen senators who represent states that expanded the program under Obamacare. The Hill reported that Senate leaders are prepared to add $200 billion in funding to the bill for those states. That wouldn’t actually be enough to offset the $772 billion in Medicaid cuts, much of which results from ending the expansion, but maybe it would win their votes anyway. Collins, the most moderate Senate Republican, might be unpersuadable no matter what. She is concerned about the Medicaid spending caps and the projected losses in insurance coverage. She told reporters she had not been invited to the meeting on Wednesday night. The conservative holdouts are tricky too. Paul seems ungettable: He staked his opposition on the $182 billion in stabilization funding, calling it an insurance bailout, and leadership would never remove that money from the bill. Lee is unsatisfied with the version of a proposal by Sen. Ted Cruz, allowing non-Obamacare plans back on the market. A technical change might win him over. Moran’s demands have been opaque throughout the debate. Collins, Paul, and an absent McCain are enough to block the BCRA. That seems for now like an insurmountable math problem. But Republicans aren’t giving up yet. That’s the one thing we’ve learned from these wild past few days.As Theodore Wafer’s trial in the killing of Renisha McBride begins today, the question of African American humanity rears its ugly head. Looking at the recent slew of racially-charged murder cases, being a black American starts to feel like you're a Game of Thrones character — expendable. Is it acceptable to shoot blacks for playing loud music or walking home in a hoodie? What about knocking on a door for help in a predominantly white neighborhood? The acquittal of George Zimmerman in the murder of Trayvon Martin, the non-verdict in Michael Dunn’s first degree murder charge in the killing of Jordan Davis and the need for a second grand jury just to charge the police officer, Randall Kerrick, who shot and killed Jonathan Ferrell, who was unarmed, with involuntary manslaughter might make you think twice. Advertisement Blaming the victim is a routine defense strategy in cases such as these and Renisha McBride will be no exception. Ted Wafer’s defense team is already digging in. On November 2, 2013, 19-year-old McBride stumbled onto Wafer's porch in Dearborn Heights, Michigan at 2:30 a.m. after suffering a car accident a town or so away two hours earlier. It is not known where she went between crashing her car and arriving on Wafer’s doorstep. When McBride knocked on Wafer’s screen door, her family says she was looking for help and access to a phone. Wafer opened his front door and fatally shot her in the head through his screen door. He did not call 911 until after he’d fired, telling dispatchers, “I just shot somebody on my front porch with a shotgun, banging on my door.” His attorneys say he was fearful for his life. After the incident, Wafer was not arrested. Instead he turned himself in nearly two weeks later on November 15, the day of his arraignment when he was charged with second-degree murder, manslaughter and possession of a felony firearm. Advertisement From her family’s perspective McBride’s murder was racially charged; a black women asked for assistance and was instead seen as a threat by a white man and killed. On the other hand, Wafer’s defense attorney Cheryl Carpenter highlighted that McBride’s blood alcohol level at the time of her death was twice the legal limit and she had marijuana in her system. Carpenter said that Wafer was afraid so he shot McBride in self defense. "Ms. McBride could have thought she was breaking into her marijuana supplier's house" when she was shot on the porch, the defense attorney claimed during pre-trial. Michigan does not have a Stand Your Ground law, which Zimmerman notoriously benefitted from in Florida, but the state does have their own definition of self-defense, which is given to juries when a defendant claims self defense and it includes the following clarification: “An individual … may use deadly force against another individual anywhere he or she has the legal right to be with no duty to retreat if … he or she honestly and reasonably believes that the use of deadly force is necessary to prevent the imminent death of or imminent great bodily harm to himself.” Advertisement This is where things get tricky; those words can be applied to a multitude of scenarios and a jury must decide if the person in question was truly in a situation where they could legally use such force. Though the proceedings have not officially started, the victim is clearly already on trial. Last month, to build a case casting McBride as a credible threat, Carpenter pushed to include the deceased’s texts, social media, emails, school records and a previous legal history as evidence to ascertain "whether Ms. McBride had a character trait for aggression" and assert that she was a drug dealer. But on June 27, a judge denied Carpenter’s request, citing that the messages did not portray the deceased as an aggressor before she was fatally shot. Ultimately, it is not clear how Michigan’s legal definition of self defense will come into play during Wafer’s trial, but Detroit criminal attorney Jeffrey L. Edison says you can never extricate race from the criminal justice system. Advertisement “A lot will depend on the jury’s perception in terms of Wafer having an honest and reasonable belief he was about to sustain serious bodily harm or death,” Edison tells Jezebel. “If you have a jury of persons who have similar perceptions of fear and stereotypical fear of African Americans, Wafer might prevail because America has a problem with perceiving African Americans as criminals and when people see a criminal, they think of African Americans. It’s a socio-political dynamic that emanates from white supremacy and we struggle with it every day in the courts.” And while the previous trials surrounding the deaths of Martin, Davis and Ferrell were in Florida and North Carolina respectively, in Edison’s opinion, racially-based perceptions can cross state lines. “In Renisha’s case, an African American juror is less inclined to accept any notion that Wafer was in fear for his life when he saw this young African American girl on his doorstep, where a white juror might have a greater inclination to accept that explanation,” continues Edison. “You can never minimize or avoid the impact of race in the criminal justice system. You deal with it as best you can but you can’t engage the process naively and think ‘Oh, race is no problem.’" Advertisement With Carpenter’s early attempts to include McBride’s online profile into evidence and the fact that the case is Wafer’s word against a dead woman’s final actions, a skeptical mind could find innumerable ways for justice to fail against the backdrop of Martin, Davis and Ferrell. But even with the history of blacks dying like Ned Stark, Duke Law professor Neil Vidmar, a leading mind on jury selection and activity, says most juries are just doing the best they can to deliver justice. “Juries do a pretty good job, not to say that they don’t make mistakes,” Vidmar says. “But those might be the mistakes of the prosecution or the defense and they way they present the evidence.” Lisa Bloom, an MSNBC legal pundit, made a similar claim in the wake of Zimmerman’s acquittal, saying the defense didn’t drive home evidence that would’ve proved his guilt without a doubt. But even when information is presented properly, sometimes it’s tough to keep out societal influences. Advertisement “I’ve testified under oath in court and done survey research and found that sometimes the media taints the community in such a way that it's not possible to get a fair trial, either in that community or in some nearby community,” says Vidmar. “Or that the trial should be delayed should be for a time.” Elsewhere, the links between Wafer, Zimmerman, Kerrick and Dunn are more nuanced. One prominent voice in race and politics thinks that justice might have a chance in Michigan in a way that it did not in other states but that may not change the way people of color view the outcome, whatever it may be. “Michael Dunn did not go free, but the jury could not agree to convict Dunn on the most serious charge he faced,” MSNBC host and Wake Forest professor Melissa Harris-Perry says of a jury’s inability to reach a verdict on Dunn’s charge of first degree murder in the fatal shooting of Davis. “That led many of us to feel justice was not served and that Jordan Davis' death is not taken seriously by the system. Undoubtedly our collective responses to the Dunn verdict are shaped by the pain and anger many of us continue to feel in the aftermath of the Zimmerman trial.” Advertisement Harris-Perry points out that Stand Your Ground won’t be a defense in Wafer’s case because unlike Florida, Michigan doesn’t have that law. “But if Mr. Wafer is exonerated,” she adds. “The sense of outrage and sadness will be increased by the recent experiences of Dunn and Zimmerman.” It remains to be seen how justice will or will not manifest itself in Wayne County but it is clear that America’s track record isn’t so good.Romania's history has not been as idyllically peaceful as its geography. Over the centuries, various migrating people invaded Romania. Romania's historical provinces Wallachia and Moldova offered furious resistance to the invading Ottoman Turks. Transylvania was successively under Habsburg, Ottoman, Hungarian or Wallachian rule, while remaining an (semi) autonomous province. Romania's post WWII history as a communist-block nation is more widely known, primarily due to the excesses of the former dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. In December 1989 a national uprising led to his overthrow. The 1991 Constitution re-established Romania as a republic with a multiparty system, market economy and individual rights of free speech, religion and private ownership. Some of the history that has shaped Romania What is now Romania has been inhabited since the Paleolithic Age as evidenced by carved stone tools unearthed there. 10,000 B.C. Approximate date of the first known art in present day Romania: cave paintings in northwest Transylvania. 4,000 B.C. Approximate date of pottery (dated to the Neolithic Age) that is found in all regions of Romania. 3,000 B.C. Thracian tribes of Indo-European origin, who migrated from Asia, occupied the actual territory of Romania. 2,000 B.C. A distinctive Thracian sub-group emerged in what is now Romania. The Greeks called these people Getae, but to the Romans they were Dacians. Herodotus called them "the fairest and most courageous of men" because they believed in the immortality of the soul and were not afraid to die. 700 B.C. Greeks arrived and settled near the Black Sea. The cities of Histria, Tomis (now Constanta) and Callatis (now Mangalia) were established. Western-style civilization developed significantly. 70-44 B.C. Dacian king Burebista controlled the territory of modern-day Romania. Burebista created a powerful Dacian kingdom. 100 A.D. Dacian civilization reaches its peak. "The Dacians had a civilization of which they could be proud. Their lands were rich in minerals, and they acquired great skill in metalworking. They traded with the Greek world, importing pottery, olive oil, and wine, and may have engaged in slave dealing. Compared with their neighbors they enjoyed a high standard of living, as well as a rich spiritual life. Military, the Dacians were less advanced. Unlike the Roman legions, they did not field a standing army, although there was a warrior class, the comati, or 'long-haired ones'. " (attribution: Anthony Everitt, Hadrian and the triumph of Rome). 106 A.D. Romans conquer and colonize Dacia (modern-today Romania). 106 - 274 A.D. Dacia is a province of the Roman Empire. Dacians gradually adopt numerous elements of the conquerors' language. 271 A.D. After fighting off the barbarian Goths, most Roman troops abandon Dacia. 4th Century Christianity is adopted by the Daco-Roman, Latin-speaking people. Both "Byzantine Empire" and "Eastern Roman Empire" are historiographical terms created after the end of the realm; its citizens continued to refer to their empire as the Roman Empire (Ancient Greek: Basileia Rhõmaiõn; Latin: Imperium Romanum or Romania) and to themselves as "Romans". 4th - 9th Centuries Nomadic tribes from Asia and Europe (Goths, Visigoths, Huns, Slavs) invade Dacia. 896 — late 1100s Magyars (Hungarians) invade regions in western and central present-day Romania (Crisana, Banat and Transylvania). The local population — Romanians - were the only Latin people in the eastern part of the former Roman Empire and the only Latin people to belong to the Orthodox faith. The oldest extant Hungarian chronicle, "Gesta Hungarorum" or The Deeds of the Hungarians, (based on older chronicles) documents the battles between the local population in Transylvania, lead by six local rulers, and the invading Magyars. 12th Century Saxon (German) settlers begin to establish several towns in Transylvania. (Germans were invited to settle in Transylvania by the king of Hungary who wanted to consolidate his position in the newly occupied territory). Szeklers people - descendants from Attila's Huns - were also brought to eastern and southeastern Transylvania as border guards. 13th Century The first formal division of the formerly unified Romanian population. The principalities of Wallachia, Moldavia, and Transylvania are established. Transylvania becomes an autonomous principality under Magyar rule, until 1526. Magyar forces tried unsuccessfully to capture Wallachia and Moldavia. 14th-15th Centuries Wallachia and Moldavia offered resistance to the Ottoman Empire expansion. 1526 Transylvania (a semi-autonomous principality) becomes subject to Ottoman (Turkish) authority. 16th-17th Century Threatened by the Turks who conquered Hungary, the three Romanian provinces of Wallachia, Moldova and Transylvania are able to retain their autonomy by paying tribute to the Turks. The principality of Transylvania prospered as a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire. 1600 Wallachia, Moldavia and Transylvania (map) are briefly united under Mihai Viteazul (Michael the Brave), prince of Wallachia. Unity lasted only one year after which, Michael the Brave was defeated by the Turks and Hapsburg forces. Transylvania came under Hapsburg rule while Turkish suzerainty continued in Wallachia and Moldavia. 1699 Transylvania and Bucovina (smaller region north of Moldavia) are incorporated in the Habsburg Empire. 1765 Transylvania was declared a Grand Principality of Transylvania, further consolidating its special separate status within the Habsburg Empire. 1821 Moldavia loses its eastern territory east of river Prut (also called Bessarabia) to Russia. 1856 The principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia — for centuries under the suzerainty of the Turkish Ottoman Empire - secure their autonomy. 1859 Alexandru Ioan Cuza is elected to the thrones of Moldavia and Wallachia. 1862 Wallachia and Moldavia unite to form a national state: Romania. 1866 Carol I (German born) succeeds Alexandru Ioan Cuza, as prince of Romania. 1867 Transylvania falls under the direct rule of Hungary and a strong push for Magyarisation (of names and official language) follows. 1877 On May 9 the Romanian parliament declared the independence of Romania from the Ottoman Empire. A day later, the act was signed by Prince Carol I. 1881 Kingdom of Romania officially proclaimed. 1892 The leaders of the Romanians of Transylvania sent a Memorandum to the Austro-Hungarian Emperor, Franz Joseph demanding an end to persecutions and Magyarization attempts. 1914 King Carol I dies. He is succeeded by his nephew King Ferdinand I (1914-1927). Romania enters WWI on the side of the Triple Entente aiming to regain its lost territories (part of Transylvania, Bessarabia and Bukovina). 1918 During large public assemblies representatives of most towns, villages and local communities in Transylvania, Bessarabia and Bucovina declare union with Romania. 1930 Carol II, Ferdinand's I son, becomes king of Romania and establishes royal dictatorship. 1939 Germany demands a monopoly on Romanian exports (mainly oil, lumber and agricultural products) in exchange for the guarantee of its borders. 1940 The Soviet Union annexes Bessarabia (eastern Romania - today Republic of Moldova) and Northern Bucovina (NNE Romania). Germany and Italy force Romania to cede Northern Transylvania to Hungary. Widespread demonstrations against King Carol II. Marshall Ion Antonescu forces him to abdicate in favor of his 19-year-old son Michael. Carol II flees Romania. 1941 Marshall Ion Antonescu imposes a military dictatorship. In order to regain Bessarabia, Romania enters WWII against the Soviet Union. 1944 King Michael I engineers a royal coup and arrests Marshall Ion Antonescu. Romania reenters war on the Allies side. 1945 The Yalta Agreement makes Romania part of the Soviet system. Communist-dominated government installed. 1947 With Soviet troops on its territory, Romania enters the sphere of influence of the Soviet Union. The communists, who gradually took the power, force King Michael I to abdicate and proclaim Romania a People's Republic. King Michael leaves the country and moves to Switzerland. 1950s After Stalin's death, Romania begins to distance itself from Moscow. 1964 Romania declares autonomy within Communist Bloc. 1967 Nicolae Ceausescu becomes President of the Council of State merging leadership of state and party. 1968 Romania condemns the Soviet-led Warsaw Pacy invasion of Czechoslovakia; Romania's communist leader Nicolae Ceausescu, earns praise and economic aid from the West. 1974 Romania was the first country of the Soviet Bloc to have official relations with the European Community. (and sign a treaty that included Romania in the Community's Generalized System of Preferences). 1980s Obsessed with repaying the national debt and megalomaniac building projects Ceausescu orders a ban on importation of any consumer products and commands exportation of all goods produced in Romania except minimum food supplies. Severe restrictions of civil rights are imposed. 1982 Romania calls on Soviet Union to withdraw from Afghanistan. 1987 Ceausescu indicates Romania will not follow Soviet reform trends. 1989 Romanians unite in protests against the communist leadership and local demonstrations sparked a national uprising that finally ousted communist ruler Nicolae Ceausescu and his cabinet. 1990 First free, multi-party elections after WWII are held in Romania. 1991 Romanians vote for a new Constitution. 2004 Romania joins NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization). 2007 Romania becomes a member of the European Union. Additional reading: Romania, An Illustrated History by Nicolae Klepper - an insightful synthesis addressed to all those who want to learn about Romania's history, politics, culture, and society. To order the book please e-mail: orders@hippocrenebooks.com or visit www.hippocrenebooks.comMichael Walter Mitchell, shot neighbor due to voices in his head. (Photo: Maricopa County Sheriff's Office) Michael Walter Mitchell, 27, of Glendale, Arizona says he shot his neighbor because the voices in his head told him to do it. Mitchell even called the police himself to report that he shot the man downstairs. When officers arrived they discovered Pedro Gomez inside his apartment with several gunshot wounds. He was dead, according to an Arizona Republic report. Mitchell said that he went to Gomez’s apartment because he heard a woman asking for his help. He knocked on the door and shot the man who answered right away. Mitchell also told officers that he found Gomez’s girlfriend and children in the apartment but didn’t shoot them because “it is not right for someone to point a gun and shoot women and children,” police documents show. Mitchell told officers he had fallen on “tough times” when his girlfriend broke up with him and he was fired. It is unclear if Mitchell acquired the gun used legally.Drive to get three cities in top 50 list of Swachh Survekshn-2018 Clearing anti-littering and anti-spitting bill Linking ACR report of officers with Swachh Survekshn-2018 Roping in district collectors to keep cities clean DEHRADUN: Uttarakhand’s Urban development initiatives of Swacch Bharat Abhiyan have been identified as “Best Practices” by the government of India and are being circulated to all the other states for replication. V K Jindal, joint secretary ( Swacch Bharat Mission ) has written a letter to the Mission Directors (across the country) for Swacch Bharat Abhiyan and asked them to follow the initiatives undertaken by the Uttarakhand to keep their cities clean.Of the four major initiatives started by the BJP government of the Himalayan state is that Uttarakhand is aiming for at least 5 of their best urban local bodies under top-50 cities in the Swachh Survekshn-2018 ranking. The government is giving a cash reward of Rs Rs 75 lakh, Rs 50 Lkah and Rs 25 lakh to the cities, which obtain the top three positions in the cleanliness list.Secondly, to keep cities clean, the Trivendra Singh Rawat government has passed anti-littering and anti-spitting bull which imposes a Rs 5,000 spot fine on the violators. The move is aimed at checking the faults at the grassroots level and taking quick action.The annual confidential report of government officials concerned is linked with performance in Swachh Survekshan-2018. This would help the government officials keep a close tab on the developments and actively participate in the activities. District Collectors have been roped in to driver cities to perform better in Swachh Survekshan-2018.The letter further mentions, “You may kindly take note of the same and introduce similar policy decisions addressing critical issues in different components of Swachh Bharat Mission Urban. For further information on the above decisions taken by the Uttarakhand government, you may reach out to Shri Vinod Kumar Suman,” State Mission Director, Uttarakhand.Secretary to the CM, Radhika Jha said, “Competitive feeling amongs the urban local bodies will definitely motivate people to perform better. Mention of Swacchta parametres in yearly appraisal of officers in an institutional reform, initiated by our state only.”Another senior officer said, “The CM instructed for some innovative and positive measures to boost Swachh Bharat campaign in Uttarakhand. The state has already achived ODF state status for rural areas and we plan to achieve ODF status for urban areas by March 2018.”Key initiativesNov 27, 2016 at 08:17 // News Coin Idol Author EY Switzerland, one of the four biggest accounting firms in the world, has recently announced to become the first professional services company to accept Bitcoin. The cryptocurrency payment option will be available fr om January 2017, however, it is an initiative of EY branch in Switzerland and there are no plans as of yet to roll it globally. EY Switzerland spokesperson said: “To our knowledge, we are the first professional services company in the world to offer this service.” According to the report, it is part of the company’s strategy to promote the developments of digital products based on smart contracts with an aim to lowering transaction costs through automatic processing. The company has also installed a Bitcoin ATM in its office building in Zurich wh ere office employees and customers can buy or sell Bitcoins for Swiss francs.The New York Police Department has reportedly been giving young adults free tickets to screenings of “Selma,” and last month, on Martin Luther King Day, officers with the 81st Precinct in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood even drove a group of local teens to see the film, which depicts the historic march for voting rights. At the same time, however, the NYPD has sought to thwart, criminalize and defame the current incarnation of civil rights activism underway in New York, treating the Black Lives Matter movement as a threat on par with terrorism. On Feb. 10, NYPD Commissioner William Bratton asked lawmakers in Albany to elevate resisting arrest from a misdemeanor to a felony. Arrestees going limp and forcing officers to carry them off to jail was a common tactic of the civil rights movement — which has continued to this day — and is considered resisting arrest by the NYPD and other law enforcement agencies. At the end of January, Bratton announced he is arming a new unit called the Strategic Response Group with machine guns that will “assist us in dealing with demonstrations.” Speaking at a breakfast organized by the Police Foundation, Bratton explained that the unit “is designed for dealing with events like our recent protests, or incidents like Mumbai or what just happened in Paris.” Since grand juries in Ferguson, Mo., and Staten Island opted late last year not to indict police officers for killing unarmed, black civilians, Black Lives Matter demonstrators in New York have staged “die-ins” by the thousands and shut down major traffic thoroughfares such as the West Side Highway and the Holland Tunnel. As in many locations across the country, Black Lives Matter marches and rallies have been angry and participants and organizers sharply critical of police but, by and large, they have not been violent. Bratton’s second-in-command, Chief of Department James O’Neill, later rolled back the commissioner’s remarks, saying instead that two separate units will be created; one for demonstrations and another that will focus solely on terrorism. To civil rights experts and activists, however, Bratton’s earlier conflation of the two was troubling. “The comparison of Black Lives Matter and other large protests to violent terrorist attacks is an outrage and an insult to the hundreds of thousands of people who have been marching across the country against racism and for police reform,” said Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, executive director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund. Sabaah Jordan, a New York-based anti-racist organizer who is also working on a documentary film about Ferguson, was worried but not too surprised by Bratton’s remarks. “The government and the media have a long history of criminalizing and vilifying black people,” she said. “The previous generation of black leaders are either in exile, locked-up as political prisoners, or they’re dead. Today, terrorism is a racialized term. It is commonly used to mean people of color threatening the safety and security of white people. We don’t recognize lynchings as terrorist acts or the Klu Klux Klan as a terrorist group. But Bratton’s comments should concern everyone. They set a precedent for the way free speech is dealt with.” SPONSORED According to veteran civil rights attorney Martin Stolar, a special unit to police demonstrations is reminiscent of the Tactical Patrol Force, which — comprised largely of former marines — was the unit responsible for crowd control at protests in New York from 1959 to 1984, garnering a reputation for cracking heads. A Yahoo Group comprised of former members bears the slogan, “Our like will never be seen again.” With the establishment of this new protest unit within the NYPD, perhaps it will. “I hope this new unit gets extensive training in civil rights,” Stolar said. The NYPD did not respond to inquiries for this article. While it may seem bizarre that protesters and terrorists could somehow be lumped into the same category, officers whose jackets read “NYPD Counter Terrorism” arefrequently sighted at demonstrations in New York. FBI documents obtained in 2012 by the Partnership for Civil Justice through a Freedom of Information Act requestrevealed that the FBI, Homeland Security, NYPD and other local law enforcement agencies monitored Occupy Wall Street activists from the movement’s inception, treating it as a terrorist threat. On December 14, Eric Linsker, an adjunct professor with the City University of New York, was arrested at his home by the Joint Terrorism Task Force, which includes members of the FBI, for allegedly assaulting an officer on the Brooklyn Bridge during a march that broke away from a larger, peaceful Black Lives Matter procession the day before. Linsker, and about a half dozen activists who allegedly helped de-arrest him at the December 13 demonstration, remain the only participants in the Black Lives Matter protests so far to face charges for violent crimes in New York. Stolar, who has represented numerous activists against criminal charges stemming from protests, including Occupy participant Cecily McMillan and now Linsker, argues that the case against the adjunct professor and those accused of abetting him is being used to smear the entire movement. “They’ve jumped on this case to say, ‘Look at this group of bad protesters,’” Stolar said. “And therefore the message is that every other protester is also tainted. They’ve used it to that extent.” A grand jury has been impaneled and is exploring charges of assaulting a police officer against Linsker and those who helped him initially escape. The Brooklyn District Attorney is casting a wide net. Videographer Atiq Zabinsky was subpoenaed, though he said he was several hundred feet away when the incident involving Linsker took place. He has refused to provide footage of the protest he captured that night to the district attorney. Another source involved in the demonstration said numerous activists who had nothing to do with the NYPD’s confrontation with Linsker have been extensively interrogated by the NYPD, though they do not currently wish to speak out for fear of retribution. “The fact that a couple of cops were shot a week later certainly has not helped,” Stolar said in reference to the December 20 murder of two NYPD officers by a man from Baltimore, who shortly thereafter killed himself. There is no evidence that the shooter had participated in any of the recent demonstrations against police brutality. Before traveling to the city he also shot his girlfriend in the stomach during a domestic dispute, though little mention of her was made in most media. The narrative has instead focused on the protesters. Patrick Lynch, president of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, the city’s largest police union, blamed the officers’ deaths on “those that incited violence on the streets under the guise of protest, that tried to tear down what NYPD officers did every day.” Mayor Bill de Blasio too was to blame, according to Lynch, since he had allowed people to protest and even expressed sympathy for the demonstrators. “We tried to warn it must not go on, it cannot be tolerated,” Lynch said. Up until that point, previous attempts by police and their supporters to roll back the momentum of the Black Lives Matter movement had failed. A “Blue Lives Matter” rally on December 19 at City Hall garnered little attention. The Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association even declined to endorse it, fearful that it might be a hoax. But immediately following the killings, the mayor and even some leading Black Lives Matter activists called for the demonstrations to stop until the officers were buried. Black Lives Matter activist Sabaah Jordan criticized pleas for pause, rejecting the notion that the movement was in any
quehanna River), Gobblers (for the rich hunting culture of the area, as well as the turkeys in Binghamton), Rocking Horses (for the Triple Cities' nickname as the "Carousel Capital of The World"), Rumble Ponies (also a carousel tribute), Stud Muffins (for the collections of carousel horses in Binghamton), and Timber Jockeys (for everyone who rides the carousels).[3][4] On November 3, 2016, the team announced that it would be rebranding as the Binghamton Rumble Ponies, and released a new logo. Current roster [ edit ] Season records [ edit ] Panoramic view of the Binghamton Mets on the field at NYSEG Stadium (Place indicates finish in Eastern League from 1987–93, in the Northern Division from 1994–2009, and in the Eastern Division from 2010. Bold indicates League Champion) Williamsport Bills Binghamton Mets Binghamton Rumble Ponies 2017: 85-54 (2nd), manager Luis Rojas 2018: 64-76 (5th), manager Luis Rojas Playoffs [ edit ]STOCKHOLM/LONDON (Reuters) - WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been subject to ‘arbitrary detention’ during the 3-1/2 years he has spent in the Ecuadorian embassy in London to avoid a rape investigation in Sweden, a U.N. panel will rule on Friday. Assange, who enraged the United States by publishing hundreds of thousands of secret U.S. diplomatic cables, appealed to the panel saying he was a political refugee whose rights had been infringed by being unable to take up asylum in Ecuador. The former computer hacker denies allegations of a 2010 rape in Sweden, saying the charge is a ploy that would eventually take him to the United States where a criminal investigation into the activities of WikiLeaks is still open. His leaks laid bare often highly critical U.S. appraisals of world leaders from Vladimir Putin to the Saudi royal family. Britain said it had never arbitrarily detained Assange and that the Australian had voluntarily avoided arrest by jumping bail to flee to the embassy. But the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention ruled in Assange’s favour, Sweden said. “Should I prevail and the state parties be found to have acted unlawfully, I expect the immediate return of my passport and the termination of further attempts to arrest me,” Assange, 44, said in a short statement posted on Twitter. He had said that if he lost the appeal then he would leave his cramped quarters at the embassy in the Knightsbridge area of London, though Britain said he would be arrested and extradited to Sweden as soon as he stepped outside. Assange made international headlines in early 2010 when WikiLeaks published classified U.S. military video showing a 2007 attack by Apache helicopters that killed a dozen people in Baghdad, including two Reuters news staff. Later that year, the group released over 90,000 secret documents detailing the U.S.-led military campaign in Afghanistan, followed by almost 400,000 internal U.S. military reports detailing operations in Iraq. More than 250,000 classified cables from U.S. embassies followed, then almost three million dating back to 1973. POLITICAL REFUGEE? In his submission to the U.N. working group, which is due to publish its findings on Friday, Assange argued that his time in the embassy constituted arbitrary detention. “(The) working group has made the judgement that Assange has been arbitrarily detained in contravention of international commitments,” a spokeswoman for the Swedish Foreign Ministry said, confirming an earlier report by the BBC. He said that he had been deprived of fundamental liberties including access to sunlight and fresh air, adequate medical facilities and legal and procedural security. While the ruling may draw attention to Assange’s fate, it is unlikely to immediately affect the current investigations against him. “We have been consistently clear that Mr Assange has never been arbitrarily detained by the U.K. but is, in fact, voluntarily avoiding lawful arrest by choosing to remain in the Ecuadorean embassy,” a British government spokeswoman said. “An allegation of rape is still outstanding and a European Arrest Warrant in place, so the UK continues to have a legal obligation to extradite Mr Assange to Sweden,” she said. Swedish prosecutors said the U.N. decision had no formal impact on the rape investigation under Swedish law. A U.S. Grand Jury investigation into WikiLeaks is ongoing. White House spokesman Josh Earnest said it was unclear what the impact “a pronouncement from the United Nations would have on the situation”. “But, you know, but he’s facing serious charges inside of Sweden. Sweden has asked the British for extradition, and ultimately those two countries will have to resolve the situation,” Earnest said. STAY OR GO? Britain, where Assange is wanted for jumping bail, has spent over 10 million pounds ($15 million) on keeping guards outside the embassy for over three years, “There seems to me a real risk that if he left the embassy that he may expose himself to arrest or questioning,” said Philip Lynch, director of the International Service for Human Rights in Geneva, an NGO. “A decision that effective confinement in the Ecuadorian embassy constitutes arbitrary detention – it doesn’t necessarily lead to the conclusion that the underlying arrest warrants and extradition requests are unlawful.” WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange gestures during a news conference at the Ecuadorian embassy in central London, Britain, in this August 18, 2014 file photo. REUTERS/John Stillwell/pool/Files Per Samuelson, one of Assange’s Swedish lawyers, said if the U.N. panel judged Assange’s time in the embassy to be custody, he should be released immediately. “It is a very important body that would be then saying that Sweden’s actions are inconsistent with the European Convention on Human Rights. And it is international common practise to follow those decisions,” Samuelson told Reuters. Since Assange’s confinement, WikiLeaks has continued to publish documents on topics such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, one of the world’s biggest multinational trade deals.If you’re a developer like me, then you probably grew up learning about Object-Oriented Programming and how that whole paradigm works. You may have messed with Java or C++ – or been lucky enough to use neat languages like Ruby, Python, or C# as your first true language – so chances are that you’re at least mildly comfortable with terms such as classes, objects, instance variables, static methods, etc. What you’re probably not as comfortable with are the core concepts behind this weird paradigm called functional programming – which is pretty drastically different from not only just object-oriented programming, but also procedural, prototypal, and a slough of other common paradigms out there. Functional programming is becoming a pretty hot topic – and for very good reason. This paradigm is hardly new too; Haskell is potentially the most corely-functional language out there and has existed since 1990. Other languages such as Erlang, Scala, Clojure also fall into the functional category – and they all have a solid following. One of the major benefits of functional programming is the ability to write programs that run concurrently and that do it properly (check out my post on concurrency if you need a refresher on what that means) – meaning that common concerns such as deadlock, starvation, and thread-safety really aren’t an issue. Concurrency in procedural-based languages is a nightmare because state can change at any given moment. Objects have state that can change, practically any function can change any variable as long as they’re in lexical scope (or dynamic scope, for the few languages that use it) – it’s very powerful, but very bad at keeping tabs on state. Functional programming touts many benefits – but the ability to take advantage of all of a CPU’s cores via concurrent behavior is what makes it really shine compared to the other popular programming languages today – so I want to go over some of the core concepts that power this language paradigm. Foreword: All of these concepts are language-agnostic (in fact, many functional languages don’t even fully abide by them), but if you had to associate them with any one language, it would most likely fit best with Haskell, since Haskell most strictly abides by core functional concepts. The following 5 concepts are strictly theory-driven and help define the functional paradigm in the purest sense. 1. Functions are Pure This is easily the foremost rule of functional programming. All functions are pure in the sense that they abide by two restrictions: A function called multiple times with the same arguments will always return the same value. Always. No side effects occur throughout the function’s execution. The first rule is relatively simple to understand – if I call the function sum(2, 3) – then it should always return the same value every time. Areas where this breaks down in more procedural-coding is when you rely on state that the function doesn’t control, such as global variables or any sort of randomized activity. As soon as you throw in a rand() function call, or access a variable not defined in the function – then the function loses its purity, and that can’t happen in functional programming. The second rule – no side effects – is a little bit more broad in nature. A side effect is basically a state change in something other than the function that’s currently executing. Modifying a variable defined outside the function, printing out to the console, raising an exception, and reading data from a file are all examples of side effects which prevent a function from being pure. At first, this might seem like a big constraint for functional programming – but think about it. If you know for sure that a function won’t modify any sort of state outside the function itself, then you have full confidence that you can call this function in any scenario. This opens so many doors for concurrent programming and multi-threaded applications. 2. Functions are First-Class and can be Higher-Order This concept isn’t exclusive to functional programming (it’s used pretty heavily in Javascript, PHP, and among other languages too) – but it is a requirement of being functional. In fact – there’s a whole Wikipedia article over the concept of first-class functions. For a function to be first-class, you just have to be able to set it to a variable. That’s it. This allows you to handle the function as if it were a normal data type (such as an integer or string), and still be able to execute the function at some other point in runtime. Higher-order functions build off of this concept of “functions as first-class citizens” and are defined as functions that either accept another function as an argument, or that return a function themselves. Common examples of higher-order functions are map functions which typically iterate over a list, modify the data based on a passed-in function, and return a new list, and filter functions, which accept a function specifying how elements of a list should be selected, and return a new list with the selections. 3. Variables are Immutable This one’s pretty simple. In functional programming, you can’t modify a variable after it’s been initialized. You just can’t. You can create new variables just fine – but you can’t modify existing variables, and this really helps to maintain state throughout the runtime of a program. Once you create a variable and set its value, you can have full confidence knowing that the value of that variable will never change. 4. Functions have Referential Transparency Referential transparency is a tricky definition to pinpoint, and if you ask 5 different developers, then you’re bound to get 5 different responses. The most accurate definition for referential transparency that I have come across (and that I agree with) is that if you can replace the value of a function call with its return value everywhere that it’s called and the state of the program stays the same, then the function is referentially transparent. This might seem obvious – but let me give you an example. Let’s say we have a function in Java that just adds 3 and 5 together: 1 2 3 4 5 6 public int addNumbers ( ) { return 3 + 5 ; } addNumbers ( ) // 8 8 // 8 It’s pretty obvious that anywhere I call the addNumbers() function, I can easily replace that whole function call with the return value of 8 – so this function is referentially transparent. Here’s an example of one that’s not: 1 2 3 4 5 public void printText ( ) { System. out. println ( "Hello World" ) ; } printText ( ) // Returns nothing, but prints "Hello World" This is a void function, so it doesn’t return anything when called – so for the function to be referentially transparent, we should be able to replace the function call with nothing as well – but that obviously doesn’t work. The function changes the state of the console by printing out to it – so it’s not referentially transparent. This is a tricky topic to get, but once you do, it’s a pretty powerful way to understand how functions really work. 5. Functional Programming is Based on Lambda Calculus Functional programming is heavily rooted in a mathematical system called lambda calculus. I’m not a mathematician, and I certainly don’t pretend to be, so I won’t go into the nitty-gritty details about this field of math – but I do want to review the two core concepts of lambda calculus that really shaped the structure of how functional programming works: In lambda calculus, all functions can be written anonymously without a name – because the only portion of a function header that affects its execution is the list of arguments. In case you ever wondered, this is where lambda (or anonymous) functions get their name in modern-day programming – because of lambda calculus. Brain explosion. When invoked, all functions will go through a process called currying. What this means is that when a function with multiple arguments is called, it will execute the function once but it will only set one variable in the parameter list. At the end, a new function is returned with 1 less argument – the one that was just applied – and this new function is immediately invoked. This happens recursively until the function has been fully applied, and then a final result is returned. Because functions are pure in functional programming – this works. Otherwise, if state changes were a concern, currying could produce unsafe results. As I mentioned earlier, there’s much more to lambda calculus than just this – but I wanted to review where some of the core concepts in functional programming came from. At the very least, you can bring up the phrase lambda calculus when talking about functional programming, and everyone else will think you’re really smart. Final Thoughts Functional programming involves a significantly different train of thought than what you’re probably used to – but it’s really powerful, and I personally think this topic is going to come up again and again with CPUs these days offering more cores to handle processes instead of just using one or two beefed up cores per unit. While I mentioned Haskell as being one of the more pure functional languages out there – there are a handful of other popular languages too that are classified as functional: Erlang, Clojure, Scala, and Elixir are just a few of them, and I highly encourage you to check one (or more) of them out. Thanks for sticking with me this long, and I hope you learned something!John Hart took the time to explain the families side of the controversial give a little page posted in Jonah Lomu's name after he passed. The Givealittle page to support Jonah Lomu's family and legacy will be taken down by the family after its intentions were "misunderstood". Jonah's wife Nadene Lomu created the page on Thursday for "The man with a big heart, a legend of the game". She since clarified that all funds raised through the page would go towards helping support her and Jonah's two children, helping with their upbringing and their education. Jonah Lomu: Pay tribute to a legend Share your stories, photos and videos. Contribute READ MORE: * Love for Lomu touches family * Two lessons to learn from Jonah * Wife Nadene's message to Jonah * Key: Lomu state service 'not impossible' * Lomu fundraising crashes Givealittle But on Friday morning at a press conference family spokesman John Hart said the page would be taken down after the reasons for it were misunderstood. Hart said the Givealittle page was set up after a number of people asked to donate money. "At the time it was thought this was probably an appropriate way to handle that." He said Nadene asked for the site to be taken down on Friday following publicity around the page. Lomu had a passion to help children around the world, Hart said. The family would reconsider how best to honour that dream, he said. Grahame Cox / FAIRFAX Jonah Lomu with Nadene Quirk at SkyCity Convention Centre in 2009. The page had raised over $5000 since it was set up, attracting 87 donations in less than a day. Nadene Lomu posted a link to the page on her own Facebook page, as well as on the official Jonah Lomu page, saying her heart was broken. Donors have commented offering condolences as well as stories of their experiences with Jonah. GIVEALITTLE.CO.NZ The Jonah Lomu page on Givealittle.co.nz The Givealittle site crashed on Thursday under the demand the Lomu page created. Givealittle confirmed there was a relationship between their website being down and the publishing of the fundraising page for Jonah Lomu. Nadene Lomu said she and Jonah had big plans to make a difference in the world. "As a team together we were going to build a lasting legacy. Jonah has left this earth too soon leaving us all empty hearted." She wrote that the vision which she and her husband had together would be possible through support. " I will finish building the legacy that my wonderful husband created when he burst onto the international stage leaving history and our hearts, changing the face of rugby".End to End Arguments and Large Organizations Terry Crowley Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jan 16, 2017 I have always been somewhat obsessed with the end-to-end argument. I see its application in systems everywhere. The paper I linked to above by Saltzer, Reed and Clark appeared in 1981. That seems a century ago in computer terms. Its genesis is even earlier and describes motivation and examples back through the fifties. One can easily argue that the main premise is really independent of computers — any complex layered system can be examined in this way. The main focus and motivation for writing the paper then was in the context of the early days of the Internet and the communication systems and applications being developed at the time. The challenge was how to divide functionality between a distributed application and the underlying communication subsystem it is layered on top of. Their succinct articulation was: The function in question can completely and correctly be implemented only with the knowledge and help of the application standing at the end points of the communication system. Therefore, providing that questioned function as a feature of the communication system itself is not possible. (Sometimes an incomplete version of the function provided by the communication system may be useful as a performance enhancement.) These were the days of the canonical “seven layers” in the ISO communication stack. As a young engineer, the idea that challenges in where to place functionality did not arise from a poor understanding of this beautiful layering system but rather were more fundamental to the structure of any system was liberating. This was especially true for someone like me who was primarily focused on applications — as remained true for most of my career. In fact, the end-to-end argument defines a way of looking at virtually any layered system — which really includes any non-trivial system. It is a way of thinking — sort of an Occam’s razor for systems design. The power of the end-to-end argument comes from being willing to accept failure. You recognize that you have no way of being perfect or solving some problem in certain layers of the system — which then opens up the opportunity for those layers to be simple, fast or great in some other dimension rather than “perfect”. One broadly applied recent example is the rise of systems that use the concept of eventual consistency. Amazon is the prototypical example. You have multiple users interacting with this large distributed real-time system to buy a book. A classic centralized system has a single transactional database that ensures that you don’t sell the last copy of a book in your warehouse to more than one user. But you have an end-to-end problem. The “end” is the book being shipped from the warehouse and arriving in good condition at the buyer’s house. Even if the database system is perfect, that last book might get run over by a forklift in the warehouse and destroyed. You need some other end-to-end mechanism to ensure the buyer is satisfied — for example some way of putting the book on backorder and notifying the user. Once you have such an end-to-end mechanism, you have much greater flexibility in the internal layers of the system. You can accept other types of “failure” that can be mitigated by your end-to-end mechanism. You can scale out that database across multiple boxes and use asynchronous mechanisms to bring them into consistency. You accept that you might sell that last book to multiple customers. You then leverage these end-to-end resolution mechanisms you already built to deal with potential anomalies and still meet your end-to-end goals. This pattern occurs over and over again. You accept that guaranteeing some result in internal layers is impossible — you revel in that impossibility — and that frees up those layers to focus on other key attributes like performance or scalability or “merely” simplicity. A characteristic of these kinds of systems is they exhibit a more dynamic robustness that makes them more tunable and responsive to underlying changes in performance of their components. A non-distributed example comes from the FrontPage HTML editor. One “end-to-end” goal is to ensure that the editor does not generate “stupid” HTML. Stupid HTML is HTML structure that is awkward or inefficient in some way. Examples include empty unnecessary tags (e.g. <b></b>) or tags that abut or subsume each other and could be more gracefully joined into a single tag. The challenge is the editor needs to be able to read virtually any existing HTML input structure and then perform edits on that content. You would rather that the hundreds of operations that edit the existing HTML structure focus on the transformation they need to perform rather than these other issues of end-to-end correctness. The approach taken in FrontPage was to have each manipulation routine focus on making its local edit and then have a single separate routine that knew how to take existing structure and make semantically equivalent transformations to make it “non-stupid”. This kept the large number of editing routines relatively simple as well as concentrating the knowledge of how to transform from stupid to non-stupid in a single location in the system. Ultimate responsibility was with this function rather than scattered throughout the system. This is another characteristic of end-to-end approaches. You can concentrate responsibility for meeting the end-to-end goals in a more isolated part of the system rather than requiring a careful — and fragile — hand off of responsibility layer by layer. One of the consequences of the end-to-end argument that is not discussed much in the literature is how this principle interacts with large organizational structure. The challenge that arises is that internal layers in a system have a constituency — a team that is responsible for it and that is motivated to “improve” it in some way release over release. These improvements inevitably have costs — more code loaded, memory used, performance consumed. The team can easily lose sight of the end to end goals. The team leaders have established the “release goals” — of course they require additional code to be written and memory to be consumed! Why else would you need a team? Butler Lampson’s old but still fabulous “Hints for Computer System Design” makes a couple points about layers in a system design that are really motivated by these end-to-end arguments. His dicta “make it fast” and “don’t hide power” are really about recognizing that the application is in a much better position to understand these tradeoffs in resource and performance consumption. The more decisions made for the application in internal layers, the more flexibility is lost. The writers of these early papers had the advantage of dealing with much smaller systems — where the designers understood every layer and in some cases had written all the layers. They were intimately familiar with the details and tradeoffs. With today’s systems, most developers walk up to an existing layer and need to accept it for what it is. It is not always clear what tradeoffs or motivations have driven the developers of a layer you depend on. There was a case in Office development that I found especially illustrative of these dynamics. The application code was making what looked like an innocuous call to read a string in a directory lookup. Internally, the layer ended up communicating with the remote Active Directory system to build up a large tree describing the various fields and types that had been configured as part of the overall Active Directory domain. This type information could then be used to perform automatic type transformations when accessing fields from the directory. Building this tree required querying the remote AD system and then required building a data structure that required several megabytes to cache the information in order to make future calls faster. In our case, we had no need for the type transformations and were only making a single call — the whole mechanism was entirely unnecessary for us. The team had an answer for us — we were using the “slow, easy-to-use API” and should be using the “fast, complex API”. This was purely an internal distinction that the team had used to rationalize these tradeoffs; there was nothing in the external documentation that described these differences. A common approach that teams working on these middleware layers will take is to make these costly features optional. The challenge is that over time the fact that there is a fast way to navigate through functionality is lost to both users of the API and the team that owns the layer. The API ends up being a hand grenade that can blow up in a developers face. The Mac Outlook client provides another good example. We received a bunch of complaints that the mail synchronization process was much slower than simpler mail clients. An investigation found that the Mac Outlook client was requesting the mail messages with a flag that told the Exchange service endpoint to fully resolve all email addresses to user names, which involved an uncached call back to the Active Directory server for each recipient in each message. It was a feature just waiting to blow up. Another recent example comes from the work to build the Microsoft Graph API, which is providing a consistent REST-based API across all the Office 365 and other Microsoft services. It is definitely worthwhile work — the APIs for each of the individual products grew up separately and the consistent structure and endpoints will make them much easier to use. The challenge that arose (and is still being resolved) is that the team had a “mission” and clearly that mission meant that costs to deliver on the mission were acceptable. In particular, they added a layer to deliver this consistency that introduced additional latency and failure modes. A consequence was internal teams frequently found these costs unacceptable and would continue to use the more baroque service-specific APIs. These were good proxies for external customers. You get a better result if the team building a layer understands it has no special right to eat performance in the service of some secondary goal. Make it fast! Following through on this ends up being both technically and organizationally difficult — it is so much easier if the organization gets to own its own code and service! I like Lampson’s “Make it fast!” dictum because it serves as a much simpler analytic tool compared to actually producing and analyzing specific applications and their end-to-end requirements. That is much messier and open to argument rather than simply looking at a layer and recognizing where it has consumed performance unnecessarily. Just say no! No argument you make will justify the additional costs you have introduced. There are lots of other examples that arose over the years in struggles between Windows and Office to build new functionality in “the right way”. Windows would want to make functionality easy to program (and in some cases automatically slipped in to a layer in a way that did not require applications to write new code). The Office developers owned the end-to-end experience and wanted control. Solving for both is really difficult. I alluded to some of these challenges in my post Leaky by Design. One thing that helps is understanding that this dynamic is playing out at both the system level and the organizational level. There are not people acting in bad faith, but there are dynamics that can result in the wrong thing being built if you do not actively work against them.There was an unprecedented image in the western zone of Girona last week: padlocked bins to avoid people searching for food in them. City Hall has plans to put an end to the practice of bin scouring due to the "health risks and social issues involved" and has come to an agreement with three supermarket chains to promote a new system of discarding and redistributing food. Two civil agents will have the task of redirecting the needy to a food center where they will be given a basic basket of food. In turn, the supermarkets have agreed to donate food they can no longer sell, but is still safe to eat. The test phase began last Monday. So far, the town hall has placed locks on five containers in the neighborhoods of Sant Narcís and Santa Eugènia, home to the supermarkets Condis, Novavenda and Bonpreu, all participating in the plan. Eduard Berloso, the CiU Catalan nationalist councilor in charge of Girona Social Services department, explained that the objective is to "guarantee [citizens'] right to food" whilst at the same time avoiding humiliation and an undignified scramble for scraps. According to statistics from the council, around 90 people in the Catalan city resort to bins as a source of food. The plan is to redirect these people to a food distribution center, an initiative of the previous Socialist-led city government, where food baskets will be handed out to families in risk of exclusion. The center is formed by a consortium which includes Cáritas and the Red Cross, and it hands out 800 baskets every two weeks. It plans to increase this number to a thousand to meet the demands of the new program. Two people will be placed near the bins to inform people of the new scheme and hand out vouchers. The opposition has criticized the city authorities for only being concerned with image. "What is their real aim? That people aren't seen rummaging in bins, or that no one goes hungry?" asks Joan Olóriz, an eco-socialist city councilor who feels social services should be the ones to decide who benefits from the distribution centers. "It worries us that everything has been reduced to simply locking bins, when the real issue would have caused a genuine scandal had it been presented any other way," says Socialist Pia Bosch. Berloso is adamant that the plan is about more than just image. City Hall believes that all of Girona's supermarkets will eventually join the program, and donate unsellable food that does not pose a health risk. Eventually, it hopes to replace the locks with special bins that can only be opened by the supermarkets' staff. The plan does not go so far as detailing the exact amount of food, or the regularity of deliveries.Finance ministers and bank governors pose for a "family" photo for the International Monetary and Financial Committee (IMFC), as part of the IMF and World Bank's 2017 Annual Spring Meetings, in Washington, U.S., April 22, 2017. REUTERS/Mike Theiler WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Member countries of the International Monetary Fund on Saturday pledged to work to reduce global imbalances but failed to repeat their past pledge to resist all forms of protectionism. The International Monetary and Financial Committee (IMFC), the IMF’s steering body, also repeated its past commitments on currency exchange rates. “We will refrain from competitive devaluations, and will not target our exchange rates for competitive purposes,” the IMFC said in a statement. “We will also work together to reduce excessive global imbalances by pursuing appropriate policies. We are working to strengthen the contribution of trade to our economies,” it said. The communique largely adopted the trade language from a G20 statement issued last month in Baden Baden, Germany, where U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin had said the anti-protectionism pledge was no longer relevant. Mexican central bank chief Agustin Carstens, who heads the IMF steering committee, said protectionism is a “relative term” and “ambiguous.” “There is no country that does not have any provision on trade,” Carstens told a news conference. “Instead of dwelling on what that concept means, we managed to put it in a more positive, more constructive framework.” Carstens, who is among the global financial officials attending the IMF and World Bank spring meetings this week, said the goal was to take advantage of trade and that all members were “aligned” on the need for free and fair trade. The IMFC statement also said that while the global economic recovery was gaining momentum, growth was “still modest” and it warned of heightened political and policy uncertainties.Health Centers Hurt In States That Skipped Medicaid Expansion More than 1 million patients who use federally funded community health centers will remain uninsured because they live in 24 states that chose not to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, according to a study released Friday by researchers at George Washington University. Most of those patients live in the South, because every state in that region except Arkansas and Kentucky opted against expanding the federal-state program for the poor after the Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that it was optional. "These low-income patients already face significant challenges to obtaining health care," says lead author Peter Shin, director of the Geiger Gibson Program in Community Health Policy at George Washington University. "Our analysis suggests these patients will remain without access to affordable insurance, which will almost certainly lead to delays in care and the risk of more serious health conditions." Health centers in states that have expanded Medicaid are benefiting, as 2.9 million of their uninsured patients were projected to gain coverage in 2014 either through Medicaid or through buying subsidized private coverage on the new health insurance marketplaces, the report found. Officials at health centers in Colorado, Kentucky and other states that expanded Medicaid have seen their rates of uninsured patients fall dramatically this year. Gaining coverage helps health center patients get access to specialists along with prescription drugs, diagnostic tests and hospital care for little or no out-of-pocket costs. The coverage will also be a financial bonanza for health centers that are paid several times more from Medicaid than from the sliding scale fees they charge the uninsured. Nationally, about 1,200 community health centers provide primary care services to nearly 21 million patients at 8,000 sites. About 36 percent of their patients in 2012 were uninsured and 39 percent were on Medicaid. In the states that expanded Medicaid this year, the government and private insurance payments will lead to potential revenues of $2.1 billion in 2014 for the centers. That's money the centers can use to pay physicians and nurses and also to expand services. But in the states that opted against expanding Medicaid, the centers will lose about $569 million in extra Medicaid funding, the study found. Health centers in states that didn't expand Medicaid are unlikely to have money to grow and "as a result, access problems are likely to increase as the number of uninsured patients who seek care at health centers increases," the report said. And this is likely to exacerbate existing access problems, particularly in the South. The report showed that 35 percent of the 1.1 million community health center patients left struggling without insurance live in just five states — Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi. "That is a huge resource loss for them," Shin said. If all 50 states had expanded Medicaid as the law's framers had intended, 5.2 million uninsured community health center patients out of a total of 7.5 million would have been covered, the report projected. Those that would have remained uninsured could not afford to buy coverage on the exchange, chose not to purchase it or were ineligible for Medicaid because of their immigration status.High Court To Hear Case Of Mexican Boy Killed In Cross-Border Shooting Enlarge this image toggle caption Russell Contreras/AP Russell Contreras/AP In June 2010, 15-year-old Sergio Hernandez and his friends were playing chicken at the U.S.-Mexico border, daring each other to run up and touch the tall border fence separating Juarez, Mexico, from El Paso, Texas. At some point during their game, U.S. border patrol agent Jesus Mesa arrived on a bicycle. He detained one of the kids on the U.S. side while the others ran away. Hernandez hid behind a pillar beneath a bridge on the Mexican side of the border. A cellphone video shows the boy peeking out from behind the column, before Mesa shoots and kills him. NPR's Nina Totenberg reports that Mesa claims he was being surrounded by the boys, and that they were throwing rocks at him. But as the Supreme Court hears oral arguments Tuesday, the question in this case actually doesn't come down to whether Mesa acted in self-defense. The Justice Department decided against prosecuting Mesa because the department said it did not have jurisdiction on the Mexico side of the border. Mexico charged the agent with murder, but the U.S. refused to extradite him, so the prosecution could not move forward. The Hernandez family sued Mesa for damages, saying that the border agent violated their son's rights — and this is the question that the Supreme Court faces: Can foreigners sue for damages under the U.S. Constitution? The government said in its court filing that the right to sue "should not be extended to aliens injured abroad." Mesa's lawyer says a ruling in favor of the Hernandez family would mean foreigners could also sue over drone attacks. In an interview with Steve Inskeep in 2014, the head of U.S. Customs and Border Protection Gil Kerlikowske acknowledged that the agency had a problem with transparency around the use of force. But he also said that he found the decision by an appellate court that the Hernandez family could sue for damages "chilling." When asked if he thought that federal law applied when agents shot across the border, Kerlikowske said it would depend on the circumstances — but that border patrol rules for using force always applied. "Frankly, we need to be better at admitting when we're wrong or where we've made a mistake," Kerlikowske told Inskeep. "There is a certain sense in law enforcement that if we just keep our heads down, all of this will go away — meaning media scrutiny and nongovernmental organizations. That doesn't happen." A 2013 report commissioned by U.S. Customs and Border Protection and written by an outside group had faulted the agency for insufficiently investigating the 67 shootings that took place from 2010 to 2012 and questioned the use of force in some of those cases. Since March of 2014 the CBP says there has been a decline in the number of use of force incidents.The 2017 NHL Draft has come and gone, and all 31 teams are exiting Chicago with varying degrees of satisfaction in regards to their respective hauls. While we likely won't know they all fared for a few years yet, we can take a quick look at the results and assess how the teams made out. Here's our take on the teams in the Central Division: Chicago Blackhawks Draft
Centennial, Colo. and Kent, Wash. – Sept. 10, 2015 – United Launch Alliance (ULA), the nation’s premier space launch company, and Blue Origin, LLC, a privately-funded aerospace company owned by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, announced today the signing of an agreement to expand production capabilities for the American-made BE-4 engine that will power the Vulcan next generation launch system. The BE-4 engine offers the fastest path to a domestic alternative to the Russian RD-180. Development is on schedule to achieve qualification for flight in 2017 to support the first Vulcan flight in 2019. "This agreement gets us closer to having an affordable, domestic and innovative engine that will help the Vulcan rocket exceed the capability of the Atlas V on its first flight and open brand new opportunities for the nation’s use of space,” said Tory Bruno, president and chief executive officer of ULA. "This partnership enables each company to leverage its strengths, with ULA bringing production excellence and mission assurance, and Blue Origin bringing innovative engineering concepts and a commitment to lowering the cost of spaceflight." "The BE-4 engine test program is well underway with more than 60 staged-combustion tests already on the books," said Jeff Bezos, founder of Blue Origin. "This new agreement is an important step toward building BE-4s at the production rate needed for the Vulcan launch vehicle." The Vulcan rocket brings together decades of experience on ULA’s reliable Atlas and Delta vehicles, combining the best features of each to produce an all-new, American-made rocket that will enable mission success from low Earth orbit all the way to Pluto. The BE-4 is a liquid oxygen, liquefied natural gas (LNG) rocket engine that delivers 550,000-lbf of thrust at sea level. Two BE-4s would power each ULA Vulcan booster, providing 1,100,000-lbf thrust at liftoff. ULA is teaming in the development of the BE-4 to enable availability for national security, civil, human and commercial missions. Development of the BE-4 engine has been underway for more than three years and testing of the BE-4 components is ongoing at Blue Origin’s test facilities in West Texas. About United Launch Alliance With more than a century of combined heritage, United Launch Alliance is the nation’s most experienced and reliable launch service provider. ULA has successfully delivered more than 95 satellites to orbit that provide critical capabilities for troops in the field, aid meteorologists in tracking severe weather, enable personal device-based GPS navigation and unlock the mysteries of our solar system. For more information on ULA, visit the ULA website at www.ulalaunch.com. Join the conversation at www.facebook.com/ulalaunch, twitter.com/ulalaunch, and instagram.com/ulalaunch. About Blue Origin Blue Origin, LLC (Blue Origin) is a private company developing vehicles and technologies to enable commercial human space transportation. Blue Origin has a long-term vision of greatly increasing the number of people that fly into space so that we humans can better continue exploring the solar system. For more information and a list of job openings, please visit us at www.blueorigin.com.The incredible photographs that give a revealing insight into Navy life A series of revealing photographs documenting an incredible insight into life in the Navy won a series of awards yesterday. Unveiled at the annual Royal Navy Photographic Competition, the images show operational duties in Afghanistan, warships patrolling the oceans along with military exercises around the world. Captain Paul Porter, head of Royal Navy public relations, said: ‘The fact that the Royal Navy and Royal Marines are deployed on diverse operations all around the world has been highlighted in the entries this year. ‘Both still and moving images have allowed us to tell our tale and the very best of those tales have been captured in this year’s competition.’ The Peregrine Trophy started in 1961 and is open to both professionals from the Navy’s Photographic Branch and amateur snappers from across the service. This year the competition received 480 entries. Flying high: The winner of the Maritime Air Prize shows Naval Air Squadron pilots soaring over the Alps during training in Germany Homecoming: Winner of the Media Operations Award shows emotional scenes as HMS Manchester returns to Portsmouth after seven months deployed across the Atlantic and South Pacific At ease: Royal Marines and soldiers break into laughter ahead of a military exercise invading Gosport's Browndown beach Dauntless - the second of six formidable air defence warships being built for the Royal Navy - arrives in her home port of Portsmouth for the first time Emotional: The funeral of a Lance Corporal Royal Marine who lost his life during battle. The ceremony took place at St Tudclud Church, Penmachno, Wales The image captured by Tam McDonald shows Royal Marines on a night exercise Recruitment drive: HMS Iron Duke played a key role in assisting with the filming of a television advertisement for the Royal Navy whilst visiting the Bahamas Viking training: The amphibious vehicles plough over the Bovington ranges in Dorset as part of a joint Royal Marine and Army exercise package HMS Cumberland deployed from Devonport to the Gulf of Aden and Horn of Africa region as part of the UK's contribution to maritime security in the region Fighting spirit: The Royal Navy Ladies' Boxing Champion prepares for a training session at HMS Nelson Boxing Gymnasium Daring procedure: Royal Marines attach their Rib boat to strops lowered from a helicopter before being lifted A GR9 Harrier of Naval Strike Wing carries out an operational launch whilst embarked on board HMS Ark Royal Centenary celebrations: Some 300 members of the Fleet Air Arm and other guests at a dinner held in the Painted Hall at Greenwich Old Naval College to celebrate 100 years of Naval AviationOn Integrity and Research Misconduct in Economics Download the WEA commentaries issue › By Ioana Negru Research Association for Knowledge Integrity in Economics (RAKIE) Network (http://rakie.org/) Most research methods textbooks, whether in business, economics or other social sciences, have a section dedicated to Ethics in Research. Research is widely viewed as a systematic and dynamic process that is based on trust, accepted conventions and the idea of ‘building blocks’, i.e. new research builds on previous research. Being ‘ethical’ when conducting research equates with conducting research in a responsible way. The areas commonly addressed in these contexts are: ethical conduct and professional conventions; treatment of animals in research; relationships between researchers, other researchers and the objects of their study. In recent years, universities, associations and institutions have issued their own codes of conduct in research that contain rules about what is appropriate behavior when pursuing research. The essential term that is used is that of research misconduct or scientific misconduct. According to the Office for Science, Technology and Policy, scientific/research misconduct is defined as: “as fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism in proposing, performing, or reviewing research, or in reporting research results. Fabrication is making up data or results and recording or reporting them. Falsification is manipulating research materials, equipment, or processes, or changing or omitting data or results such that the research is not accurately represented in the research record. Plagiarism is the appropriation of another person’s ideas, processes, results, or words without giving appropriate credit. Research misconduct does not include honest error or differences of opinion” (http://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/projects/rcr/rcr_misconduct/foundation/index.html#1). Researchers are expected to interpret data appropriately given general methodological standards and to report findings without bias; to explain the methods and processes used to gather and analyze data; to report potential errors and distortions in their publications or reports and so on. The discussions around scientific misconduct have been more present in natural sciences than in economics and business. Karabag and Berggren (2012) in Retraction, Dishonesty and Plagiarism: Analysis of a Crucial Issue for Academic Publishing, and the Inadequate Responses from Leading Journals in Economics and Management Disciplines investigate the state of academic dishonesty, plagiarism and retractions within business and economics disciplines (using databases such as EBSCO, JSTOR, Emerald and Science Direct). The authors undertake a literature review and conclude that studies on academic honesty in economics and business can be divided into two groups: “The first group focuses on plagiarism behavior among authors. Honig and Bedi (2012), for example, analyze papers submitted to the Academy of Management conference, and found that almost 1 of 4 papers contain some degree of plagiarism. The second group attempts to understand how journals are dealing with this issue. Enders and Hoover (2004) surveyed editors of economic journals about the nature of plagiarism and their strategies related to plagiarism.” (pp. 174) In this study, authors mention also duplication and self-plagiarism as forms of academic misconduct in research. The conclusion of this study is grim: “The analysis shows that management journals rarely retract papers, and economics journals do it at an even lower rate. Although there are many indicators of academic dishonesty and plagiarism among academicians and researchers in general, the leading business and economics journals’ response to academic dishonesty and plagiarism has been slow” (pp.179). Evidently, further surveys and work need to be undertaken in the area of research misconduct in economics but there is a clear awareness of the need for discussions amongst economists regarding forms of scientific misconduct. The REPEC Database (Research Papers in Economics) has a Retraction Watch point for economics that is designed for documenting news about retracted papers in economics. The following post focuses on economics: http://retractionwatch.com/2014/09/19/economics-paper-retracted-for-plagiarism-after-citing-its-twin/ One can add examples such as Rheinhart and Rogoff and the flaws of deductive processes that assume causation between high debt levels and low growth instead of just recognising tendencies of economic processes within certain contexts (http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/the-reinhart-and-rogoff-controversy-a-summing-up). Or one can point towards research on widespread misapplication of hypothesis tests and for statistical significance results due to a lack of appreciation of the ‘fallacy of the transposed conditional’ (Ziliak & McCloskey, 2008, p. 17) In 2011, George DeMartino published the book The Economist’s Oath: On the Need for and Content of Professional Economic Ethics. In the book DeMartino argues for the importance of establishing a new field of critical inquiry that examines the ethical requirements of economic practice. In Chapter 1 of the book he states: “The Economics Profession today has an enormous impact on the life chances of people across the globe: one that is far greater than that of most other professions. It is not always the impact that economists hope to have, to be sure, not least since economists’ prescriptions are often distorted in the political arena, but it is considerable nonetheless” (pg. 4). And yet, as DeMartino argues, leading economists have not had five minutes training in what it means to be an ethical economist, or what it would mean for economics to be an ethical profession. Given the extent of its influence in the world, the failure of economics to engage its ethical duties and the ethical challenges its members face represents a gross professional ethical failure. In this regard, as DeMartino argues elsewhere, economics can be considered a “rogue” profession. In August 2014, a group of economists led by Altug Yacintas, Ankara University and Wilfred Dolfsma, Groningen University, has organized the first ever workshop on research ethics in economics in Izmir, Turkey. A list of workshop participants is available here: http://rakie.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/ConfirmedListOfParticipants.docx The original CFP is available here: http://rakie.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/EconEthics2014_CallForPapers.pdf This was a fascinating event which has generated debates on research misconduct in economics and the responsiveness of the profession to such cases. As a result of this meeting, the participants of the workshop decided to form a pluralist network, RAKIE.org, established in December 2014. 33 members have subscribed to the RAKIE Network so far. Below, there is an excerpt from the RAKIE’s opening page: “Rakie.org is a scholarly network set up by a group of economists who are concerned about the unresponsiveness of the professionals in economics to the significance of the problem of research misconduct. The purpose of the network is to reach economists who care about the economic science. At this early stage of setting up the association, we wish to expand our network and organise a larger workshop in 2016”. We would like to invite economists, of all orientations and beliefs, to join us. We aim to provide a forum for discussion and generate debate to counter dishonest academic behaviour and to promote sound research practices in economics. The scope includes challenging accepted conventions and standards that are seriously flawed and produce misleading results. To make contact or join RAKIE, go to http://rakie.org. References: S.F. Karabag and C. Breggren (2012), “Retraction, Dishonesty and Plagiarism: Analysis of a Crucial Issue for Academic Publishing, and the Inadequate Responses from Leading Journals in Economics and Management Disciplines”, Journal of Applied Economics and Business Research, JAEBR, 2(3): 172-183. G. F. DeMartino (2011) The Economist’s Oath: On the Need for and Content of Professional Economic Ethics, Oxford University Press, USA. Ziliak, S. T., & McCloskey, D. N. (2008). The cult of statistical significance: how the standard error costs us jobs, justice, and lives. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. From: pp.5-6 of World Economics Association Newsletter 5(4), August 2015 http://www.worldeconomicsassociation.org/files/Issue5-4.pdfGlen Ellyn adds zombie pub crawl to day of Halloween events hello Members of the Glenbard West High School student group Clowns Against Drugs will join in the Glen Ellyn children's costume parade, which will be led by the Hilltoppers' marching band. Daily Herald File Photo Following the children's costume parade, children can trick-or-treat at downtown Glen Ellyn businesses until 1 p.m. Saturday. Daily Herald File Photo Downtown Glen Ellyn will be the site of two Halloween-themed parades Saturday -- the traditional kid's parade at 10 a.m., and a zombie crawl at 5 p.m. Daily Herald File Photo Downtown Glen Ellyn may look a little like Michael Jackson's "Thriller" music video on Saturday. That's when the first "Walk Amongst the Dead, PubZ 'n' GrubZ Zombie Crawl" will be held, featuring a parade of costumed monsters haunting the streets. Organizers from local businesses and the Glen Ellyn Chamber of Commerce are encouraging locals to dress the part, though those who walk as "survivors" are also welcome. Similar zombie crawls occur around Halloween in Chicago, but there's few happening in the suburbs, said Georgia Koch, the chamber's co-executive director. "We had a suggestion from one of our members," Koch said. "We thought it would be a fun thing to do. We said, 'OK, let's give it a shot.'" The zombie walk begins at 5 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 29, from the Crescent Boulevard parking lot just west of Main Street, and follows a designated route through the downtown streets. It leads to the Citibank building at 444 Main St., where a DJ will spin spooky tunes and the award will be given for best costume. The winner will receive a $50 gift certificate. Afterward, the "PubZ n GrubZ" portion of the event begins, when participants are encouraged to visit local bars and restaurants offering zombie-themed food and drink specials. Coupons for the promotions will be in a packet available starting at 4 p.m. at registration tables across from McChesney and Miller Grocery and Market, starting at 5:30 p.m. at Citibank. The registration packet also includes an event T-shirt, wristband for those 21 and older, and makeup application tips. Registration is $20 in advance, $25 on Saturday. Koch predicted the number of zombie participants will be light for the first-time event, but it's something that could spark the imagination and bring people out. While the new zombie crawl in Glen Ellyn is a chance for adults to dress up, the annual Halloween parade for kids is a standard in town. The parade steps off at 10 a.m. from Prairie Path Park, south of the train station between Park Boulevard and Forest Avenue. Members of the Glenbard West High School marching band will lead the parade. And members of the school's "Clowns Against Drugs" group, who teach elementary school students about peer pressure and making healthy decisions, also will participate. Following the parade, trick-or-treaters will be able to pick up candy from participating downtown merchants until 1 p.m.You know how the edges of subway tracks are equipped with textured flooring, so blind people can sense they're in peril of tumbling onto the tracks? Turns out even that is not enough to halt a person who's really bonding with their cell phone. Sturdy nets, or perhaps a screeching alarm similar to when bowlers go "over the line," might be needed in Philadelphia's train system to save its phone-loving passengers from harming themselves. That's apparent in the below 2011 video recorded by Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority that was featured last week in a head-shaking AP story about "distracted walking." It's a reportedly growing scourge, with four times as many people heading to the emergency room than they did seven years ago due to walking blindly into a hard obstruction. In this particular case, the distracted man fell headlong into the SEPTA track pit and was either knocked senseless or unconscious, because he remained there for several minutes. Luck was on his side, however, as no trains happened to be roaring down the tunnel. He climbed out and survived. Many others haven't, according to SEPTA, which claims that several people have died on train tracks while wearing headphones or clasping cell phones.This day at Teahupoo- Aug 27th 2011 during the Billabong Pro waiting period is what many are calling the biggest and gnarliest Teahupoo ever ridden. Chris Bryan was fortunate enough to be there working for Billabong on a day that will go down in the history of big wave surfing. The French Navy labeled this day a double code red prohibiting and threatening to arrest anyone that entered the water. Kelly Slater described the day by saying "witnessing this was a draining feeling being terrified for other people's lives all day long, it's life or death. Letting go of that rope one time can change your life and not many people will ever experience that in their life." All images where shot by Chris Bryan using the Phantom HD Gold camera. To see more of Chris' work check out his website. WWW.CHRISBRYANFILMS.COMThere are days when your only consolation is that someday, somewhere, your mistake might help prevent someone else’s. The Federal government’s Office of Personnel Management (OPM) has been having a bunch of days like that recently, which gives us all an opportunity to learn what to do differently. It may have started as long as a year ago when hackers first broke into OPM systems, using credentials from a contractor, and installed malware that would enable them to steal data in the future. “Hackers obtained a credential used by KeyPoint Government Solutions, a Colorado-based contractor that OPM uses to conduct background investigations of applicants for federal jobs that require a security clearance,” explains Erin Kelly in USA Today. KeyPoint doesn’t know how the employee’s credentials were compromised, she continues. And multifactor authentication wasn’t implemented. The upshot is that personally identifiable information from anywhere from 4.2 million to 21 million Federal employees, job applicants, and contractors was stolen. That includes names, Social Security numbers, addresses, fingerprints, and so on. Apparently the data wasn’t encrypted, in part because the hardware on which it was stored was so old—on the order of three decades—that encryption software for it didn’t exist. It turns out encryption wouldn’t have helped much anyway, because the administrators responsible for managing the records had root access to the system, writes Sean Gallagher in Ars Technica. And we only assume that data on employees was taken. “What if records were not only taken, but some were added as well?” writes Steve Ragan in CSO Online. “Would the OPM be able to tell? The attackers had at least a year of unchecked access on the network—plenty of time for someone to do whatever they wanted.” To make matters worse, the hackers apparently also stole data from Standard Form 86 and similar data, called “adjudication information.” What is Standard Form 86? It’s what you fill out when you have a security clearance, so they ask you all sorts of personal information looking for things that could potentially be used to blackmail you in the future. So the OPM databases included information on employees’ friends and family as well. “This did not have to happen,” says Dr. Stan Stahl, president of the Los Angeles Chapter of the Information Systems Security Association (ISSA-LA) and the founder and president of Citadel Information Group, Inc., an information security management firm. “This was mismanagement. For that to have been allowed to happen, there’s no excuse.” If the data actually got stolen as much as a year ago, apparently nobody’s tried using it yet. Or if they are, nobody’s talking about it. It’s even possible that data on classified employees was also stolen, because there was an effort after 9/11 to merge databases to make them easier to search—even though the classified agencies didn’t want to do this because they were concerned about security. If that’s the case, nobody’s talking about that, either. Altogether, 65 percent of OPM’s data was stored on 11 major systems that had not been properly certified as secure and were run by OPM’s own IT department, out of a total of 47, Gallagher writes. (Some systems were run by contractors.) This has been a developing story for the past several weeks, which is why the number of people affected keeps rising. In fact, there are those who contend that 32 million people were actually affected—basically, anyone who’s applied for a Federal job. That’s essentially 10 percent of the US population, writes Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols in Computerworld, going so far as to suggest that compromised people should all receive new Social Security numbers. “Any way you cut it, fixing this is going to take a minimum of tens of billions of dollars,” he writes. Another part of how the story has developed is how the break-in was discovered in the first place. The first story is that it was through EINSTEIN, a system run by the Department of Homeland Security to record, detect, and block cyber threats. Then a security vendor, CyTech Services, reportedly discovered the malware while it was doing a demo for OPM. Then OPM said, they’d discovered it themselves a few days before that, using a different vendor’s product. It does seem like, in one way or another, changes are likely at OPM. There have already been a series of Congressional hearings on the issue, and director Katherine Archuleta has resigned. Though finding out whom to blame isn’t necessarily the most important part of this incident. “Instead of hearings in D.C. that are focused on blame and attribution, perhaps there should be hearings to address budget cuts and the lack of proper security staffing in critical areas of the government,” Ragan writes. “Clearly, OPM long knew they had a major problem on their hands due to their reliance on out-of-date equipment and software,” agrees Vaughn-Nichols in a piece for ZDNet. “They knew their obsolete IT infrastructure made them more vulnerable to hackers. And, they knew what the answer was. It’s just too bad they couldn’t get Congress to pay for it.” So now we get to the part where we talk about what we’ve learned to do differently. If you’ve got a lot of personally identifiable information about people, encrypt it. If it’s on hardware that is too old to support encryption, put it on different hardware. If you can’t afford different hardware yet, at least don’t hook the hardware up to the Internet. Similarly, ensure that your records management software is up-to-date to support modern security techniques—and if it doesn’t support them, find new software. Limit the people who have access to passwords into the system. Especially limit the people who have root access. Log the times when that access is used, so you can see if they come at an odd time or from an odd place. Implement multifactor authentication, so someone can’t break in by just having a password. Periodically run scanners looking for malware on your system. If you need a cybersecurity expert, hire one right away. To do this, CIOs—working with CISOs if they are separate positions—need to talk to boards about security, Stahl says. “The most important thing is that CIOs have got to find their way up to the executive office, the boardroom,” he says. “They’ve got to be able to explain security in ways that management can understand. Boards need insight.” Look at the bright side: This is probably a great time to get that security budget line item funded.Now updated for Windows 8.1 with better performance and device compatibility! The issue with using modTuner on a Surface 2 is resolved in this release. modTuner is a sophisticated automatic chromatic tuner suitable for tuning a wide range of musical instruments including guitars, basses, ukuleles, violins, violas and cellos. Its large, easy to read display is ideal for tuning even at a distance, and the carefully designed white-on-black appearance is ideal for use in dark performance environments. modTuner uses a sophisticated digital signal processing algorithm to accurately and reliably detect the fundamental frequency of the note being played. modTuner’s background graphic glows when a reliable tone is detected, providing you with greater confidence while tuning. Although very easy to use, modTuner has a number of advanced features including Drop/Capo tuning, Concert A calibration, High Sensitivity and Noise Filter modes. Drop/Capo enables drop or capo tuning, along with transposition which can be used to change keys for instruments played in a key other than C, for example alto saxophones (E flat) or trumpets (B flat). Concert A can be calibrated in steps of 0.1 Hertz to allow you to match the tuning of another instrument. modTuner can listen to another instrument to calibrate Concert A, or you can select a desired frequency directly. The High Sensitivity mode is provided to help when tuning certain instruments that may not be detected as easily by modTuner. The Noise Filter listens to your environment and reduces or eliminates noise that may make tuning difficult. modTuner automatically uses the sound source selected as Windows' default recording device, enabling it to be used with almost any sound source Windows recognizes. modTuner; the reliable chromatic tuner that makes it easy for you to keep your instruments in tune.Share. Defensive errors Defensive errors Let’s make this clear right off the bat: RBI Baseball 14 is not a simulation, but a simple arcade game that attempts to appeal to a wide audience. But after playing only a few games, ultimately fails to be appealing at all. It may have an updated look – at least, up to 2006 standards – but it plays and feels exactly how I remember it from RBI Baseball ‘95, 19 years ago. Outside of a few fun local multiplayer moments, that’s not a good thing. I always appreciate a retro-style game that looks vintage, and give the impression that the developer has carefully written a love letter to the games of yesteryear while bringing what was great and memorable about it up to modern standards. RBI Baseball 14 is not one of those games, as its baseball gameplay hasn’t evolved since the 90s. Meanwhile, the same uninspired music plays on repeat and the announcer is fairly annoying; I was very quickly encouraged to turn the sound off altogether. When starting a game there are literally no team introductions or animations. It just dumps you straight into the game and forces you to pick a starting pitcher, without showing you any of their skills. It’s obvious that players have attributes, since some can pitch faster than others, but it’s as if it’s a secret between the MLB and its biggest fans. There are no team ratings of any kind, either. The only way to know which teams and pitchers are the best is if you paid close attention to last season, which directly contradicts what RBI Baseball 14 is seemingly attempting to do. How can a game be accessible to everybody if you have to know how good all the players are before you play? Controls are oversimplified, which, on the bright side, makes it easy for anybody to pick up and play. Moving the joystick to the left or right to move the ball while it’s in the air is a fun mechanic when trying to fool your friends into swinging, and it can provoke major trash talking. Hitting is equally easy to do – it’s just a matter of timing. Fielding the ball once it’s in play is where the simplicity starts to hinder the experience, and the ball is in play quite a bit. A yellow circle surrounds the ball at all times, letting you know how high in the air it is by growing and shrinking. While it seems like a workable system, the way the circle changes sizes made it difficult to tell where it was headed. Especially because you can’t see the player you’re controlling for the first few vital seconds, and when you can they move very slowly, I felt like I was guessing where the ball would land every time. It’s by far the worst part of RBI. Ground balls are similarly frustrating. Once a ball is hit, you automatically assume control of whichever player the computer decides should field that play, even if a different player is clearly in a better position if you have a brain. That annoyance can be circumvented by changing the fielding settings from standard to assisted or automatic, but when your best bet is to have the computer play defense for you, it’s not a good sign. Game options are limited to an exhibition mode, a season mode, and a postseason mode. There is no online multiplayer (only local) and no home-run derby, which would have made sense for an arcade game. It struck me as odd that in season mode you have the opportunity to unlock throwback uniforms by completing team-specific challenges like hitting a certain number of home runs, but not offer any viewable stat tracking.The broadest measure of unemployment in the United States was 12 percent in August, the Labor Department announced on Friday. Sen. Bernie Sanders spent Labor Day last Monday calling for a major investment in road and bridge projects –work that badly needs to be done anyway – as a way to create millions of good-paying jobs. On Thursday, Sanders supported fast-food workers who took to the streets to protest their starvation wages they make. With up to 15,000 Postal Service jobs on the chopping block, Sanders welcomed Senate Leader Harry Reid’s decision on Wednesday to sign a letter with 50 other senators calling for a one-year moratorium on USPS cuts. Jobs The Bureau of Labor Statistic’s disappointing jobs report on Friday said there was 12 percent unemployment in a category that counts workers forced to settle for part-time work and those who gave up looking for a job was almost double the “official unemployment rate” of 6.1 percent. A small decrease from July wasn’t because there were any more jobs, but because the size of the work force shrank. The news was worse for younger workers. Even using the official unemployment rate, the jobless figure for 16- to 19-year-olds was 19.6 percent. For those 20- to 24-years-old, the unemployment rate was 10.6 percent. Labor Day The latest job numbers underscore the need for a federal jobs program, something Sanders talked about at events marking Labor Day on Monday at a New Hampshire AFL-CIO breakfast. “We can create millions of new jobs by rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure and dramatically improve life for low-wage workers by raising the minimum wage. We need new trade policies to prevent corporations from throwing American workers out on the street and running to China for cheap labor and we need new tax policies so they can't stash their profits in foreign tax havens,” he said. Fast-Food Workers Strike Fast-food workers from McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's and KFC restaurants staged protests in more than 150 U.S. cities on Thursday. Workers struggling on the minimum wage or slightly more want to double their pay to $15 an hour. They also are seeking the right to join a union. “It is an act of extraordinary courage on the part of these working people,” Sanders said. “Today, people at these fast-food places are being paid a starvation wage. That’s the only way I can describe it. They have no health insurance because what McDonalds and Burger King offer is something that they can’t afford. So these people who are being exploited are standing up for justice. I have enormous respect for their courage.” Stop Postal Service Cuts Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on Wednesday added his crucial backing to calls for a one-year moratorium on U.S. Postal Service plans to close up to 82 mail processing plants, slow down mail delivery and eliminate up to 15,000 jobs. With Reid’s signature, a bipartisan majority of 51 senators have now signed a letter calling for a ban on Postal Service cuts as part of must-pass legislation to keep the government running into the new fiscal year that begins Oct. 1. Sens. Sanders, Jon Tester and Tammy Baldwin organized the effort to block the cuts proposed by Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe. Health Care Cliff Amid a major crisis in primary health care, the situation may become significantly worse unless Congress renews support for community health centers that care for 22 million Americans, Sanders warned on Wednesday. Four years ago he secured $12.5 billion in the Affordable Care Act to expand community health centers and to recruit more doctors, dentists and nurses. The funding runs out at the end of the next fiscal year. “Millions of Americans could lose access to community health centers. Members of Congress will need to work in a bipartisan way to extend funding if we are to continue to provide Americans with the greatest health care needs a reliable source of primary care,” Sanders said.UPDATED: The "Hunger Games" sequel bites off a massive $110.2 million over the long holiday; "Frozen" follows with $93 million after earning a coveted A+ CinemaScore. Thanks to a pair of shrewd female heroines, Hollywood enjoyed its most prosperous Thanksgiving on record as holdover The Hunger Games: Catching Fire and new animated tentpole Frozen turned in ferocious performances, each earning more than any previous holiday title. Any celebration, however, was muted by the death of actor Paul Walker in a fiery crash Saturday. Catching Fire grossed $110.2 million from 4,163 theaters over the five-day holiday (Wednesday-Sunday), becoming the top Thanksgiving title of all time after sailing past the $82.4 million earned by Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. For the weekend itself, the Lionsgate sequel took in $74.5 million -- the fourth best second weekend in history after The Avengers ($103.1 million), Avatar ($75.6 million) and The Dark Knight ($75.2 million). STORY: The Making of 'Frozen' Catching Fire has now earned $296.5 million domestically. Overseas the title, costing $130 million to produce, took in another $92.5 million for an international total of $276.5 million and a massive global haul of $573 million. Disney's Frozen, opening Wednesday, scored the top Thanksgiving debut of all time with a five-day gross of $93 million, eclipsing the $80.1 million five-day launch of Pixar's Toy Story 2 in 1999. It also scored the top opening for a Disney Animation Studios title, besting the $68.7 million grossed by Tangled over Thanksgiving in 2010. For the three-day weekend, Frozen took in $74.5 million. Loosely based on Hans Christian Andersen's classic fairy tale The Snow Queen, Frozen -- earning a coveted A+ CinemaScore -- tells the story of a fearless princess (Kristen Bell) who sets off on an epic journey to find her sister, whose icy powers have caused an eternal winter. Last weekend, the 3D pic, costing $150 million to make, did big business when it played exclusively at Disney's El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood. Kids between the ages of 2 and 11 made up the largest percentage of the audience (38 percent), while families overall made up 81 percent. The movie skewed female, although males made up a healthy 43 percent of ticket buyers, according to Disney. Overseas, Frozen earned $16.7 million as it began rolling out in a handful of markets for a worldwide debut of $109.7 million. Led in large part by Frozen and Catching Fire, domestic box office revenue for the five-day holiday clocked in at roughly $294 million, up nearly 3 percent from last year's record $291 million. After Frozen, the news was mixed for the other new holiday films. Action-thriller Homefront, starring Jason Statham, placed No. 6 with a five-day debut of $9.8 million and a three-day gross of $7 million. Homefront, receiving a B CinemaScore, features Statham as a widowed ex-DEA agent who moves to a small town with his daughter, only to have the decision blow up in his face. James Franco and Winona Ryder also star. Spike Lee's Oldboy, playing in 583 theaters Wednesday, bombed in its North American launch, earning roughly $1.2 million for the five days. From a script by Mark Protosevich, the remake of the cult South Korean film stars Josh Brolin, Elizabeth Olsen and Sharlto Copley. Oldboy marks the final release from Peter Schlessel's FilmDistrict before Schlessel officially takes over as CEO of Focus Features on Jan. 1. Among adult-skewing fare, 20th Century Fox's The Book Thief, Fox Searchlight's African-American musical Black Nativity and The Weinstein Co.'s Philomena have all landed on the top 10 chart. The Book Thief, opening in select cities earlier this month in a bid to build word of mouth and expanding into a total of 1,234 theaters on Wednesday, placed No. 7 with a five-day gross of $6.4 million. Based on the best-selling novel by Markus Zusak about a
’s a gain of 30 seats overall in the Commons, bringing the total up to 338 MPs. The added clout for regions, in particular the Greater Toronto Area and Ontario, which are more known as Liberal strongholds, raises questions about why the Conservatives would want to hand their opponents added strength. But much will depend, says Liberal MP Dominic LeBlanc, on how the new electoral map is drawn. “I certainly don’t think Mr. Harper is Mr. Popularity in Ontario,” LeBlanc said. “But if Steven Fletcher and some … fundraisers and pollsters are allocating the seats, it will be a lot less legitimate.” LeBlanc also quipped that Harper has to do more than add seats to Parliament to show his regard for it. “Mr. Fletcher can keep adding seats to the House of Commons, but if his boss keeps shutting it down, it just creates longer lineups at Ottawa airport when everybody’s scrambling to get out of town.” The new riding boundaries, however, won’t be drawn until 2011 and are unlikely to come into force until at least 2012, which means that there will probably be at least one election before the expansion of the battlegrounds in Ontario, B.C. and Alberta. At Queen’s Park, Ontario Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Monique Smith, who learned of the proposed changes from reporters in a scrum, said “on first blush it’s looking like it’s fair.” “But we do want to look at how the numbers roll out province by province before we determine whether or not we are getting our proportional fair share on a national level,” Smith said. Article Continued Below “Originally, we were looking for a total of 127 (federal seats, up from 106); this brings us to a total of 125, so we think it’s in the range,” she said. Fletcher says he hopes the opposition parties will endorse the bill. LeBlanc called it “a much better effort” than the last bill, which drew anger from the Liberal caucus especially because so much of its caucus comes from Ontario, especially the GTA. Last month, the Mowat Centre in Ontario released a study showing that Canada was one of the worst countries in living up to the principles of representation by population. It found that 61 per cent of Canadians were actually under-represented in the Commons, particularly visible-minority communities in large urban centres. “Canadians deserve better. Our government deeply believes that each vote in Canadian elections should carry equal weight to the greatest extent possible,” Fletcher told reporters. Matthew Mendelsohn, author of the Mowat Centre’s report, said Thursday that the new legislation almost completely replies to the concerns raised in their findings. He says that the new force of Ontario, B.C. and Alberta could have interesting implications for politics in Canada – affecting the delicate urban-rural balance, especially. “I do think the politics of Canada has overemphasized the concerns of smaller regional populations, because they had more voting power,” Mendelsohn said. “But now governments have to pay attention to the concerns of those voters (in the strengthened provinces) in a fairer and more proportional way.” Fletcher wouldn’t be drawn into questions about why only 10 new seats were offered in 2007, saying only that it was an improvement over the mere four originally envisioned in the overhaul. The new figure of 18 was obtained when the Harper government simply decided to throw out the old formula for determining Commons expansion – devised in 1985 – and come up with a whole new way of adding numbers to the chamber to reflect the growing population. Pure representation by population is almost impossible in Canada because the Constitution guarantees that no province can have fewer MPs than it has senators. That means Prince Edward Island, with about 141,000 people, is assured of four MPs — or one for every 35,000 people. If that ratio were accepted nationally, it would require more than 970 MPs. The controversy surrounding this new bill may come from Quebec, which will lose proportional clout as Ontario, B.C. and Alberta gain strength in the Commons. Fletcher insisted that Quebec’s seats are protected and that Quebec’s citizens actually will still have a relative advantage over many other provinces in terms of voters per riding. Mendelsohn says Quebec’s reduced proportion is inevitable for the plain reason that the province’s population is shrinking, relative to other provinces. Fletcher said he’s not worried about criticism about growing the size of Parliament, arguing that citizens care about fair democratic representation. Nor is he concerned about the difficulties of squeezing more MPs into an already crowded Commons, saying he’s been told that the current chamber could accommodate around 374 MPs. With files from Rob Benzie and The Canadian Press Read more about:In the aftermath of the Bills' 16-10 victory against the Kansas City Chiefs, the elephant in the room was the quarterback situation. After getting enough from Tyrod Taylor for the Bills to get a victory, coach Sean McDermott was asked whether the win proved that he erred in having Nathan Peterman start last week against the Los Angeles Chargers. Peterman threw five interceptions and the Bills were blown out. McDermott again said he felt the move was the right thing for his football team at the time, but he did commit to Taylor for next Sunday's home game against the New England Patriots. Asked specifically whether Taylor is the quarterback until the team would be eliminated from the playoffs, McDermott said, "Tyrod is our quarterback next week." McDermott also was quick to continue to turn the page. "What's important now is what just happened this week and where we're going next week and that's what we're focused on.... "(The Patriots) are a good football team. They're the reigning champs.... We've got a lot of work to do." Told of what McDermott said about next week, Taylor responded, "One week at a time." Great TEAM win. It’s all in how you respond to the tests. #OneBuffalo pic.twitter.com/ucNb2gmreg — Tyrod Taylor (@TyrodTaylor) November 26, 2017 The win snapped a three-game losing streak that included a series of ugly losses. "We just focused on our process," McDermott said. "That is what we do. You have heard me say this before, this league is going to try to move you in a lot of different directions in one season alone and who can stay focused and stay together the longest, that is what happens through injuries, through adversity. We just try to stay focused on that process and hanging together and that is what we have to do moving forward.”As the wearables market heats up with every company trying something, anything to attach their electronics to your body, it’s tough to know what will actually resonate with consumers. It’s so difficult that electronics giant Sony developed a watch then put it on a crowdfunding site to see if anyone was interested. The Wall Street Journal reports that Sony has a project called Fashion Entertainments that develops electronic paper fashion devices. The first device it created was a watch that changes the band’s appearance and face when you move it. It looks intriguing. But the real news is that Sony, under the moniker FES, put the watch on crowdfunding site Makuake to see if there was enough interest in the device. Apparently there was because the watch shot past its initial goal. A source told The Wall Street Journal “We hid Sony’s name because we wanted to test the real value of the product, whether there will be demand for our concept.” So the next item you back something on a crowdfinding site that item might just be from Sony. But more likely from someone that had a crazy idea while taking a shower and owns 3D rendering software. ➤ Who’s Behind the E-paper FES Watch? [WSJ]Distributed Search Engines, And Why We Need Them In The Post-Snowden World from the easier-said-than-done dept One of the many important lessons from Edward Snowden's leaks is that centralized services are particularly vulnerable to surveillance, because they offer a single point of weakness. The solution is obvious, in theory at least: move to decentralized systems where subversion of one node poses little or no threat to the others. Of course, putting this into practice is not so straightforward. That's especially true for search engines: creating distributed systems that are nonetheless capable of scaling so that they can index most of the Web is hard. Despite that challenge, distributed search engines do already exist, albeit in a fairly rudimentary state. Perhaps the best-known is YaCy: YaCy is a free search engine that anyone can use to build a search portal for their intranet or to help search the public internet. When contributing to the world-wide peer network, the scale of YaCy is limited only by the number of users in the world and can index billions of web pages. It is fully decentralized, all users of the search engine network are equal, the network does not store user search requests and it is not possible for anyone to censor the content of the shared index. We want to achieve freedom of information through a free, distributed web search which is powered by the world's users. ... The resulting decentralized web search currently has about 1.4 billion documents in its index (and growing -- download and install YaCy to help out!) and more than 600 peer operators contribute each month. About 130,000 search queries are performed with this network each day. Another is Faroo, which has an interesting FAQ that includes this section explaining why even privacy-conscious non-distributed search engines are problematic: Some search engines promise privacy, and while they look like real search engines, they are just proxies. Their results don't come from their own index, but from the big incumbents (Google, Bing, Yahoo) instead (the query is forwarded to the incumbent, and the results from incumbent are relayed back to the user). Not collecting logfiles (of your ip address and query) and using HTTPS encryption at the proxy search engine doesn't help if the search is forwarded to the incumbent. As revealed by Edward Snowden the NSA has access to the US based incumbents via PRISM. If the search is routed over a proxy (aka "search engine") the IP address logged at the incumbent is that from the proxy and not from the user. So the incumbent doesn't have the users IP address, and the search engine proxy promises not to log/reveal the user IP, while HTTPS prevents eavesdropping on the way from the user to the search engine proxy. Sounds good? By observing the traffic between user and search engine proxy (IP and time and size are not protected by HTTPS) via PRISM, Tempora (GCHQ taps world's communications) et al. and combining that with the traffic between search engine proxy and the incumbent (query, time, size are accessible by PRISM), all those seemingly private and protected information can be revealed. This is a common method know as Traffic analysis. The NSA system XKeyscore allows to recover search engine keywords and other communication just by observing connection data (meta data) and combining them with the backend data sourced from the the incumbents. The system is also used by the German intelligence services BND and BfS. Neither the encryption with HTTPS, nor the use of proxies, nor restricting the observation to meta data is protecting your search queries or other communication content. Unfortunately, unlike YaCy, Faroo is not open source, which means that its code can't be audited -- an essential pre-requisite in the post-Snowden world. Another distributed search engine that is fully open source is Scholar Ninja, a new project from Jure Triglav: I’ve started building a distributed search engine for scholarly literature, which is completely contained within a browser extension: install it from the Chrome Web Store. It uses WebRTC and magic, and is currently, like, right now, used by 42 people. It’s you who can be number 43. This project is 20 days old and early alpha software; it may not work at all. As that indicates, Scholar Ninja is domain-specific at the moment, although presumably once the technology is more mature it could be adapted for other uses. It's also very new -- barely a month old at the time of writing -- and very small-scale, which shows that distributed search has a long way to go before it becomes mainstream. Given the serious vulnerabilities of traditional search engines, that's a pity. Let's hope more people wake up to the need for a completely new approach, and start to help create it. Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+ Filed Under: distributed computing, privacy, search enginesEnjoying a day at one of Kentucky’s state parks now can include an extra stop at the tavern on your way out. Take the Trail’s End Tavern, which opened this month at Natural Bridge State Resort Park, just 120 miles or so from Louisville, for example. With a full bar featuring a selection of Kentucky bourbons, not to mention draft and bottled beer, the 60-seat tavern also offers full food service and a bar made from white ash found in the park itself. An etched mural of the park’s trails will be added to the bar area soon. Kentucky breweries such as West Sixth, Goodwood and White Squirrel consulted with park officials to help choose the right beers for the various taverns and restaurants that will carry adult beverages. Ultimately, the hope is to establish a bar of some kind — or at least alcoholic beverage service — in every Kentucky state park. Why now? “Over the last few years, different areas of the state have been more open to allowing alcoholic beverage consumption in certain areas, and parks are taking on liquor licenses,” says Patrick Gregory, director of resort parks for Kentucky Department of Parks. This is one aspect of why establishing taverns seemed like a good idea, especially because many of the resort parks host weddings and other special events already. “The other aspect is that bourbon is a heritage in this state,” Gregory tells Insider. “To allow part of our heritage to be offered at our parks kind of builds into the tourism model. You come to a Kentucky state park, and you get many of the different experiences the state has to offer.” And no, this is not your tax dollars at work. Gregory points out the parks department is a “quasi-business” because the parks do bring in money from special events. “We have zero funding (for the projects), so all of it has been done through park operations,” he says. He notes that even the white ash bar was built by a park carpenter rather than outsourced. “Though we really don’t operate with a for-profit model, it is a way for us to offset some of the park operations so we’re not asking for as much from the state.” Twelve resort parks out of 17 now have drink service in some form (there are 49 state parks in all). This varies from park to park because not all parks are considered “resort parks,” meaning there is some sort of lodge for events and other services. But sales have been increasing since the first state park lounges began opening last year, and Gregory says he expects total sales to exceed $1 million in 2017. Kentucky Dam Village in Gilbertsville was one of the first to open, with a full-service Harbor Lights Restaurant and convention center, as well as alcoholic beverage service on the golf course. General Butler State Resort Park in Carrollton, with its Two Rivers Restaurant, is another that opened a lounge last year, along with Lake Barkley State Resort Park. More lounge and tavern openings are planned for this year and 2018. Next up is a lounge at Jenny Wily State Resort Park, which already has a full-service restaurant. Others include Rough River Dam, Dale Hollow Lake, Pine Mountain, Lake Cumberland, and Barren River Lake, all of which already have full-service restaurants. Gregory says a challenge, apart from not having funding, has been the way the laws differ in various regions, thanks in part to lingering effects of Prohibition in the early 20th century. “It really is about finding what is appropriate for each park,” he says. For instance, Natural Bridge has a license that allows alcoholic beverages to be poured anywhere in the park, while Kenlake State Resort Park can only pour in the restaurant. “If alcohol is legal in the area and the park has a restaurant, there will be the appropriate offering,” he says. So far, so good in terms of public reception. Obviously, bourbon is a big draw for tourists who visit Kentucky, which was a natural fit. But the beer offerings have been popular as well, particularly the Kentucky-brewed beers. “That’s a very popular piece, especially for travelers, because they want to try craft brews from the area,” Gregory says. And so now, when you finish up a hike at Natural Bridge State Resort Park, you can grab a cold one at the handmade bar in the shiny new Trail’s End Tavern. “That’s a popular place to go to anyway,” Gregory says. “That’s part of the reason we picked it to do early.”The region of Umbria, the centre of Italy, is well-known for being at the forefront of innovation when it comes to the country's services. Not long ago, Umbria made the news for its LibreUmbria project, where proprietary software was swapped out for LibreOffice across the region's biggest local government organisations. Recently, Umbria's local government took another important step towards becoming a more efficient and technologically-evolved administration when it approve the Regional Law n. 9, which came into force at the beginning of May. The law contains many significant elements, among them is the creation of a "single datacentre" where the infrastructure for all the region's local public sector organisations will converge, with the aim of saving money and avoiding duplication. "We have already a regional datacentre that houses the regional government and the regional health authority's servers," the regional coordinator for technological innovation Annalisa Doria told ZDNet. "The new law stipulates that all the other regional public sector agencies' servers must migrate to the DCRU [Data center regionale unico or single regional datacentre] within 18 months." Umbria's government has invested €1.5m in the program, known as #consolidamento, to upgrade and strengthen the DRCU's infrastructure. The reasons for the move are not merely financial, but have also a lot to do with the regional government's overall digital strategy. "A single datacentre is an essential component in the transformation of the regional administration into a 'digital administration'. In the past, there have been many different approaches to setting up and building IT systems in the region, at both the central and local level — something that did not allow the various organisations' databases to interoperate. That's why this process of consolidation is fundamental to guarantee the right performance for public sector digital services." The reorganisation will not just involve improving the region's technical infrastructure but also streamlining of the region's ICT-related government agencies as well, with the creation of a single consortium, Umbria Digitale, which will oversee the work previously undertaken by five organisations. "Umbria Digitale will come from the aggregation of Centralcom Spa, Webred Spa, Webred Servizi Scarl, Umbria Servizi Innovativi Spa, and the SIR Umbria consortium. This reorganisation, beside helping to save money (at least €240,000 per year, thanks to a reduction in the number of members of the board of governors) will allow economies of scale and improvements in performance and security," regional commissioner for innovation and information system Fabio Paparelli said. It will also have an effect on the civil servants involved, as the SIR consortium will be dissolved and all of its duties undertaken by the regional government. Most staff will be transferred, however; all employees that have been working for three years or more for the region will be moved to other departments. The region has also announced the creation of a Center for Openness, to promote the adoption of open source, the re-use of data published in open formats, and to support open government initiatives across all the regional public sector infrastructure, universities and schools included. A special fund will be set up to finance initiatives by schools, local public sector bodies and other organisations involving open source, open data, and open government every year. "It's not just a matter of transparency. That's the minimum goal, but it's also about giving citizens and companies the chance to exploit data and information belonging to local government organisations, taking advantage of a knowledge that, if well used, can generate even more value," said Giovanni Gentili, who's in charge of Umbria's Digital Agenda project. The new law will force all regional government organisations to draw up a plan within the next six months on how to collect and release its data to the public. All the material will then be published on the website Dati.umbria.it. The data will be anonymised when necessary, to protect the privacy of people involved (for example, in the case of healthcare-related information), and it will give priority to the publication of datasets on topics that citizens involved in determining the regional Digital Agenda have shown most interest in. It's interesting to note that, in this respect, many of the points contained in the new legislation spring up from citizens' participation. The idea of a single, unified datacentre, for instance, was first mentioned in the when the Agenda was unveiled in a meeting at the Department of Mathematics of the University of Perugia. It was subsequently opened up to public consultation in the 'Ideario' — a kind of online notebook to collect and organise ideas related to the use of digital technologies and residents' quality of life, and an online community where the ideas can be voted up and commented on by users. Suggestions with more votes top the list, in a Reddit-like way. "During 2013, we took into account the suggestions gathered through the Ideario to design and approve a three-year regional Digital Plan, covering five strategic areas: digital infrastructure, citizenship, digital skills and e-inclusion, competitiveness, quality of life and healthcare — and 55 specific projects. This provided the basis for the general reorganisation envisaged in the new law," Paparelli says. Read more from ItalyBOSTON (CBS) – With the Bruins and Canadiens set to face off in the NHL Stanley Cup Playoffs on Thursday, a beer store in Quebec is having some fun at the expense of Sam Adams beer. The Boston-based brewer has taken its unfair share of harassment in recent years thanks to misguided fans of opposing teams. And on Tuesday, Fine & Fûtés posted a photo on its Facebook page featuring the Montreal Canadiens logo covering the “Boston” on bottles and six-packs of Sam Adams Boston Lager. Fine & Fûtés is actually located much closer to Ottawa than to Montreal, so it’s unclear why they aren’t Senators fans. Perhaps that could explain why they aren’t outright banning the brew from their store. In 2012, a New York bar outright banned Sam Adams during the Bruins-Rangers series, and a Pittsburgh bar did the same during the 2013 Bruins-Penguins series. MORE BRUINS NEWS FROM CBS BOSTONHBO has pacted with Amy Poehler’s Paper Kite production banner to develop a comedy project to star “Bob’s Burgers” actor John Roberts. The project marks the first collaboration for Poehler’s Universal TV-based shingle with HBO. “Edison” revolves around a 40-year-old real estate broker who dreams of living in New York but is stuck in his hometown of Edison, N.J. Roberts is writing the script with fellow “Bob’s Burgers” voice actor H. Jon Benjamin. Roberts, Benjamin, Poehler, and her partner in Paper Kite, Brooke Posch, will exec produce with 3 Arts’ Dave Becky. Paper Kite just nabbed a pilot order for an ABC comedy, “Household Name,” to star Carol Burnett. It’s also the production banner behind Comedy Central’s “Broad City” and Hulu’s “Difficult People.” (Pictured: Amy Poehler, John Roberts)We all have difficult people in our life who drives us nuts! And they are exhausting, frustrating and annoying—but I have some ways to help you deal with difficult people. Here are some ideas for how you can handle the difficult person in your life: 1. Identify the 4 Types There are 4 different types of difficult people. Think about the person in your life and figure out which category they are in: Downers are also known as Negative Nancy’s or Debbie Downers. They always have something bad to say. They complain, critique and judge. They are almost impossible to please. are also known as Negative Nancy’s or Debbie Downers. They always have something bad to say. They complain, critique and judge. They are almost impossible to please. Better Thans are also known as Know It All’s, One Upper’s or Show-Offs. They like to try to impress you, name-drop and compare. are also known as Know It All’s, One Upper’s or Show-Offs. They like to try to impress you, name-drop and compare. Passives are also known as Push-Overs, Yes Men and Weaklings. They don’t contribute much to conversations or people around them and let others do the hard work. are also known as Push-Overs, Yes Men and Weaklings. They don’t contribute much to conversations or people around them and let others do the hard work. Tanks are also known as being explosive, a handful or bossy. They want their way and will do anything to get it. Do you have a difficult person in your life? Tell me! 2. Don’t Try to Change Them When we meet a difficult person, or if we have one in our family or circle of friends our instinct is to try to change them. We try to encourage Downers to be more positive, Passives to stand up for themselves, Tanks to calm down and Better Thans to be more humble. This never works! In fact, when you try to change someone they tend to resent you, dig in their heels, and get worse. 3. Try to Understand Them The way to disengage a difficult person is to try to understand where they are coming from. I try to find their value language. A value language is what someone values most. It is what drives their decisions. For some people it is money; for others, it is power or knowledge. This not only helps me understand them, but also helps them relax and become more open minded. For example, sometimes Tanks just want to explain their opinion. If you let them talk to you, that might help them not blow up or try to dominate a situation. 4. Don’t Let Them Be Toxic Some difficult people can be toxic. Toxic people can be passive aggressive, mean or hurtful. So if you have to deal with them, you can understand where they are coming from and then keep your distance. Toxic relationships are harmful so you need to create a buffer zone by surrounding yourself with good friends, seeing them less and if you have to be with them, do it for the minimum amount of time.The last several months have seen a disturbing string of problems in updates released for Microsoft products. Last week we saw three four. It's time to worry about what's behind it all. This isn't the first time I've brought this up. In Summer of last year Microsoft had buggy Patch Tuesday updates three months in a row. There had been others that year, some of which crippled systems. The following list includes problems observed in just the last six months: Update on December 15: They keep coming. KB3008923 describes problems with MS14-080, the December Cumulative Update for Internet Explorer: Known issues with this security update We are aware of some reports of functional issues on sites that use nested modal dialog boxes on Internet Explorer 11 that occur after you install this security update. Microsoft is researching this issue and will post more information in this article when the information becomes available. We are aware of some limited reports of Internet Explorer 9 crashing after you apply this security update. Microsoft is researching this issue and will post more information in this article when the information becomes available. The MS14-080 security bulletin itself has no mention of any problems. Note the (*) on the link about the October updates to Word. In Microsoft's explanations of what caused this update I saw inconsistencies and things that just didn't make sense. Sorry, it's complicated: According to an Office Sustained Engineering blog announcing the issue, both Word 2010 and Word 2013 suffer from the same problem caused by the October public updates. It refers the user to two different KBs: KB2920738 for Word 2013, KB2920807 for Word 2010. According to KB2920738, the Word 2013 problem requires "that you installed October hotfix KB2889939 for Word 2013." KB2920807 does not say whether a particular update/hotfix causes the problem in Word 2010. The purpose of KB2889939, the October update which (according to KB2920738) causes the problem in Word 2013, is that it "[I]mproves localization in the Kyrgyz and Mongolian language versions to make sure that the meanings are accurate." It's just my opinion, but I think that such an update sounds unlikely to have caused the problem described in Word (fields not updating some times) There is no update listed for Word 2010 that corresponds to KB2889939 for Word 2013 Update on December 15: Microsoft contacted me about the section above. They say that KB2920738, the article which explains the field updating bug in Word 2013, mistakenly attributed the problem to KB2889939 ([I]mproves localization in the Kyrgyz and Mongolian language versions..."). The correct article to point to is KB2889954 ("Hotfix KB2889954 for Word 2013 October 14, 2014 (Word-x-none.msp)"), which fixes a large number of Word bugs. Microsoft calls it a typo, (which I believe) and thanked me for pointing it out. KB2920738 has been corrected. I have had to cross out a big chunk of the story. The main point about the number and severity of updates stands unchecked. The Microsoft correction makes sense out of nonsense of their explanations. If you're lost, I'm sorry but not surprised. It's convoluted. It's also strangely reminiscent of the problems with the August patches that caused systems to go into infinite reboot loops. The update for which this problem was blamed is KB2970228 "Update to support the new currency symbol for the Russian ruble in Windows." I just don't see how such an update could cause such a problem. Whenever I see a change like this in anything I try to ask myself if there really is a change or if we're just noticing it more than in the past. In this case, I think the only way it's only a matter of perception is if Microsoft has begun reporting update problems more than they have in the past. This is entirely possible, but I don't have any real evidence that it's the case. With products as complex as Windows, Office and Exchange and a user base as large and diverse as theirs, there are always people complaining of problems caused by updates and it's inevitable that some users will suffer ill effects from even a well-designed and tested patch, because there are just too many configurations and third-party products for Microsoft to test. There's another complication potentially at fault in these bugs: Microsoft silently patches many security problems. Who knows, perhaps the Kyrgyz/Mongolian and Ruble updates did a lot more than Microsoft claimed they did. If an undocumented function of an update were to cause problems it wouldn't be surprising for Microsoft to dissemble in their explanations. Of course I'm speculating here, but it's not like we have an official and logical explanation on which to rely. I would assume that the people in charge at Microsoft know what the real problem is and aren't happy with it. In the long run, when almost all our software is in the cloud and managed, I think all patches will be silent and we won't know anything happened, other than perhaps a version number incrementing. Have there been any security bulletins for the online parts of Office 365? In the meantime I have to figure that the update processes for Windows, Office and Exchange have become too complex and unwieldy. There's little Microsoft can do about it in the short term; they brought it on themselves, mostly by having excessively long support lifecycles. I wish I had some constructive advice with near-term benefits, but I think we're doomed to more of this sort of thing for the foreseeable future.Boracay. Boom!! By Nathan Allen (Scroll down if you want to skip to my ultimate guide to Boracay's Hotels Restaurants, and Attractions...) Connect to Facebook Be prepared to stop for pictures every 2 meters - Boracay might be the best sunset you'll ever see in your entire life. Trust me - Kim Kardashian's butt isn't the only thing that could "break the Internet". Having been told that Boracay was already too crowded and overdeveloped, I managed to avoid the island for over a year during my exploration of the Philippines. Still, I always wondered, "what is it about Boracay that makes my Filipino friends SO proud?" Well now that I've seen it with my own two eyes, it's perfectly clear. Boracay is definitely the "crown jewel" of the 7,107 island of the Philippines. From what I've seen, the perfect white-sand beaches and crystal clear waters are unparalleled anywhere in the world! No wonder Travel + Leisure awarded Boracay "Best Island In The World" in 2012! No, these are not just huts on a beach - this is a world-class island with world-class amenities. No joke. Friendly Locals I really was surprised how genuine and friendly the locals were - considering that the island can be so touristy. I actually came on the bus from a neighboring province. On the way, I was befriended by a nice old couple who lives on the island. They guided me all the way to my hotel and didn't ask for a thing in return. "We love tourists, and understand how important they are", they told me. Only in the Philippines! Beach at Station 3 Clean Beaches Yes, during peak season there can be huge crowds, but what amazed me was how clean the beaches are - despite the crowds! People can take their drinks right down to the water, but somehow I didn't see any bottles or trash left behind. Filipinos and foreign tourists seem to be respectful of this beautiful place, and that makes me happy. There is a "no smoking on the beach" policy that I appreciate very much as well. Amazingly, it actually works - I hardly noticed any cigarette butts! "Comparison Is The Thief Of Joy" No, I didn't get to see the untouched Boracay of the 80s and 90s, but I choose to appreciate it for what it IS, not what it used to be. As Teddy Roosevelt said: "Comparison is the thief of joy". As it is now, the island has a lot to offer tourists - whether they're on a budget or on their honeymoon. "Boracay is a place Filipinos can go and be proud...they can watch as the stunning beauty of their country lights up the faces of travelers from all over the world." Are you freakin' kidding me?? Yes, that's a REAL place. It's called BORACAY. As a foreigner who is a big fan of Filipino culture, I worried that seeing all the foreign influence on the island would ruin the experience for me. Actually, just the opposite was true! Boracay is the least Filipino place in the Philippines, and I realized that's exactly why my Filipino friends love it so much! It's a place (in their own country) where Filipinos can interact with people and cultures from all over the world. For me, San Francisco in California is the same way. It's a very international city, and that's exactly what I love about it. Anyhow, it was a good realization to have about Boracay. Yes, Boracay is a place Filipinos can go and be proud...they can watch as the stunning beauty of their country lights up the faces of travelers from all over the world. So What's Your Story, Boracay? Well, the indigenous Ati people have been there for hundreds (thousands?) of years, but in terms of tourism, the story I heard was that German backpackers "discovered" the island in the 1970s. They would camp out for weeks at a time, and make trips back to the mainland (Panay) when they needed supplies. However, they couldn't keep their paradise a secret for too long, and word began to spread. Soon, Taiwanese and Korean tourists began arriving in droves. The island has seen massive growth in the past 20 years. Some of my favorite photos - click to enlarge! The Full Range Of Experiences (Including Mermaids) My goal was to explore every nook and cranny of the island - and document what's left of the local culture if at all possible. I stayed on the island for one month (I make these sacrifices for you, I swear:), and in that time, I befriended a family of fishermen who I ate, drank, and stayed with. I slept on top of a table on their isolated beach - just as they do, and tried to learn as much of the local language (Aklanon) as possible. Other than that, I attended a pubcrawl, photographed brilliant, starry skies during the "black moon", slept in a hammock under the full moon, and woke up to a stunning sunrise (the blue photo below). I volunteered at the local elementary school, made a guest appearance as Wolverine on Halloween, and even attended an actual underwater mermaid wedding! I'll never forget the time I spent on this magical island. (Click To Enlarge) Oh by the way, have you "liked" my page yet? Follow me through this beautiful country! - Nathan Allen Connect to Facebook Of course, I spent a lot of time researching hotels, restaurants, and attractions for you as well. Ready for my recommendations? I think you'll love them:) Here we go, and don't forget to bookmark this page for your next trip!! Boracay Hotels and Accommodations Hotels on White Beach White Beach is broken up into 3 sections, or "stations". Station 3 is the closest to the jetty port, and is where you can find the best deals on a peaceful stay. Station 2 is about a kilometer or 2 away, and is where you can find the parties and nightlife. Station 1 is two to three kilometers away, and is also a good place for peace and quiet - though it's generally more expensive. Diniwid Beach, is a kilometer past Station 1, and it also has some relaxing (but pricey) options. Bulabog Beach is on the opposite side of the island from White Beach, and has some affordable, less crowded options as well. Low Season is the time to find the best deals. This is from May to October
63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 public class BooksActivity extends BaseActivity implements BooksView, BookListAdapter. OnBookClickListener { @ Bind ( R. id. recycler_view ) RecyclerView mRecyclerView ; @ Bind ( R. id. toolbar ) Toolbar mToolbar ; @ Inject BooksPresenter mBooksPresenter ; private BookListAdapter mAdapter ; @ Override public void onCreate ( Bundle savedInstanceState ) { super. onCreate ( savedInstanceState ) ; setContentView ( R. layout. activity_main ) ; ButterKnife. bind ( this ) ; initToolbar ( ) ; initList ( ) ; } @ Override protected Object getModule ( ) { return new BooksModule ( ) ; } private void initToolbar ( ) { setSupportActionBar ( mToolbar ) ; } private void initList ( ) { mAdapter = new BookListAdapter ( ) ; mAdapter. setOnBookClickListener ( this ) ; mRecyclerView. setLayoutManager ( new LinearLayoutManager ( this ) ) ; mRecyclerView. setAdapter ( mAdapter ) ; } @ Override protected void onStart ( ) { super. onStart ( ) ; mBooksPresenter. setView ( this ) ; } @ Override protected void onStop ( ) { super. onStop ( ) ; mBooksPresenter. clearView ( ) ; } @ Override protected void closeRealm ( ) { mBooksPresenter. closeRealm ( ) ; } @ Override public void showBooks ( final RealmResults < Book > books ) { mAdapter. setBooks ( books ) ; } @ Override public void onBookClick ( final int id ) { mBooksPresenter. onBookClick ( id ) ; } @ OnClick ( R. id. fab ) public void onAddNewBookClick ( ) { mBooksPresenter. onAddNewBookClick ( ) ; } @ Override public void showBookDetailView ( final int id ) { startActivity ( DetailActivity. getStartIntent ( this, id ) ) ; } @ Override public void showAddNewBookView ( ) { startActivity ( new Intent ( this, AddBookActivity. class ) ) ; } } What that code is doing? Initialize adapter and RecyclerView in initList(). Manage the View in presenter in onStart() and onStop(). Show books in showBooks(…). Get taps in onBookClick(…) and onAddNewBookClick(). Go to another views in showBookDetailView(…) and showAddNewBookView(). For now don’t bother about Presenter injection and closing Realm instance. How Presenter and View interfaces look like? public interface BooksPresenter extends BasePresenter { void onBookClick(int id); void onAddNewBookClick(); } 1 2 3 4 public interface BooksPresenter extends BasePresenter { void onBookClick ( int id ) ; void onAddNewBookClick ( ) ; } public interface BasePresenter { void setView(Object view); void clearView(); void closeRealm(); } 1 2 3 4 5 public interface BasePresenter { void setView ( Object view ) ; void clearView ( ) ; void closeRealm ( ) ; } public interface BooksView { void showBooks(RealmResults<Book> books); void showBookDetailView(int id); void showAddNewBookView(); class EmptyMyListView implements BooksView { @Override public void showBooks(final RealmResults<Book> books) { } @Override public void showBookDetailView(final int id) { } @Override public void showAddNewBookView() { } } } 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 public interface BooksView { void showBooks ( RealmResults < Book > books ) ; void showBookDetailView ( int id ) ; void showAddNewBookView ( ) ; class EmptyMyListView implements BooksView { @ Override public void showBooks ( final RealmResults < Book > books ) { } @ Override public void showBookDetailView ( final int id ) { } @ Override public void showAddNewBookView ( ) { } } } The BooksActivity implements BooksView and implementation of BooksPresenter is shown below. public class BooksPresenterImpl implements BooksPresenter { private final RealmService mRealmService; private BooksView mMyListView = new BooksView.EmptyMyListView(); private boolean booksWereShown = false; public BooksPresenterImpl(final RealmService realmService) { mRealmService = realmService; } @Override public void setView(final Object view) { mMyListView = (BooksView) view; showBooksIfNeeded(); } private void showBooksIfNeeded() { if(!booksWereShown) { mMyListView.showBooks(mRealmService.getAllBooks()); booksWereShown = true; } } @Override public void clearView() { mMyListView = new BooksView.EmptyMyListView(); } @Override public void closeRealm() { mRealmService.closeRealm(); } @Override public void onBookClick(final int id) { mMyListView.showBookDetailView(id); } @Override public void onAddNewBookClick() { mMyListView.showAddNewBookView(); } } 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 public class BooksPresenterImpl implements BooksPresenter { private final RealmService mRealmService ; private BooksView mMyListView = new BooksView. EmptyMyListView ( ) ; private boolean booksWereShown = false ; public BooksPresenterImpl ( final RealmService realmService ) { mRealmService = realmService ; } @ Override public void setView ( final Object view ) { mMyListView = ( BooksView ) view ; showBooksIfNeeded ( ) ; } private void showBooksIfNeeded ( ) { if (! booksWereShown ) { mMyListView. showBooks ( mRealmService. getAllBooks ( ) ) ; booksWereShown = true ; } } @ Override public void clearView ( ) { mMyListView = new BooksView. EmptyMyListView ( ) ; } @ Override public void closeRealm ( ) { mRealmService. closeRealm ( ) ; } @ Override public void onBookClick ( final int id ) { mMyListView. showBookDetailView ( id ) ; } @ Override public void onAddNewBookClick ( ) { mMyListView. showAddNewBookView ( ) ; } } As you see, Presenter handles the clicks and shows all added books using RealmService. Let’s do a quick look at the BaseActivity and than we go to RealmService. Injection and close Realm The BaseActivity is responsible for injecting modules and forcing inheriting Activities to implement closeRealm() method. public abstract class BaseActivity extends AppCompatActivity { @Override public void onCreate(final Bundle savedInstanceState) { super.onCreate(savedInstanceState); BooksApplication.injectModules(this, getModule()); } @Override protected void onDestroy() { closeRealm(); super.onDestroy(); } protected abstract Object getModule(); protected abstract void closeRealm(); } 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 public abstract class BaseActivity extends AppCompatActivity { @ Override public void onCreate ( final Bundle savedInstanceState ) { super. onCreate ( savedInstanceState ) ; BooksApplication. injectModules ( this, getModule ( ) ) ; } @ Override protected void onDestroy ( ) { closeRealm ( ) ; super. onDestroy ( ) ; } protected abstract Object getModule ( ) ; protected abstract void closeRealm ( ) ; } Now we open Realm instance in onCreate() and close it in onDestroy() – as it was said in documentation. @Module(injects = BooksActivity.class, addsTo = ApplicationModule.class) public class BooksModule { @Provides BooksPresenter provideMyListPresenter(final RealmService realmService) { return new BooksPresenterImpl(realmService); } } 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 @ Module ( injects = BooksActivity. class, addsTo = ApplicationModule. class ) public class BooksModule { @ Provides BooksPresenter provideMyListPresenter ( final RealmService realmService ) { return new BooksPresenterImpl ( realmService ) ; } } BooksModule simply injects BooksPresenter with RealmService to the BooksActivity. RealmService As long as we do read queries we are allowed to do them on UI thread and use injected Realm instance field. public class RealmService { private final Realm mRealm; public RealmService(final Realm realm) { mRealm = realm; } public void closeRealm() { mRealm.close(); } public RealmResults<Book> getAllBooks() { return mRealm.allObjects(Book.class); } //other methods } 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 public class RealmService { private final Realm mRealm ; public RealmService ( final Realm realm ) { mRealm = realm ; } public void closeRealm ( ) { mRealm. close ( ) ; } public RealmResults < Book > getAllBooks ( ) { return mRealm. allObjects ( Book. class ) ; } //other methods } The problem occurs with database modifications like write or update. If write operation is not a simple one we should do it on background thread. We can either use an AsyncTask and in doInBackground() make write operation with new Realm instance between Realm.beginTransaction() and Realm.commitTransaction() or use method Realm.executeTransaction(…). The first idea is not a good one for our architecture. All database operation should be doing outside the View, so the AsyncTask should be implemented in Presenter or some kind of service, but we also don’t want Android framework in any classes except Views. Therefore let’s try the second solution. public class RealmService { //other methods public void addBookAsync(final String title, final String author, final String isbn, final String publisher, final OnTransactionCallback onTransactionCallback) { mRealm.executeTransaction(new Realm.Transaction() { @Override public void execute(final Realm realm) { Book book = realm.createObject(Book.class); book.setId(realm.allObjects(Book.class).size()); book.setTitle(title); book.setAuthor(createOrGetAuthor(author, book, realm)); book.setPublisher(createOrGetPublisher(publisher, book, realm)); book.setIsbn(isbn); } }, new Realm.Transaction.Callback() { @Override public void onSuccess() { if (onTransactionCallback!= null) { onTransactionCallback.onRealmSuccess(); } } @Override public void onError(final Exception e) { if (onTransactionCallback!= null) { onTransactionCallback.onRealmError(e); } } }); } //other methods public interface OnTransactionCallback { void onRealmSuccess(); void onRealmError(final Exception e); } } 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 public class RealmService { //other methods public void addBookAsync ( final String title, final String author, final String isbn, final String publisher, final OnTransactionCallback onTransactionCallback ) { mRealm. executeTransaction ( new Realm. Transaction ( ) { @ Override public void execute ( final Realm realm ) { Book book = realm. createObject ( Book. class ) ; book. setId ( realm. allObjects ( Book. class ). size ( ) ) ; book. setTitle ( title ) ; book. setAuthor ( createOrGetAuthor ( author, book, realm ) ) ; book. setPublisher ( createOrGetPublisher ( publisher, book, realm ) ) ; book. setIsbn ( isbn ) ; } }, new Realm. Transaction. Callback ( ) { @ Override public void onSuccess ( ) { if ( onTransactionCallback!= null ) { onTransactionCallback. onRealmSuccess ( ) ; } } @ Override public void onError ( final Exception e ) { if ( onTransactionCallback!= null ) { onTransactionCallback. onRealmError ( e ) ; } } } ) ; } //other methods public interface OnTransactionCallback { void onRealmSuccess ( ) ; void onRealmError ( final Exception e ) ; } } Method execute() is called in background thread. If there was no exception during operations on database then onSucces() method is called, if not – onError(…). Notice that in execute() body the new instance of Realm is used. Summary It is possible to use Realm in MVP architecture. Even if we can’t use Realm instance in different thread than it was created, we can use async transactions mechanizm with callbacks which Realm provides. Opening and closing Realm instance in each Activity and Fragment is not a problem as long as we use Dagger and some base component which views have to inherit. Do you have any other ideas how to use Realm with MVP? Feel free to comment. The project can be found on DroidsOnRoids Github in ExampleRealmMVP-Android repository.A con woman is behind bars after she convinced a mother and daughter, who later died in a suspected suicide pact, that they would be jailed for 20 years. Linsey Cotton, 33, concocted an elaborate plot to woo RAF corporal Michael McDonough, 33, which left his mother, Margaret, and sister, Nicola, fearing they would be imprisoned. The mother of two convinced the two women in a meeting at their house in Paisley on May 7 2013 they had broken the law. She alleged they had breached a confidentiality clause relating to the medical treatment of a person whose identity she had made up. She said they would be jailed for 20 years. Mrs McDonough and Nicola were thought to have been left petrified and tearful at the prospect of spending life in prison. The court heard Mrs McDonough was physically sick. Three days later, Mrs McDonough, 52, and her 23-year-old student daughter were found badly injured from slash wounds at the Premier Inn in Greenock. The former Liberal Democrat council candidate died soon after being found in the budget hotel. Nicola, who was found unconscious in a corridor, lost her fight for life three days later. The deaths were treated as a suspected double suicide. Cotton, of Addiewell, West Lothian, was remanded in custody at Paisley Sheriff Court yesterday after she pled guilty obtaining money by fraud. She created a complex web of lies which saw her con Michael McDonough out of nearly £5,000 and attempt to get a further £5,500 from him and his family. Fifteen mobile phones, two laptops and two tablet computers were used by Cotton to convince the family that she was over a dozen different people. She pretended to be a woman Mr McDonough fell in love with, the non-existent woman's siblings and parents, her nurse, her lawyer, her barrister and even government officials. Cotton later introduced her true self to Mr McDonough, telling him she was the main point of contact for Steph. But she also posed as numerous other people she had made up to contact him. While pretending to be Steph, said Cotton was like a mother figure to her. The court heard that Mr McDonough joined online dating website Plenty of Fish in August 2011. In May 2012 he received a message from a user called Stephanie Wilson or Johnstone. Cotton had stolen her stepsister's daughter's pictures to use as Stephanie's profile picture and Mr McDonough began speaking to "Stephanie" regularly and they exchanged mobile numbers. They began texting and phoning each other and their relationship grew to a point where Michael believed he was in a relationship with Stephanie, whom he knew as Steph. Mr McDonough, who had never met the woman, bought her a £2,000 engagement ring. He was unaware he was interacting with Cotton. She even wore the engagement ring when he met her, without him realising. Posing as Steph, Cotton made up a host of excuses to postpone proposed meetings between her fictional alter ego and Mr McDonough. She told him she been jailed for a breach of the peace over a fight with her non-existent's sister's boyfriend. Cotton then posed as a family member to text Mr McDonough, telling him that Steph had confronted Jason and been brutally attacked by her. She told him Steph was left with a broken jaw, fractured cheek, broken arm, suspected fractured skull and swelling on the brain. While still posing as one of Steph's relatives, said Steph's injuries were so bad that she had to be admitted to hospital and undergo plastic surgery to correct the damage Jason had caused to her body. That was the beginning of a series of physical problems which Cotton said befell Steph, from suffering three heart attacks and being dropped in a hospital bath to being subjected to numerous murder attempts by employees from a non-existent medical company called Biotech Scotland. Cotton convinced Mr McDonough that Steph's medical care had been passed to Biotech and that she was included in a clinical trial which would ultimately cure all her medical problems. But she said that Steph then became the subject of murder bids by rogue doctors who were trying to kill her as Biotech would receive a £100million payout if all the patients in the clinical trial died. She said there was a government cover up. She informed Mr McDonough that, due to the involvement of Biotech in Steph's medical care, he was the subject of a confidentiality agreement which meant he could not discuss the case with anyone. But, the court heard, he confided in his mother, who told his sister, and she then told her former boyfriend. Cotton said she was aware that the confidentiality agreement had been breached and went to the McDonough's family home for a meeting. It was there that she made the threat they would be jailed. Mr McDonough sent texts to Steph saying he could never forgive his mum or his sister for breaching the confidentiality clause. Cotton also said she could make the case disappear with the help of a lawyer if they gave her £5,000. She also said she could organised a fake passport for Nicola for £500, so she could leave the country. The court heard Mr McDonough suffered stress during the 11 month ordeal. Sheriff Robert Fife heard Cotton had changed her Facebook status to "in a relationship" throughout her fraud, telling friends and family she was engaged to Mr McDonough. Despite not being in a relationship with Cotton and believing he was engaged to Steph, Mr McDonough moved in with Cotton at one point as it would be easier for them to deal with the issues surrounding Steph's medical care. As well as fixing the laminate flooring, skirting boards and painting and wallpapering Cotton's home, Mr McDonough gave her £4,910 over the year, along with a Blackberry and an iPhone. Defence solicitor Gerry Bann asked Sheriff Robert Fife to release Cotton on bail, saying she was not a flight risk or a threat to the public and had two children, aged 15 and 11. But Sheriff Fife ruled the case was so serious he had to remand Cotton in custody. He deferred sentence until next month and called for her to be assessed by social workers ahead of the hearing. Margaret, a foster carer with Renfrewshire Council, was rushed to Inverclyde Royal Hospital for treatment after she was found injured at the Premier Inn. The mother of four, who stood for the LibDems in Johnstone in 2012, and died a few hours later. Charity worker and social work graduate Nicola, who had also been slashed and was found slumped in the hallway of the hotel, was also rushed to hospital. She was in a critical condition for three days before losing her fight for life and sadly passing away.Lady Gaga is apparently on top of it when it comes to donating money to those affected by the March 11 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Today, it was announced that the pop star donated $1.5 million to Zynga’s fundraising initiative with Save the Children, as well as to the American Red Cross. Gaga raised these funds via sales of her Japan Prayer Bracelets. “I’m inspired that my little monsters banded together to help those affected by the terrible tragedy,” she said in a release. Last week, the singer also participated in a benefit album called Songs for Japan, which also features popular tunes in original, remastered, live or acoustic formats from Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Justin Bieber, Eminem, Katy Perry and more. Worldwide proceeds from album downloads will go to the Japanese Red Cross Society. Zynga, for its part, donated more than $2.5 million in the last two weeks for Save the Children’s Japan Earthquake Tsunami Children in Emergency Fund via its social games (Café World, CityVille, FrontierVille, FarmVille, Words With Friends, Vampire Wars, YoVille and Zynga Poker). Players donated 100% of the purchase price of virtual goods to the relief effort. What do you think of these methods of fundraising? Would you buy a bracelet — or a virtual farm — to benefit charity?SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Yahoo Inc’s YHOO.O plans to turn around its struggling core business are set to dominate its earnings report on Tuesday, with investors keen to see if CEO Marissa Mayer will push ahead with a proposed spin-off or entertain calls for a complete sale. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer speaks during her keynote address at the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Nevada January 7, 2014. REUTERS/Robert Galbraith The spin-off of its main business which includes its search engine and digital advertising units was flagged by Mayer in December after Yahoo abandoned efforts to sell its stake in Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (BABA.N), but the company has provided few details. On Monday the Wall Street Journal reported Yahoo planned layoffs of about 15 percent of its 11,000-strong workforce and would close unspecified units. A Yahoo spokeswoman declined to comment on the report, citing the quiet period ahead of earnings. Investors are also expected to zero in on any comments from Mayer on her plans to increase the company’s advertising sales and improve its efforts on mobile platforms, where more users are spending their online time. Some activist investors are pushing Yahoo to ditch the spin-off and instead sell the core business. Verizon Communications Inc (VZ.N) has expressed interest in the core, and analysts say other potential buyers include media and private equity firms. A note published by SunTrust Robinson Humphrey last week valued the core business at between $6 billion and $8 billion. A Reuters story earlier this year reported that investors are prepared to take a tax hit on a quick sale of the core business instead of waiting for a spin-off that could take more than a year. For the fourth quarter, analysts expect Yahoo to report revenue of $1.18 billion and earnings per share of 12.5 cents, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S. Last quarter’s revenues and EPS both missed analysts’ estimates. Yahoo has struggled to expand its Internet business, which includes selling search and display ads on its news and sports sites and email service, in the face of competition from Alphabet Inc’s (GOOGL.O) Google unit and Facebook Inc (FB.O). Yahoo’s revenue has fallen slightly since Mayer took the helm in mid-2012, and its share of U.S. web searches is essentially flat with three years ago, gaining no ground on market leader Google.For busy staffers on Capitol Hill, whose hectic days are often scheduled down to the minute, grabbing lunch often means a trip to the cafeterias scattered around the Capitol complex. Although there are multiple dining spots on the campus’s House and Senate sides, offering everything from Indian cuisine to slow-cooked barbecue, some vegetarian and vegan House staffers say there’s a noticeable lack of healthy proteins and lettuce varieties available to fit their dietary needs. And they’re doing something about it. Calling themselves the Vegetarian Caucus, these vegetarian and vegan House staffers penned a letter late last month urging Restaurant Associates, the New York-based food service company that runs most of the eateries in the Capitol complex, to add standing proteins and more nutritious greens to the salad bars on the House side, including black beans, spinach, kale and tofu. “While the salad bar occasionally has black beans, tofu and chickpeas, all good sources of protein, those options are not always reliable or sufficient,” reads the letter, signed by nine House staffers identifying with the Vegetarian Caucus. “We would like to request that tofu, falafel or other substantive, non-animal protein is offered every day as a salad bar option.” Michael Shank, communications director for California Democratic Rep. Michael M. Honda and a member of the Vegetarian Caucus, said the letter the group sent to RA was a product of informal conversations between vegetarian and vegan staffers on the House side of the Capitol. He said they all realized that they lamented the lack of vegetarian and vegan options available for lunch at the House eateries when they got together. “We got into a conversation, and we all started saying, ‘Oh yeah, eating on the Hill has limited options for vegetarians and vegans. We should do something about it,’” said Shank, who has been a vegetarian for 20 years and recently began living a vegan or meat- and dairy-free lifestyle. Shank said the group received a positive response from RA regarding the concerns. But three weeks after sending the Feb. 22 email, the group has seen no changes in salad bar offerings. “The essence of what they said is, ‘Hey, we hear you, and we’re committed to attending to your concerns,’” Shank said. “I think it was a positive response, and I think they very clearly heard us and understood the legitimacy of our concern.... [But the email was] pretty recent, so they’re probably buying in bulk, and I don’t know how quickly you can change the offerings. So the change remains to be seen.” RA representatives did not reply to CQ Roll Call’s request for comment. Shank and other members hope that by going to the press, the Vegetarian Caucus will inspire other vegetarians and vegans on Capitol Hill to join their cause and spread the word to RA leadership. “There are about a dozen of us right now, and we’re pretty new. This is the first article that talks about us,” Shank said of the Vegetarian Caucus. “We hope that with [this article] there will become increased awareness.” Adam Kuranishi, a fellow in Honda’s office who is a vegetarian for health reasons, said the group’s next step — if the salad bar offerings are not noticeably changed — is to land a face-to-face meeting with RA representatives to understand the limitations to increasing vegetarian offerings in the cafeterias. He added that as the population of Capitol Hill becomes more diverse, the cafeteria offerings need to shift to accommodate the changing needs of those who work in Congress. “As we’re starting to see members of Congress and staff coming from different backgrounds, races and ethnicities, there’s this need to be more inclusive,” said Kuranishi. “I think there needs to be a recognition of the landscape within Capitol Hill by making some incremental shifts [in the cafeterias].” For now, Kuranishi and Shank said they and other members of the Vegetarian Caucus bring supplemental proteins from home to make up for the lack of options in the cafeterias. However, they said, since they are constituents on Capitol Hill, RA should want their business. Supplying healthier vegetarian options may benefit other staffers and tourists who frequent the eateries, they added. “If they’re concerned about food going bad, if it’s a demand issue, maybe it’s on us to do a poll to communicate to management,” Shank said of proving the market for vegetarian and vegan offerings. “But often if you provide it, people will come. If tourists come, they will get what’s available to them, and they might consume it just because it’s there.”© Christian Petersen/Getty Images Sport A girl apologized for bragging on Tinder that she slept with a Patriots player. By Steve DelVecchio New England Patriots wide receiver Julian Edelman earned the right to celebrate nonstop after the way he performed in Super Bowl XLIX. The only mistake he made was partying with a young lady named Sabrina. Edelman apparently hooked up with a girl named Sabrina after they partied together on Tuesday night. We know this because she bragged about it using the "moments" feature on Tinder, and the photo she shared went viral. (You can see the photo here) People are not happy with Sabrina. One Boston club promoter told TMZ that he is rallying local club owners to ban her from the area’s nightlife scene. TMZ later got in touch with Sabrina, and she admitted she feels “terrible” about the whole situation. “I made a mistake. I feel really bad about it,” she said. “He passed out and I was bored I guess. I was drunk … and I made a mistake and I feel terrible about it. “Some of the players were texting me that they were really disappointed. I obviously made a mistake and I can’t take it back.” While she expressed regret, Sabrina didn’t seem concerned about promoters and club owners banning her from their establishments. “I’ve definitely gotten my fair share of clubbing in Boston — and I have friends who work there who say I’m still welcome,” she said. “I don’t know if I’ll go out anytime soon — but that’s my choice.” If that sounds like a girl who is confident enough to sleep with an NFL player and then brag about it on Tinder, well… The important thing is Sabrina’s dumb Tinder post didn’t stop Edelman from tearing it up at the Super Bowl victory parade on Wednesday.There’s a widely-held belief among internet snobs that The Simpsons took a dip in quality in the late ‘90s/early ‘00s and has yet to fully recover. Nevertheless, TV’s longest-running scripted show continues to roll along and to pull in a sizable audience every week as its landmark 25th season continues. Simpsons showrunner Al Jean announced recently that the writers are killing off a character at the start of next season, but that’s not the only change to the show in recent years. For those of you who stopped watching The Simpsons within the last decade or so and missed the most recent couple hundred episodes, we made a list of some surprising stuff that’s happened to your beloved Springfield characters since 2003, like more character deaths, an unexpected wedding, and Homer and Marge’s secret 12-season-long divorce. Or, for you Comic Book Guy-esque fans out there, you can just continue to treat everything after season 10 as non-canon. 1. Flanders and Mrs. Krabappel are married Yes, that’s right, Krabappel and Skinner are through, and she is currently married to the Simpsons’ nextdoor neighbor Ned Flanders and the stepmom to Rod and Todd. In the Season 22 finale “The Ned-Liest Catch” in 2011, Flanders saves Krabappel from falling off a ladder and the two begin dating. The Simpsons held a weird fan poll at the end of the episode, allowing viewers to vote on whether Flanders and Krabappel stayed together. The results were revealed in the Season 23 premiere, and fans opted to keep the couple together. At the end of Season 23, in the episode “Ned ‘n Edna’s Blend” (2012), Krabappel and Skinner reveal that they secretly got married and the town throws them a party. Krabappel still keeps her name for teaching though. 2. Fat Tony died In the Season 22 episode “Donnie Fatso” (2010), which involved Homer going undercover to infiltrate the mob, Springfield crime boss Fat Tony dies from a heart attack after he’s shocked to find out Homer was a government informant. Fat Tony’s cousin, Fit Tony (who looks just like Fat Tony but is in shape), then takes his job but promptly gains a bunch of weight from the stress of the new position and gets the nickname “Fat Tony,” essentially restoring the character in a “this never happened” Armin Tamzarian-style bailout. 3. There were two more future episodes We saw two episodes set in the future during the show’s first dozen seasons (“Lisa’s Wedding,” where Lisa’s engaged to a charming Englishman, and “Bart to the Future,” where Lisa is president and Bart is a failed musician), but The Simpsons has gone back to that well for two more future-set episodes, Season 15’s “Future-Drama” (2005) and Season 23’s “Holidays of Future Passed” (2011). “Future-Drama,” set before “Lisa’s Wedding,” followed Bart and Lisa graduating from high school (with Lisa doing so two years early) and competing over a scholarship from Mr. Burns. Bart is dating a skateboarder named Jenda (voiced by Amy Poehler), who he ends up breaking up with, and Lisa is dating Milhouse, who she dumps after he proposes to her, and Marge has left Homer for Krusty, only to come back to Homer by the end of the episode. “Holidays of Future Passed,” written as a potential series finale in case contract negotiations didn’t go through, took place 30 years in the future with Bart and Lisa as middle-aged parents. Bart is divorced with two sons, Lisa is married to Milhouse and has a rebellious daughter she’s struggling to connect with, and Maggie, the lead singer for a famous band, is giving birth to her first child. 4. Snowball II died Lisa’s cat, Snowball II, was hit by a car in the Season 15 episode, “I, D’oh-Bot” (2004). Lisa gets two cats to replace it, Snowball III and Snowball IV, both of which promptly die. Her next replacement, Snowball V, doesn’t die and she renames it Snowball II so that she doesn’t have to buy the cat a new bowl and to save herself from thinking about her cat’s death. After Lisa vows to act like the whole thing never happened, Principal Skinner walks by and asks, “That’s really a cheat, isn’t it?” Lisa responds, “I guess you’re right, Principal Tamzarian,” causing Skinner to call the cat “Snowball II” and walk away. 5. Marvin Monroe is alive again Gravelly-voiced psychologist Dr. Marvin Monroe’s death is referenced multiple times from Seasons 7-16, with a Dr. Marvin Monroe Memorial Hospital and a Dr. Marvin Monroe Memorial Gymnasium popping up in addition to his death being the subject of a trivia question in the Troy McClure-hosted “The Simpsons 138th Episode Spectacular.” Nevertheless, in the Season 15 episode “Diatribe of a Mad Housewife” (2004), he pops up to buy a copy of Marge’s novel. When she asks where he’s been, Monroe says he’s “been very sick.” 6. Selma adopted a child from China Marge’s sister Selma, who’s desire to have a child was established early in the series, adopted a daughter named Ling from China in the Season 16 episode “Goo Goo Gai Pain” (2005) after she starts going through menopause. The episode involved Selma having Homer pretend to be her husband and traveling to China with her (and the rest of the Simpsons) for the adoption. Even though her plan was foiled, she was still able to adopt Ling anyway. 7. Patty came out of the closet In the Season 16 episode “There’s Something About Marrying” (2005), Marge’s sister Patty comes out as gay, much to Marge’s surprise. 8. Principal Skinner and Mrs. Krabappel got engaged but she left him at the altar Principal Skinner proposed to Mrs. Krabappel in the Season 14 episode “Special Edna” (2004) and the two were set to wed in Season 15’s “My Big Fat Geek Wedding” (2005). Skinner had doubts about marrying her, and when Krabappel heard about that, she ran away from the wedding and it was called off. 9. Ricky Gervais and Seth Rogen both wrote episodes Ricky Gervais and Seth Rogen (along with writing partner Evan Goldberg) each wrote an episode of the show and guest-starred in their episode. Gervais penned Season 15’s “Homer Simpson, This Is Your Wife” (2006), in which the Simpson family does a Wife Swap-style reality show, and Gervais voices the perfect new husband who switches places with Homer. Rogen and Goldberg’s episode was Season 21’s “Homer the Whopper,” in which Rogen voices Lyle, a guy training Homer for a role in a superhero movie. 10. Milhouse’s parents got remarried Milhouse’s parents, Kirk and Luann Van Houten, who divorced in the Season 8 episode “A Milhouse Divided” remarried in Season 19’s “Little Orphan Millie” (2007). They went on a cruise for their second honeymoon but fell off the boat and went missing. They soon turned up and are still together. 11. Mona Simpson died Homer’s mother, Mona Simpson, passed away in Season 19’s “Mona Leaves-a” (2008). Mona showed up at the Simpsons’ door, asking for Homer’s forgiveness and promising that her days of activism are over and that she wants to move in with the family. Homer refuses to forgive her, upset about her repeatedly leaving him as a kid, but when he changes his mind and goes downstairs to make peace, he finds her dead. Homer then does “one more stupid hippie protest” in his mom’s honor. 12. The Simpsons went to a ton of more places Episodes set around the Simpson family traveling to a new place and excitedly exclaiming at the top of the episode, “The Simpsons are going to _____!” has become a cliche on the show and something the writers have even made fun of. The Simpsons have still been traveling to a ton of places over the past 10 seasons, including Miami, New Jersey, Niagara Falls, England, China, Italy, Vermont, Utah, Machu Picchu, Colorado, Ireland, Mexico, Israel, Vancouver, Antarctica, and return visits to LA, New York, and Washington, D.C. 13. More people moved in with the Simpsons for an episode Another cliche on the show has been a side character falling on hard times and briefly moving in with the Simpson family, only to fix their life by the end of the episode when everything goes back to normal. Over the last decade, characters like Gil, Groundskeeper Willie, Mr. Burns (a second time), Kent Brockman, and country singer Lurleen Lumpkin have all been temporary houseguests in the Simpson home. 14. Selma married Abe Simpson and Fat Tony In the awfully-titled Season 18 episode “Rome-old and Juli-eh” (2007), Selma and Abe Simpson both fell in love after being asked to babysit the Simpson
-1 loss. When Ruth belted 60 homers in 1927, Gehrig hit 47. As late as August 19 The Iron Horse led the Bambino, 39-38, but he couldn't compete with Ruth's finishing kick. In 1931, Gehrig and Ruth tied for the A.L. lead with 46 homers. Gehrig lost a homer when a baserunner thought the ball was caught and headed for the dugout, believing there were three outs. When Gehrig "passed" the runner, his "homer" was negated. In the 1932 World Series game against the Cubs that Ruth hit his "called shot," Gehrig hit two homers, including one following Babe's homer. Despite having pain from lumbago, Gehrig led off one game in 1934 in Detroit (he was listed as the shortstop), singled and then was removed for a pinch-runner. Gehrig led the A.L. in hitting just once - with a.363 average in 1934 when he became the first Yankee to win the Triple Crown. But he batted higher than that three times (.373,.374 and.379) between 1927-30. When Gehrig's streak reached 1,999, his wife Eleanor suggested he sit out the next game. She thought it would ease the pressure on him as well as give him additional publicity, as it would be a number people wouldn't forget. The Iron Horse played on. In his 13 full seasons, Gehrig averaged 147 runs batted in. From 1950 through 1995, not one American Leaguer reached 147 RBI. Besides his record 23 grand slams, Gehrig also had 73 three-run homers and 166 two-run shots among his 493 homers. In 34 World Series games, Gehrig batted.361 with 10 homers, eight doubles and 35 RBI in 119 at-bats. The Yankees lost their first Series with Gehrig (1926), but won their next six (1927-28, 1932, 1936-38). Late in his career, Gehrig's hands were x-rayed and doctors spotted 17 fractures that had "healed" while he continued to play. Gehrig knew it was time to take himself out of the lineup in 1939 when several teammates complimented him for making a routine play. When Gehrig's consecutive game streak ended on May 2, 1939, pitcher Lefty Gomez told him, "It took them 15 years to get you out of the game. Sometimes I'm out of there in 15 minutes." Gehrig's lifetime slugging percentage of.632 is third all-time behind Ruth's.690 and Ted Williams'.634. Gehrig was the first athlete in any sport to have his number retired. No Yankee besides Gehrig has ever worn No. 4. The general estimate is that Gehrig earned $361,500 in salary from the Yankees, with a high of $39,000 in 1938. Gehrig ranks second (behind Babe Ruth) in at-bats per RBI at 4.01, with 1,995 RBI in 8,001 at-bats. After Gehrig retired in 1939, he was appointed to the New York City Parole Commission and worked with youth groups until a month before his death. "I would not have traded two minutes of joy and the grief with that man for two decades of anything with another," said his wife Eleanor. ALSO SEESidhartha Shukla moneycontrol.com The government will soon be appointing merchant bankers to help it find a buyer for its minority stake in 51 companies which it holds through the Specified Undertaking of UTI (SUUTI) fund. The government will kick of its divestment plans in three blue chip companies. SUUTI was formed in 2003 as an extension of the United Trust of India (UTI). It comprises 51 companies -- 8 unlisted and the rest listed companies. Through SUUTI, the government holds minority stake in these companies and is planning to divest its shareholding. The government is mulling to divest through an offer for sale (OFS), block deal, bulk deal or just by a regular sale on stock exchanges. The fund includes listed companies like HUL, RIL, ICICI Bank, Axis Bank and a host of Tata Group firms. For the purposes of divestment, SUUTI has segregated the companies into three groups. Group A consists of 3 blue-chip companies -- Axis Bank, L&T and ITC. Group B has 8 unlisted companies, while Group C has the remaining 40 listed companies. Through SUUTI the government holds 11.53 percent stake in Axis Bank, 11.17 percent in ITC and 8.16 percent in L&T which are placed in Group A and are up for divestment first. Source: http://www.suuti.in/RFP-25072016.pdf As per Monday's closing, the government's holding in Axis Bank is worth Rs 14,818 crore, in ITC Rs 33,908 crore and L&T Rs 12,057 crore. The complete sale of these three blue-chip stocks can fetch the government Rs 60,785 crore based on yesterday's closing price. Stocks in Group A will be easier to divest because of their high demand in the market. The rest of the companies in Group B and C may comparatively be a hard sell. The investment bankers -- who will be hired for three years -- will have their job cut out. Follow @shukla_05sidA BSD licensed code completion engine is now available for Delphi XE8 Firemonkey. One of the core functionalities that is useful to have when building a code editor or IDE is code completion. Code completion (otherwise known as Code Insight or Intellisense by Microsoft) is the popup hint window that comes up after you press. or ( when writing Object Pascal code. It gives you a list of properties, methods, or parameters that the current class or method supports. This makes it easier and faster to build software because the hints show you exactly what you can do while you are trying to do it. This code completion engine was built for me by a developer in Belarus via UpWork. It uses a number of third party libraries to make it happen including Delphi AST, JsonDataObjects, OXml, SvCollections.Tries, and TTMSFMXMemo. The TTMSFMXMemo component (part of a commercial library) provides the syntax highlighting and the hint window. Delphi AST provides the parsing of the Object Pascal files, OXml provides fast parsing of the syntax tree, JsonDataObjects provides a super fast JSON storage and retrieval mechanism, and SvCollections.Tries provides a object for fast lookups of the data. The engine should run on Android, IOS, OSX, and Windows. I have compiled it for all platforms but only tested it on OSX and Windows. You should also be able to use this engine in Appmethod. Full source code and a sample application demoing the engine are available via Github. Download the full Object Pascal code completion engine and sample project for Delphi XE8 Firemonkey.* Illustration: Jason Lee * We always knew Starbucks was a hangout for writers and dilettantes. For Wired contributing photographer Dan Winters, it's also an art supply shop: He used nearly 50 'Bucks cups and a crazy number of stirrers to build this, the coolest TIE Fighter ever. "The ribbing on the drink holders reminded me of solar panels," Winters says. "That instantly registered 'TIE fighter' in my head." Now we put the challenge to you: What can you make out of the free stuff from Starbucks? Coffee cups from drink purchases are OK, too — you might want to consider multiple stops or asking the manager to sell you a stash. Then build your dream. (Glue, tape, and string are allowed.) Upload a pic (with instructions on how to make it) on this How-To Wiki page. We'll feature our favorites in an online slideshow. May the Force (and the nondairy creamer) be with you. Play Previous: Bejeweled Creator Spills Secrets of Addictive Games Next: E.O. Wilson Returns to the Hive With Superorganism TomeWe're always being told that we need to use stronger passwords, but most of us tend to trade off security for real world convenience. Minneapolis-based Password Boss is hoping to convert people with the launch of its free password manager and digital wallet aimed at consumers. According to a Harris Interactive survey of 2,030 US adults conducted for Password Boss, 92 percent of consumers don’t use a password manager to store their passwords for online accounts. Instead 63 percent say they memorize them, while 43 percent say they write them down on paper. The survey also found that more than half of consumers (54 percent) agree that they need to change their online password habits. "Most people aren't motivated to change their poor password habits," says Password Boss founder and CEO Steve Wise. "Despite the fact that four of ten companies were hacked in 2014, most of us continue to use and reuse crackable passwords that are easy to remember, store passwords in unsafe places and rely too much on clicking 'forget password' links. As consumers, we want things to be easy. That’s why we created Password Boss. By securely storing personal information and synchronizing it across all devices, Password Boss is the easiest way for people to safely login to websites, access their accounts and shop online". Password Boss is the only free password manager that allows people to store an unlimited number of passwords, choose where their data is securely stored and share any item in their account with anyone they choose. It uses 256-bit AES encryption to protect data and synchronizes consumers’ accounts across all of their devices instantaneously for easy access to their passwords and personal data at any time and from anywhere. It also provides a personal security score with recommendations on how consumers can increase their level of online security. Password Boss is available free for download on Windows PCs and tablets, as well as iOS and Android mobile devices. There’s also a premium, paid version with extra features including features like online backups, 2-step verification and unlimited, secure password sharing. For more details visit the Password Boss website.Alamy Get our daily newsletter Upgrade your inbox and get our Daily Dispatch and Editor's Picks. ON A fine afternoon at the Texas State Fair, a ringmaster encouraged a gaggle of children to flap their arms like butterfly wings. “What could possibly go wrong on a day as beautiful as today?” he asked. But a hundred yards away, something had gone quite wrong. People were queuing for an unusual delicacy: balls of butter, dipped in dough and cooked in a vat of boiling oil. Fried butter, in other words. The balls were dusted with a thin coat of powdered sugar. When bitten, they collapsed with an unctuous squelch. Fairs are known for their decadent snack offerings. Most are unhealthy, and some push the conceptual boundaries of food into new territory. The Los Angeles County Fair, which ended on October 4th, featured a Meat Lovers' Ice Cream Cone (don't ask). The Minnesota State Fair is known for its foods-on-a-stick. The Texas fair bills itself as the fried food capital of the state. The claim is credible. Sprinkled between the pig races and carnival rides are vendors selling fried ribs, fried guacamole, fried ice cream and even fried bacon. Fried butter is a new development. At the beginning of the fair it won an award for creativity. The inventor, Abel Gonzales, won the same award in 2006 for a different recipe—fried Coke. Nutritionists would shudder at all the fat, sodium and trans-fats. Defenders say that the key is moderation. “If this is not your lifestyle, then it's OK to indulge once or twice a year,” says a spokeswoman for the fair. Opinions among fairgoers were divided. A woman selling toffee said that people had no business frying butter, with diabetes and high cholesterol as common as they are. She said she preferred to cook with olive oil. But a man eating a basket of fried butter with cherry jam was not too bothered. “It's just butter,” he maintained.Speech by Richard W. Fisher, President and CEO (2005–2015) Storms on the Horizon Remarks before the Commonwealth Club of California San Francisco, California Thank you, Bruce [Ericson]. I am honored to be here this evening and am grateful for the invitation to speak to the Commonwealth Club of California. Alan Greenspan and Paul Volcker, two of Ben Bernanke’s linear ancestors as chairmen of the Federal Reserve, have been in the news quite a bit lately. Yet, we rarely hear about William McChesney Martin, a magnificent public servant who was Fed chairman during five presidencies and to this day holds the record for the longest tenure: 19 years. Chairman Martin had a way with words. And he had a twinkle in his eye. It was Bill Martin who wisely and succinctly defined the Federal Reserve as having the unenviable task “to take away the punchbowl just as the party gets going.” He did himself one up when he received the Alfalfa Club’s nomination for the presidency of the United States. I suspect many here tonight have been to the annual Alfalfa dinner. It is one of the great institutions in Washington, D.C. Once a year, it holds a dinner devoted solely to poking fun at the political pretensions of the day. Tongue firmly in cheek, the club nominates a candidate to run for the presidency on the Alfalfa Party ticket. Of course, none of them ever win. Nominees are thenceforth known for evermore as members of the Stassen Society, named for Harold Stassen, who ran for president nine times and lost every time, then ran a tenth time on the Alfalfa ticket and lost again. The motto of the group is Veni, Vidi, Defici—“I came, I saw, I lost.” Bill Martin was nominated to run and lose on the Alfalfa Party ticket in 1966, while serving as Fed chairman during Lyndon Johnson’s term. In his acceptance speech,[1] he announced that, given his proclivities as a central banker, he would take his cues from the German philosopher Goethe, “who said that people could endure anything except continual prosperity.” Therefore, Martin declared, he would adopt a platform proclaiming that as a president he planned to “make life endurable again by stamping out prosperity.” “I shall conduct the administration of the country,” he said, “exactly as I have so successfully conducted the affairs of the Federal Reserve. To that end, I shall assemble the best brains that can be found…ask their advice on all matters…and completely confound them by following all their conflicting counsel.” It is true, Bruce, that as you said in your introduction, I am one of the 17 people who participate in Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) deliberations and provide Ben Bernanke with “conflicting counsel” as the committee cobbles together a monetary policy that seeks to promote America’s economic prosperity, Goethe to the contrary. But tonight I speak for neither the committee, nor the chairman, nor any of the other good people that serve the Federal Reserve System. I speak solely in my own capacity. I want to speak to you tonight about an economic problem that we must soon confront or else risk losing our primacy as the world’s most powerful and dynamic economy. Forty-three years ago this Sunday, Bill Martin delivered a commencement address to Columbia University that was far more sober than his Alfalfa Club speech. The opening lines of that Columbia address [2] were as follows: “When economic prospects are at their brightest, the dangers of complacency and recklessness are greatest. As our prosperity proceeds on its record-breaking path, it behooves every one of us to scan the horizon of our national and international economy for danger signals so as to be ready for any storm.” Today, our fellow citizens and financial markets are paying the price for falling victim to the complacency and recklessness Martin warned against. Few scanned the horizon for trouble brewing as we proceeded along a path of unparalleled prosperity fueled by an unsustainable housing bubble and unbridled credit markets. Armchair or Monday morning quarterbacks will long debate whether the Fed could have/should have/would have taken away the punchbowl that lubricated that blowout party. I have given my opinion on that matter elsewhere and won’t go near that subject tonight. What counts now is what we have done more recently and where we go from here. Whatever the sins of omission or commission committed by our predecessors, the Bernanke FOMC’s objective is to use a new set of tools to calm the tempest in the credit markets to get them back to functioning in a more orderly fashion. We trust that the various term credit facilities we have recently introduced are helping restore confidence while the credit markets undertake self-corrective initiatives and lawmakers consider new regulatory schemes. I am also not going to engage in a discussion of present monetary policy tonight, except to say that if inflationary developments and, more important, inflation expectations, continue to worsen, I would expect a change of course in monetary policy to occur sooner rather than later, even in the face of an anemic economic scenario. Inflation is the most insidious enemy of capitalism. No central banker can countenance it, not least the men and women of the Federal Reserve. Tonight, I want to talk about a different matter. In keeping with Bill Martin’s advice, I have been scanning the horizon for danger signals even as we continue working to recover from the recent turmoil. In the distance, I see a frightful storm brewing in the form of untethered government debt. I choose the words—“frightful storm”—deliberately to avoid hyperbole. Unless we take steps to deal with it, the long-term fiscal situation of the federal government will be unimaginably more devastating to our economic prosperity than the subprime debacle and the recent debauching of credit markets that we are now working so hard to correct. You might wonder why a central banker would be concerned with fiscal matters. Fiscal policy is, after all, the responsibility of the Congress, not the Federal Reserve. Congress, and Congress alone, has the power to tax and spend. From this monetary policymaker’s point of view, though, deficits matter for what we do at the Fed. There are many reasons why. Economists have found that structural deficits raise long-run interest rates, complicating the Fed’s dual mandate to develop a monetary policy that promotes sustainable, noninflationary growth. The even more disturbing dark and dirty secret about deficits—especially when they careen out of control—is that they create political pressure on central bankers to adopt looser monetary policy down the road. I will return to that shortly. First, let me give you the unvarnished facts of our nation’s fiscal predicament. Eight years ago, our federal budget, crafted by a Democratic president and enacted by a Republican Congress, produced a fiscal surplus of $236 billion, the first surplus in almost 40 years and the highest nominal-dollar surplus in American history. While the Fed is scrupulously nonpartisan and nonpolitical, I mention this to emphasize that the deficit/debt issue knows no party and can be solved only by both parties working together. For a brief time, with surpluses projected into the future as far as the eye could see, economists and policymakers alike began to contemplate a bucolic future in which interest payments would form an ever-declining share of federal outlays, a future where Treasury bonds and debt-ceiling legislation would become dusty relics of a long-forgotten past. The Fed even had concerns about how open market operations would be conducted in a marketplace short of Treasury debt. That utopian scenario did not last for long. Over the next seven years, federal spending grew at a 6.2 percent nominal annual rate while receipts grew at only 3.5 percent. Of course, certain areas of government, like national defense, had to spend more in the wake of 9/11. But nondefense discretionary spending actually rose 6.4 percent annually during this timeframe, outpacing the growth in total expenditures. Deficits soon returned, reaching an expected $410 billion for 2008—a $600 billion swing from where we were just eight years ago. This $410 billion estimate, by the way, was made before the recently passed farm bill and supplemental defense appropriation and without considering a proposed patch for the Alternative Minimum Tax—all measures that will lead to a further ballooning of government deficits. In keeping with the tradition of rosy scenarios, official budget projections suggest this deficit will be relatively short-lived. They almost always do. According to the official calculus, following a second $400-billion-plus deficit in 2009, the red ink should fall to $160 billion in 2010 and $95 billion in 2011, and then the budget swings to a $48 billion surplus in 2012. If you do the math, however, you might be forgiven for sensing that these felicitous projections look a tad dodgy. To reach the projected 2012 surplus, outlays are assumed to rise at a 2.4 percent nominal annual rate over the next four years—less than half as fast as they rose the previous seven years. Revenue is assumed to rise at a 6.7 percent nominal annual rate over the next four years—almost double the rate of the past seven years. Using spending and revenue growth rates that have actually prevailed in recent years, the 2012 surplus quickly evaporates and becomes a deficit, potentially of several hundred billion dollars. Doing deficit math is always a sobering exercise. It becomes an outright painful one when you apply your calculator to the long-run fiscal challenge posed by entitlement programs. Were I not a taciturn central banker, I would say the mathematics of the long-term outlook for entitlements, left unchanged, is nothing short of catastrophic. Typically, critics ranging from the Concord Coalition to Ross Perot begin by wringing their collective hands over the unfunded liabilities of Social Security. A little history gives you a view as to why. Franklin Roosevelt originally conceived a social security system in which individuals would fund their own retirements through payroll-tax contributions. But Congress quickly realized that such a system could not put much money into the pockets of indigent elderly citizens ravaged by the Great Depression. Instead, a pay-as-you-go funding system was embraced, making each generation’s retirement the responsibility of its children. Now, fast forward 70 or so years and ask this question: What is the mathematical predicament of Social Security today? Answer: The amount of money the Social Security system would need today to cover all unfunded liabilities from now on—what fiscal economists call the “infinite horizon discounted value” of what has already been promised recipients but has no funding mechanism currently in place—is $13.6 trillion, an amount slightly less than the annual gross domestic product of the United States. Demographics explain why this is so. Birthrates have fallen dramatically, reducing the worker–retiree ratio and leaving today’s workers pulling a bigger load than the system designers ever envisioned. Life spans have lengthened without a corresponding increase in the retirement age, leaving retirees in a position to receive benefits far longer than the system designers envisioned. Formulae for benefits and cost-of-living adjustments have also contributed to the growth in unfunded liabilities. The good news is this Social Security shortfall might be manageable. While the issues regarding Social Security reform are complex, it is at least possible to imagine how Congress might find, within a $14 trillion economy, ways to wrestle with a $13 trillion unfunded liability. The bad news is that Social Security is the lesser of our entitlement worries. It is but the tip of the unfunded liability iceberg. The much bigger concern is Medicare, a program established in 1965, the same prosperous year that Bill Martin cautioned his Columbia University audience to be wary of complacency and storms on the horizon. Medicare was a pay-as-you-go program from the very beginning, despite warnings from some congressional leaders—Wilbur Mills was the most credible of them before he succumbed to the pay-as-you-go wiles of Fanne Foxe, the Argentine Firecracker—who foresaw some of the long-term fiscal issues such a financing system could pose. Unfortunately, they were right. Please sit tight while I walk you through the math of Medicare. As you may know, the program comes in three parts: Medicare Part A, which covers hospital stays; Medicare B, which covers doctor visits; and Medicare D, the drug benefit that went into effect just 29 months ago. The infinite-horizon present discounted value of the unfunded liability for Medicare A is $34.4 trillion. The unfunded liability of Medicare B is an additional $34 trillion. The shortfall for Medicare D adds another $17.2 trillion. The total? If you wanted to cover the unfunded liability of all three programs today, you would be stuck with an $85.6 trillion bill. That is more than six times as large as the bill for Social Security. It is more than six times the annual output of the entire U.S. economy. Why is the Medicare figure so large? There is a mix of reasons, really. In part, it is due to the same birthrate and life-expectancy issues that affect Social Security. In part, it is due to ever-costlier advances in medical technology and the willingness of Medicare to pay for them. And in part, it is due to expanded benefits—the new drug benefit program’s unfunded liability is by itself one-third greater than all of Social Security’s. Add together the unfunded liabilities from Medicare and Social Security, and it comes to $99.2 trillion over the infinite horizon. Traditional Medicare composes about 69 percent, the new drug benefit roughly 17 percent and Social Security the remaining 14 percent. I want to remind you that I am only talking about the unfunded portions of Social Security and Medicare. It is what the current payment scheme of Social Security payroll taxes, Medicare payroll taxes, membership fees for Medicare B, copays, deductibles and all other revenue currently channeled to our entitlement system will not cover under current rules. These existing revenue streams must remain in place in perpetuity to handle the “funded” entitlement liabilities. Reduce or eliminate this income and the unfunded liability grows. Increase benefits and the liability grows as well. Let’s say you and I and Bruce Ericson and every U.S. citizen who is alive today decided to fully address this unfunded liability through lump-sum payments from our own pocketbooks, so that all of us and all future generations could be secure in the knowledge that we and they would receive promised benefits in perpetuity. How much would we have to pay if we split the tab? Again, the math is painful. With a total population of 304 million, from infants to the elderly, the per-person payment to the federal treasury would come to $330,000. This comes to $1.3 million per family of four—over 25 times the average household’s income. Clearly, once-and-for-all contributions would be an unbearable burden. Alternatively, we could address the entitlement shortfall through policy changes that would affect ourselves and future generations. For example, a permanent 68 percent increase in federal income tax revenue—from individual and corporate taxpayers—would suffice to fully fund our entitlement programs. Or we could instead divert 68 percent of current income-tax revenues from their intended uses to the entitlement system, which would accomplish the same thing. Suppose we decided to tackle the issue solely on the spending side. It turns out that total discretionary spending in the federal budget, if maintained at its current share of GDP in perpetuity, is 3 percent larger than the entitlement shortfall. So all we would have to do to fully fund our nation’s entitlement programs would be to cut discretionary spending by 97 percent. But hold on. That discretionary spending includes defense and national security, education, the environment and many other areas, not just those controversial earmarks that make the evening news. All of them would have to be cut—almost eliminated, really—to tackle this problem through discretionary spending. I hope that gives you some idea of just how large the problem is. And just to drive an important point home, these spending cuts or tax increases would need to be made immediately and maintained in perpetuity to solve the entitlement deficit problem. Discretionary spending would have to be reduced by 97 percent not only for our generation, but for our children and their children and every generation of children to come. And similarly on the taxation side, income tax revenue would have to rise 68 percent and remain that high forever. Remember, though, I said tax revenue, not tax rates. Who knows how much individual and corporate tax rates would have to change to increase revenue by 68 percent? If these possible solutions to the unfunded-liability problem seem draconian, it’s because they are draconian. But they do serve to give you a sense of the severity of the problem. To be sure, there are ways to lessen the reliance on any single policy and the burden borne by any particular set of citizens. Most proposals to address long-term entitlement debt, for example, rely on a combination of tax increases, benefit reductions and eligibility changes to find the trillions necessary to safeguard the system over the long term. No combination of tax hikes and spending cuts, though, will change the total burden borne by current and future generations. For the existing unfunded liabilities to be covered in the end, someone must pay $99.2 trillion more or receive $99.2 trillion less than they have been currently promised. This is a cold, hard fact. The decision we must make is whether to shoulder a substantial portion of that burden today or compel future generations to bear its full weight. Now that you are all thoroughly depressed, let me come back to monetary policy and the Fed. It is only natural to cast about for a solution—any solution—to avoid the fiscal pain we know is necessary because we succumbed to complacency and put off dealing with this looming fiscal disaster. Throughout history, many nations, when confronted by sizable debts they were unable or unwilling to repay, have seized upon an apparently painless solution to this dilemma: monetization. Just have the monetary authority run cash off the printing presses until the debt is repaid, the story goes, then promise to be responsible from that point on and hope your sins will be forgiven by God and Milton Friedman and everyone else. We know from centuries of evidence in countless economies, from ancient Rome to today’s Zimbabwe, that running the printing press to pay off today’s bills leads to much worse problems later on. The inflation that results from the flood of money into the economy turns out to be far worse than the fiscal pain those countries hoped to avoid. Earlier I mentioned the Fed’s dual mandate to manage growth and inflation. In the long run, growth cannot be sustained if markets are undermined by inflation. Stable prices go hand in hand with achieving sustainable economic growth. I have said many, many times that inflation is a sinister beast that, if uncaged, devours savings, erodes consumers’ purchasing power, decimates returns on capital, undermines the reliability of financial accounting, distracts the attention of corporate management, undercuts employment growth and real wages, and debases the currency. Purging rampant inflation and a debased currency requires administering a harsh medicine. We have been there, and we know the cure that was wrought by the FOMC under Paul Volcker. Even the perception that the Fed is pursuing a cheap-money strategy to accommodate fiscal burdens, should it take root, is a paramount risk to the long-term welfare of the U.S. economy. The Federal Reserve will never let this happen. It is not an option. Ever. Period. The way we resolve these liabilities—and resolve them we must—will affect our own well-being as well as the prospects of future generations and the global economy. Failing to face up to our responsibility will produce the mother of all financial storms. The warning signals have been flashing for years, but we find it easier to ignore them than to take action. Will we take the painful fiscal steps necessary to prevent the storm by reducing and eventually eliminating our fiscal imbalances? That depends on you. I mean “you” literally. This situation is of your own creation. When you berate your representatives or senators or presidents for the mess we are in, you are really berating yourself. You elect them. You are the ones who let them get away with burdening your children and grandchildren rather than yourselves with the bill for your entitlement programs. This issue transcends political affiliation. When George Shultz, one of San Francisco’s greatest Republican public servants, was director of President Nixon’s Office of Management and Budget, he became worried about the amount of money Congress was proposing to spend. After some nights of tossing and turning, he called legendary staffer Sam Cohen into his office. Cohen had a long memory of budget matters and knew every zig and zag of budget history. “Sam,” Shultz asked, “tell me something just between you and me. Is there any difference between Republicans and Democrats when it comes to spending money?” Cohen looked at him, furrowed his brow and, after thinking about it, replied, “Mr. Shultz, there is only one difference: Democrats enjoy it more.” Yet no one, Democrat or Republican, enjoys placing our children and grandchildren and their children and grandchildren in harm’s way. No one wants to see the frightful storm of unfunded long-term liabilities destroy our economy or threaten the independence and authority of our central bank or tear our currency asunder. Of late, we have heard many complaints about the weakness of the dollar against the euro and other currencies. It was recently argued in the op-ed pages of the Financial Times [3] that one reason for the demise of the British pound was the need to liquidate England’s international reserves to pay off the costs of the Great Wars. In the end, the pound, it was essentially argued, was sunk by the kaiser’s army and Hitler’s bombs. Right now, we—you and I—are launching fiscal bombs against ourselves. You have it in your power as the electors of our fiscal authorities to prevent this destruction. Please do so. NotesMedicines authorities focus on any possible impact on patients The European Medicines Agency is working with national medicines agencies to investigate deficiencies in the medicine-safety reporting system of Roche. This includes looking at whether the deficiencies have an impact on the overall benefit-risk profile for any of the products involved. There is at present no evidence of a negative impact for patients and while the investigations are being conducted, there is no need for patients or healthcare professionals to take any action. The deficiencies are identified in a May 2012 report from the United Kingdom's medicines regulatory agency (Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency, MHRA) following an inspection at Roche. This was part of a coordinated European programme of routine inspection of safety-reporting systems. At the time of the inspection, the company identified some 80,000 reports for medicines marketed by Roche in the United States that had been collected through a Roche-sponsored patient support programme, but which had not been evaluated to determine whether or not they should be reported as suspected adverse reactions to the European Union (EU) authorities. These included 15,161 reports of death of patients. it is not known whether the deaths were due to natural progression of the disease or had a causal link to the medicine. More recent information from the company indicates a smaller number of reports, but this information needs to be verified by the authorities. It remains unclear whether any of the reports have already been submitted to the EU authorities through other channels, for example by the treating healthcare professionals. Other deficiencies identified related to the evaluation and reporting to national medicines agencies of suspected adverse reactions from their reporting systems (around 23,000) and clinical trials (around 600). The Agency's Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use (CHMP), CHMP Pharmacovigilance Working Party and the Coordination Group for Mutual Recognition and Decentralised Procedures - Human (CMDh) discussed the issues arising from the inspection at their meetings in May and June 2012. Specific actions include: Roche to ensure that all known reportable events are immediately reported to the appropriate EU authorities in accordance with their existing legal obligations. The company must confirm to the Agency that this has been done, both for products in clinical trials and for marketed products; Roche to submit a revised comprehensive action plan by 27 June 2012 for the evaluation and reporting of all outstanding cases and plans for corrective measures to ensure the correct processing of reports on suspected adverse drug reactions in the future. This includes evaluation of each of the 80,000-plus reports received by the patient support programme in the United States and appropriate follow-up. The Agency continues to work closely with the national medicines agencies and the United States Food and Drug Administration and other international partners to assess the overall public health impact of the findings, including any consequences for the overall benefit-risk balance of the concerned medicines. Updates will be made on the the Agency's website as appropriate. NoteSome investors flew in from faraway cities to join hundreds more surrounding a luxury hotel in Shanghai before dawn on Saturday. When Fanya founder Shan Jiuliang attempted to check out, they manhandled him into a car before delivering him to the nearest police station. Shanghai police took Mr Shan into custody and promised to work with local authorities in Yunnan province to investigate what has happened to investors' money. They later released him without charge. The demonstrations in Shanghai and Kunming and the exchange's unusual accumulation of several years' supply of some metals have so far failed to attract much public attention from regulators. A report by the local regulator identifying the exchange as one of the bigger investment risks in Yunnan was redacted to remove reference to Fanya late last year. More from the Financial Times: China's 'little tigers' present political challenge China hardly the ideal model for market behaviour China: unfavoured nation The exchange began to experience liquidity problems this spring. Fanya is estimated to hold several years' supply of minor metals used in some high-tech and military applications, which it purchased at above-market prices. The exchange's travails are pressuring prices for some of these metals, as traders anticipate it will have to sell its stockpile. The exchange, which has acknowledged it has problems, is backed by several of China's minor metals miners. It has said it has found a buyer but won't identify the company. Mr Shan "was deceiving us. He admitted to us that there is no buyout group," said one disgruntled investor surnamed Gu, who participated in the rainy early morning raid. Mr Shan has been holding regular meetings with exchange backers since problems first surfaced this spring and was on the way to Guangzhou for a business trip when captured. Among other businesses he heads the Hong Kong-listed animation studio Imagi International Holdings. He formerly led the Bohai Commodity Exchange, which traded iron ore among other products. Read MoreChina OKs pension funds to pour $97B into market Fanya denounced the weekend's raid. "Violent acts against president Shan and our employees or the disturbance of our work are destructive of our work around solving the crisis. This
a German seriously wish to make himself an orator, or to enter a "school for authors," he will find neither master nor school: no one yet seems to have thought that speaking and writing are arts which cannot be learnt without the most careful method and untiring application. But, to their shame, nothing shows more clearly the insolent self-satisfaction of our people than the lack of demand for educators; it comes partly from meanness, partly from want of thought. Anything will do as a so-called "family tutor," even among our most eminent and cultured people: and what a menagerie of crazy heads and mouldy devices mostly go to make up the belauded Gymnasium! And consider what we are satisfied with in our finishing schools,—our universities. Look at our professors and their institutions! And compare the difficulty of the task of educating a man to be a man! Above all, the wonderful way in which the German savants fall to their dish of knowledge, shows that they are thinking more of Science than mankind; and they are trained to lead a forlorn hope in her service, in order to encourage ever new generations to the same sacrifice. If their traffic with knowledge be not limited and controlled by any more general principles of education, but allowed to run on indefinitely,—"the more the better,"—it is as harmful to learning as the economic theory of laisser faire to common morality. No one recognises now that the education of the professors is an exceedingly difficult problem, if their humanity is not to be sacrificed or shrivelled up:—this difficulty can be actually seen in countless examples of natures warped and twisted by their reckless and premature devotion to science. There is a still more important testimony to the complete absence of higher education, pointing to a greater and more universal danger. It is clear at once why an orator or writer cannot now be educated,—because there are no teachers; and why a savant must be a distorted and perverted thing,—because he will have been trained by the inhuman abstraction, science. This being so, let a man ask himself: "Where are now the types of moral excellence and fame for all our generation—learned and unlearned, high and low—the visible abstract of constructive ethics for this age? Where has vanished all the reflection on moral questions that has occupied every great developed society at all epochs?" There is no fame for that now, and there are none to reflect: we are really drawing on the inherited moral capital which our predecessors accumulated for us, and which we do not know how to increase, but only to squander. Such things are either not mentioned in our society, or, if at all, with a naive want of personal experience that makes one disgusted. It comes to this, that our schools and professors simply turn aside from any moral instruction or content themselves with formulae; virtue is a word and nothing more, on both sides, an old-fashioned word that they laugh at—and it is worse when they do not laugh, for then they are hypocrites. An explanation of this faint-heartedness and ebbing of all moral strength would be difficult and complex: but whoever is considering the influence of Christianity in its hour of victory on the morality of the mediaeval world, must not forget that it reacts also in its defeat, which is apparently its position to-day. By its lofty ideal, Christianity has outbidden the ancient Systems of Ethics and their invariable naturalism, with which men came to feel a dull disgust: and afterwards when they did reach the knowledge of what was better and higher, they found they had no longer the power, for all their desire, to return to its embodiment in the antique virtues. And so the life of the modern man is passed in see-sawing between Christianity and Paganism, between a furtive or hypocritical approach to Christian morality, and an equally shy and spiritless dallying with the antique: and he does not thrive under it. His inherited fear of naturalism, and its more recent attraction for him, his desire to come to rest somewhere, while in the impotence of his intellect he swings backwards and forwards between the "good" and the "better" course—all this argues an instability in the modern mind that condemns it to be without joy or fruit. Never were moral teachers more necessary and never were they more unlikely to be found: physicians are most in danger themselves in times when they are most needed and many men are sick. For where are our modern physicians who are strong and sure-footed enough to hold up another or lead him by the hand? There lies a certain heavy gloom on the best men of our time, an eternal loathing for the battle that is fought in their hearts between honesty and lies, a wavering of trust in themselves, which makes them quite incapable of showing to others the way they must go. So I was right in speaking of my "wandering in a world of wishes" when I dreamt of finding a true philosopher who could lift me from the slough of insufficiency, and teach me again simply and honestly—to be in my thoughts and life, in the deepest sense of the word, "out of season"; simply and honestly for men have now become such complicated machines that they must be dishonest, if they speak at all, or wish to act on their words. With such needs and desires within me did I come to know Schopenhauer. I belong to those readers of Schopenhauer who know perfectly well, after they have turned the first page, that they will read all the others, and listen to every word that he has spoken. My trust in him sprang to life at once, and has been the same for nine years. I understood him as though he had written for me (this is the most intelligible, though a rather foolish and conceited way of expressing it). Hence I never found a paradox in him, though occasionally some small errors: for paradoxes are only assertions that carry no conviction, because the author has made them himself without any conviction, wishing to appear brilliant, or to mislead, or, above all, to pose. Schopenhauer never poses: he writes for himself, and no one likes to be deceived—least of all a philosopher who has set this up as his law: "deceive nobody, not even thyself," neither with the "white lies" of all social intercourse, which writers almost unconsciously imitate, still less with the more conscious deceits of the platform, and the artificial methods of rhetoric. Schopenhauer's speeches are to himself alone; or if you like to imagine an auditor, let it be a son whom the father is instructing. It is a rough, honest, good-humoured talk to one who "hears and loves." Such writers are rare. His strength and sanity surround us at the first sound of his voice: it is like entering the heights of the forest, where we breathe deep and are well again. We feel a bracing air everywhere, a certain candour and naturalness of his own, that belongs to men who are at home with themselves, and masters of a very rich home indeed: he is quite different from the writers who are surprised at themselves if they have said something intelligent, and whose pronouncements for that reason have something nervous and unnatural about them. We are just as little reminded in Schopenhauer of the professor with his stiff joints worse for want of exercise, his narrow chest and scraggy figure, his slinking or strutting gait. And again his rough and rather grim soul leads us not so much to miss as to despise the suppleness and courtly grace of the excellent Frenchmen; and no one will find in him the gilded imitations of pseudo-gallicism that our German writers prize so highly. His style in places reminds me a little of Goethe, but is not otherwise on any German model. For he knows how to be profound with simplicity, striking without rhetoric, and severely logical without pedantry: and of what German could he have learnt that? He also keeps free from the hair-splitting, jerky and (with all respect) rather un-German manner of Lessing: no small merit in him, for Lessing is the most tempting of all models for prose style. The highest praise I can give his manner of presentation is to apply his own phrase to himself:—"A philosopher must be very honest to avail himself of no aid from poetry or rhetoric." That honesty is something, and even a virtue, is one of those private opinions which are forbidden in this age of public opinion; and so I shall not be praising Schopenhauer, but only giving him a distinguishing mark, when I repeat that he is honest, even as a writer: so few of them are that we are apt to mistrust every one who writes at all. I only know a single author that I can rank with Schopenhauer, or even above him, in the matter of honesty; and that is Montaigne. The joy of living on this earth is increased by the existence of such a man. The effect on myself, at any rate, since my first acquaintance with that strong and masterful spirit, has been, that I can say of him as he of Plutarch—"As soon as I open him, I seem to grow a pair of wings." If I had the task of making myself at home on the earth, I would choose him as my companion. Schopenhauer has a second characteristic in common with Montaigne, besides honesty; a joy that really makes others joyful. "Aliis laetus, sibi sapiens." There are two very different kinds of joyfulness. The true thinker always communicates joy and life, whether he is showing his serious or comic side, his human insight or his godlike forbearance: without surly looks or trembling hands or watery eyes, but simply and truly, with fearlessness and strength, a little cavalierly perhaps, and sternly, but always as a conqueror: and it is this that brings the deepest and intensest joy, to see the conquering god with all the monsters that he has fought. But the joyfulness one finds here and there in the mediocre writers and limited thinkers makes some of us miserable; I felt this, for example, with the "joyfulness" of David Strauss. We are generally ashamed of such a quality in our contemporaries, because they show the nakedness of our time, and of the men in it, to posterity. Such fils de joie do not see the sufferings and the monsters, that they pretend, as philosophers, to see and fight; and so their joy deceives us, and we hate it; it tempts to the false belief that they have gained some victory. At bottom there is only joy where there is victory: and this applies to true philosophy as much as to any work of art. The contents may be forbidding and serious, as the problem of existence always is; the work will only prove tiresome and oppressive, if the slipshod thinker and the dilettante have spread the mist of their insufficiency over it: while nothing happier or better can come to man's lot than to be near one of those conquering spirits whose profound thought has made them love what is most vital, and whose wisdom has found its goal in beauty. They really speak: they are no stammerers or babblers; they live and move, and have no part in the danse macabre of the rest of humanity. And so in their company one feels a natural man again, and could cry out with Goethe—"What a wondrous and priceless thing is a living creature! How fitted to his surroundings, how true, and real!" I have been describing nothing but the first, almost physiological, impression made upon me by Schopenhauer, the magical emanation of inner force from one plant of Nature to another, that follows the slightest contact. Analysing it, I find that this influence of Schopenhauer has three elements, his honesty, his joy, and his consistency. He is honest, as speaking and writing for himself alone; joyful, because his thought has conquered the greatest difficulties; consistent, because he cannot help being so. His strength rises like a flame in the calm air, straight up, without a tremor or deviation. He finds his way, without our noticing that he has been seeking it: so surely and cleverly and inevitably does he run his course, as if by some law of gravitation. If any one have felt what it means to find, in our present world of Centaurs and Chimaeras, a single-hearted and unaffected child of nature who moves unconstrained on his own road, he will understand my joy and surprise in discovering Schopenhauer: I knew in him the educator and philosopher I had so long desired. Only, however, in his writings: which was a great loss. All the more did I exert myself to see behind the book the living man whose testament it was, and who promised his inheritance to such as could, and would, be more than his readers—his pupils and his sons. 3 [ edit ] I get profit from a philosopher, just so far as he can be an example to me. There is no doubt that a man can draw whole nations after him by his example; as is shown by Indian history, which is practically the history of Indian philosophy. But this example must exist in his outward life, not merely in his books ; it must follow the way of the Grecian philosophers, whose doctrine was in their dress and bearing and general manner of life rather than in their speech or writing. We have nothing yet of this "breathing testimony" in German philosophical life; the spirit has, apparently, long completed its emancipation, while the flesh has hardly begun; yet it is foolish to think that the spirit can be really free and independent when this victory over limitation—which is ultimately a formative limiting of one's self—is not embodied anew in every look and movement. Kant held to his university, submitted to its regulations, and belonged, as his colleagues and students thought, to a definite religious faith: and naturally his example has produced, above all, University professors of philosophy. Schopenhauer makes small account of the learned tribe, keeps himself exclusive, and cultivates an independence from state and society as his ideal, to escape the chains of circumstance here : that is his value to us. Many steps in the enfranchisement of the philosopher are unknown in Germany; they cannot always remain so. Our artists live more bravely and honourably than our philosophers; and Richard Wagner, the best example of all, shows how genius need not fear a fight to the death with the established forms and ordinances, if we wish to bring the higher truth and order, that lives in him, to the light. The "truth," however, of which we hear so much from our professors, seems to be a far more modest being, and no kind of disturbance is to be feared from her; she is an easy-going and pleasant creature, who is continually assuring the powers that be that no one need fear any trouble from her quarter: for man is only "pure reason." And therefore I will say, that philosophy in Germany has more and more to learn not to be "pure reason": and it may well take as its model "Schopenhauer the man." It is no less than a marvel that he should have come to be this human kind of example: for he was beset, within and without, by the most frightful dangers, that would have crushed and broken a weaker nature. I think there was a strong likelihood of Schopenhauer the man going under, and leaving at best a residue of "pure reason": and only "at best"—it was more probable that neither man nor reason would survive. A modern Englishman sketches the most usual danger to extraordinary men who live in a society that worships the ordinary, in this manner:—"Such uncommon characters are first cowed, then become sick and melancholy, and then die. A Shelley could never have lived in England: a race of Shelleys would have been impossible." Our Hölderlins and Kleists were undone by their unconventionality, and were not strong enough for the climate of the so-called German culture; and only iron natures like Beethoven, Goethe, Schopenhauer and Wagner could hold out against it. Even in them the effect of this weary toiling and moiling is seen in many lines and wrinkles; their breathing is harder and their voice is forced. The old diplomatist who had only just seen and spoken to Goethe, said to a friend—"Voilà un homme qui a eu de grands chagrins!" which Goethe translated to mean "That is a man who has taken great pains in his life." And he adds, "If the trace of the sorrow and activity we have gone through cannot be wiped from our features, it is no wonder that all that survives of us and our struggles should bear the same impress." And this is the Goethe to whom our cultured Philistines point as the happiest of Germans, that they may prove their thesis, that it must be possible to be happy among them—with the unexpressed corollary that no one can be pardoned for feeling unhappy and lonely among them. Hence they push their doctrine, in practice, to its merciless conclusion, that there is always a secret guilt in isolation. Poor Schopenhauer had this secret guilt too in his heart, the guilt of cherishing his philosophy more than his fellow-men; and he was so unhappy as to have learnt from Goethe that he must defend his philosophy at all costs from the neglect of his contemporaries, to save its very existence: for there is a kind of Grand Inquisitor's Censure in which the Germans, according to Goethe, are great adepts: it is called—inviolable silence. This much at least was accomplished by it; the greater part of the first edition of Schopenhauer's masterpiece had to be turned into waste paper. The imminent risk that his great work would be undone, merely by neglect, bred in him a state of unrest—perilous and uncontrollable;—for no single adherent of any note presented himself. It is tragic to watch his search for any evidence of recognition: and his piercing cry of triumph at last, that he would now really be read (legor et legar), touches us with a thrill of pain. All the traits in which we do not see the great philosopher show us the suffering man, anxious for his noblest possessions; he was tortured by the fear of losing his little property, and perhaps of no longer being able to maintain in its purity his truly antique attitude towards philosophy. He often chose falsely in his desire to find real trust and compassion in men, only to return with a heavy heart to his faithful dog again. He was absolutely alone, with no single friend of his own kind to comfort him; and between one and none there lies an infinity—as ever between something and nothing. No one who has true friends knows what real loneliness means, though he may have the whole world in antagonism round him. Ah, I see well ye do not know what isolation is! Whenever there are great societies with governments and religions and public opinions where there is a tyranny, in short, there will the lonely philosopher be hated: for philosophy offers an asylum to mankind where no tyranny can penetrate, the inner sanctuary, the centre of the heart's labyrinth: and the tyrants are galled at it. Here do the lonely men lie hid: but here too lurks their greatest danger. These men who have saved their inner freedom, must also live and be seen in the outer world: they stand in countless human relations by their birth, position, education and country, their own circumstances and the importunity of others: and so they are presumed to hold an immense number of opinions, simply because these happen to prevail: every look that is not a denial counts as an assent, every motion of the hand that does not destroy is regarded as an aid. These free and lonely men know that they perpetually seem other than they are. While they wish for nothing but truth and honesty, they are in a net of misunderstanding; and that ardent desire cannot prevent a mist of false opinions, of adaptations and wrong conclusions, of partial misapprehension and intentional reticence, from gathering round their actions, And there settles a cloud of melancholy on their brows : for such natures hate the necessity of pretence worse than death : and the continual bitterness gives them a threatening and volcanic character. They take revenge from time to time for their forced concealment and self-restraint: they issue from their dens with lowering looks: their words and deeds are explosive, and may lead to their own destruction. Schopenhauer lived amid dangers of this sort. Such lonely men need love, and friends, to whom they can be as open and sincere as to themselves, and in whose presence the deadening silence and hypocrisy may cease. Take their friends away, and there is left an increasing peril; Heinrich von Kleist was broken by the lack of love, and the most terrible weapon against unusual men is to drive them into themselves; and then their issuing forth again is a volcanic eruption. Yet there are always some demi-gods who can bear life under these fearful conditions and can be their conquerors: and if you would hear their lonely chant, listen to the music of Beethoven. So the first danger in whose shadow Schopenhauer lived was—isolation. The second is called—doubting of the truth. To this every thinker is liable who sets out from the philosophy of Kant, provided he be strong and sincere in his sorrows and his desires, and not a mere tinkling thought-box or calculating machine. We all know the shameful state of things implied by this last reservation, and I believe it is only a very few men that Kant has so vitally affected as to change the current of their blood. To judge from what one reads, there must have been a revolution in every domain of thought since the work of this unobtrusive professor: I cannot believe it myself. For I see men, though darkly, as themselves needing to be revolutionised, before any "domains of thought" can be so. In fact, we find the first mark of any influence Kant may have had on the popular mind, in a corrosive scepticism and relativity. But it is only in noble and active spirits who could never rest in doubt that the shattering despair of truth itself could take the place of doubt. This was, for example, the effect of the Kantian philosophy on Heinrich von Kleist. "It was only a short time ago," he writes in his poignant way, "that I became acquainted with the Kantian philosophy; and I will tell you my thought, though I cannot fear that it will rack you to your inmost soul, as it did me.—We cannot decide, whether what we call truth is really truth, or whether it only seems so to us. If the latter, the truth that we amass here does not exist after death, and all our struggle to gain a possession that may follow us even to the grave is in vain. If the blade of this thought do not cut your heart, yet laugh not at another who feels himself wounded by it in his Holy of Holies. My one highest aim has vanished, and I have no more." Yes, when will men feel again deeply as Kleist did, and learn to measure a philosophy by what it means to the "Holy of Holies"? And yet we must make this estimate of what Schopenhauer can mean to us, after Kant, as the first pioneer to bring us from the heights of sceptical disillusionment or "critical" renunciation, to the greater height of tragic contemplation, the nocturnal heaven with its endless crown of stars. His greatness is that he can stand opposite the picture of life, and interpret it to us as a whole: while all the clever people cannot escape the error of thinking one comes nearer to the interpretation by a laborious analysis of the colours and material of the picture ; with the confession, probably, that the texture of the canvas is very complicated, and the chemical composition of the colours undiscoverable. Schopenhauer knew that one must guess the painter in order to understand the picture. But now the whole learned fraternity is engaged on understanding the colours and canvas, and not the picture: and only he who has kept the universal panorama of life and being firmly before his eyes, will use the individual sciences without harm to himself; for, without this general view as a norm, they are threads that lead nowhere and only confuse still more the maze of our existence. Here we see, as I said, the greatness of Schopenhauer, that he follows up every idea, as Hamlet follows the Ghost, without allowing himself to turn aside for a learned digression, or be drawn away by the scholastic abstractions of a rabid dialectic. The study of the minute philosophers is only interesting for the recognition that they have reached those stages in the great edifice of philosophy where learned disquisitions for and against, where hair-splitting objections and counter-objections are the rule: and for that reason they evade the demand of every great philosophy to speak sub specie aeternitatis—"this is the picture of the whole of life: learn thence the meaning of thine own life." And the converse: "read thine own life, and understand thence the hieroglyphs of the universal life." In this way must Schopenhauer's philosophy always be interpreted ; as an individualist philosophy, starting from the single man, in his own nature, to gain an insight into his personal miseries, and needs, and limitations, and find out the remedies that will console them: namely, the sacrifice of the ego, and its submission to the nobler ends, especially those of justice and mercy. He teaches us to distinguish between the true and the apparent furtherance of man's happiness: how neither the attainment of riches, nor honour, nor learning, can raise the individual from his deep despair at his unworthiness; and how the quest for these good things can only have meaning through a universal end that transcends and explains them;—the gaining of power to aid our physical nature by them and, as far as may be, correct its folly and awkwardness. For one's self only, in the first instance: and finally, through one's self, for all. It is a task that leads to scepticism: for there is so much to be made better yet, in one and all! Applying this to Schopenhauer himself, we come to the third and most intimate danger in which he lived, and which lay deep in the marrow of his being. Every one is apt to discover a limitation in himself, in his gifts of intellect as well as his moral will, that fills him with yearning and melancholy; and as he strives after holiness through a consciousness of sin, so, as an intellectual being, he has a deep longing after the "genius" in himself. This is the root of all true culture; and if we say this means the aspiration of man to be "born again" as saint and genius, I know that one need not be a Buddhist to understand the myth. We feel a strong loathing when we find talent without such aspiration, in the circle of the learned, or among the so-called educated; for we see that such men, with all their cleverness, are no aid but a hindrance to the beginnings of culture and the blossoming of genius, the aim of all culture. There is a rigidity in them, parallel to the cold arrogance of conventional virtue, which also remains at the opposite pole to true holiness. Schopenhauer's nature contained an extraordinarily dangerous dualism. Few thinkers have felt as he did the complete and unmistakable certainty of genius within them; and his genius made him the highest of all promises,—that there could be no deeper furrow than that which he was ploughing in the ground of the modern world. He knew one half of his being to be fulfilled according to its strength, with no other need; and he followed with greatness and dignity his vocation of consolidating his victory. In the other half there was a gnawing aspiration, which we can understand, when we hear that he turned away with a sad look from the picture of Rancé, the founder of the Trappists, with the words: "That is a matter of grace." For genius evermore yearns after holiness as it sees further and more clearly from its watch-tower than other men, deep into the reconciliation of Thought and Being, the kingdom of peace and the denial of the will, and up to that other shore, of which the Indians speak. The wonder is, that Schopenhauer's nature should have been so inconceivably stable and unshakable that it could neither be destroyed nor petrified by this yearning. Every one will understand this after the measure of his own character and greatness: none of us will understand it in the fulness of its meaning. The more one considers these three dangers, the more extraordinary will appear his vigour in opposing them and his safety after the battle. True, he gained many scars and open wounds: and a cast of mind that may seem somewhat too bitter and pugnacious. But his single ideal transcends the highest humanity in him. Schopenhauer stands as a pattern to men, in spite of all those scars and scratches. We may even say, that what was imperfect and "all too human" in him, brings us nearer to him as a man, for we see a sufferer and a kinsman to suffering, not merely a dweller on the unattainable heights of genius. These three constitutional dangers that threatened Schopenhauer, threaten us all. Each one of us bears a creative solitude within himself, and his consciousness of it forms an exotic aura of strangeness round him. Most men cannot endure it, because they are slothful, as I said, and because their solitude hangs round them a chain of troubles and burdens. No doubt, for the man with this heavy chain, life loses almost everything that one desires from it in youth—joy, safety, honour: his fellow-men pay him his due of—isolation! The wilderness and the cave are about him, wherever he may live. He must look to it that he be not enslaved and oppressed, and become melancholy thereby. And let him surround himself with the pictures of good and brave fighters such as Schopenhauer. The second danger, too, is not rare. Here and there we find one dowered by nature with a keen vision ; his thoughts dance gladly in the witches' Sabbath of dialectic; and if he uncautiously give his talent the rein, it is easy to lose all humanity and live a ghostly life in the realm of "pure reason": or through the constant search for the "pros and cons" of things, he may go astray from the truth and live without courage or confidence, in doubt, denial and discontent, and the slender hope that waits on disillusion: "No dog could live long thus!" The third danger is a moral or intellectual hardening: man breaks the bond that united him to his ideal: he ceases to be fruitful and reproduce himself in this or that province, and becomes an enemy or a parasite of culture. The solitude of his being has become an indivisible, unrelated atom, an icy stone. And one can perish of this solitude as well as of the fear of it, of one's self as well as one's self-sacrifice, of both aspiration and petrifaction: and to live is ever to be in danger. Beside these dangers to which Schopenhauer would have been constitutionally liable, in whatever century he had lived, there were also some produced by his own time; and it is essential to distinguish between these two kinds, in order to grasp the typical and formative elements in his nature. The philosopher casts his eye over existence, and wishes to give it a new standard value; for it has been the peculiar task of all great thinkers to be law-givers for the weight and stamp in the mint of reality. And his task will be hindered if the men he sees near him be a weakly and worm-eaten growth. To be correct in his calculation of existence, the unworthiness of the present time must be a very small item in the addition. The study of ancient or foreign history is valuable, if at all, for a correct judgment on the whole destiny of man; which must be drawn not only from an average estimate but from a comparison of the highest destinies that can befall individuals or nations. The present is too much with us; it directs the vision even against the philosopher's will: and it will inevitably be reckoned too high in the final sum. And so he must put a low figure on his own time as against others, and suppress the present in his picture of life, as well as in himself; must put it into the background or paint it over; a difficult, and almost impossible task. The judgment of the ancient Greek philosophers on the value of existence means so much more than our own, because they had the full bloom of life itself before them, and their vision was untroubled by any felt dualism between their wish for freedom and beauty on the grand scale, and their search after truth, with its single question "What is the real worth of life? "Empedocles lived when Greek culture was full to overflowing with the joy of life, and all ages may take profit from his words; especially as no other great philosopher of that great time ventured to contradict them. Empedocles is only the clearest voice among them—they all say the same thing, if a man will but open his ears. A modern thinker is always in the throes of an unfulfilled desire; he is looking for life,—warm, red life,—that he may pass judgment on it: at any rate he will think it necessary to be a living man himself, before he can believe in his power of judging. And this is the title of the modern philosophers to sit among the great aiders of Life (or rather of the will to live), and the reason why they can look from their own out-wearied time and aspire to a truer culture, and a clearer explanation. Their yearning is, however, their danger; the reformer in them struggles with the critical philosopher. And whichever way the victory incline, it also implies a defeat. How was Schopenhauer to escape this danger? We like to consider the great man as the noble child of his age, who feels its defects more strongly and intimately than the smaller men: and therefore the struggle of the great man against his age is apparently nothing but a mad fight to the death with himself. Only apparently, however: he only fights the elements in his time that hinder his own greatness, in other words his own freedom and sincerity. And so, at bottom, he is only an enemy to that element which is not truly himself, the irreconcilable antagonism of the temporal and eternal in him. The supposed "child of his age" proves to be but a step-child. From boyhood Schopenhauer strove with his time, a false and unworthy mother to him, and as soon as he had banished her, he could bring back his being to its native health and purity. For this very reason we can use his writings as mirrors of his time; it is no fault of the mirror if everything contemporary appear in it stricken by a ravaging disease, pale and thin, with tired looks and hollow eyes,—the step-child's sorrow made visible. The yearning for natural strength, for a healthy and simple humanity, was a yearning for himself: and as soon as he had conquered his time within him, he was face to face with his own genius. The secret of nature's being and his own lay open, the step-mother's plot to conceal his genius from him was foiled. And now he could turn a fearless eye towards the question, "What is the real worth of life?" without having any more to weigh a bloodless and chaotic age of doubt and hypocrisy. He knew that there was something higher and purer to be won on this earth than the life of his time, and a man does bitter wrong to existence who only knows it and criticises it in this hateful form. Genius, itself the highest product of life, is now summoned to justify life, if it can: the noble creative soul must answer the question:—"Dost thou in thy heart say 'Yea!' unto this existence? Is it enough for thee? Wilt thou be its advocate and its redeemer? One true 'Yea' from thy lips, and the sorely accused life shall go free." How shall he answer? In the words of Empedocles. 4 [ edit ] The last hint may well remain obscure for a time: I have something more easy to explain, namely how Schopenhauer can help us to educate ourselves in opposition to our age, since we have the advantage of really knowing our age, through him;—if it be an advantage! It may be no longer possible in a couple, of hundred years. I sometimes amuse myself with the idea that men may soon grow tired of books and their authors, and the savant of to-morrow come to leave directions in his will that his body be burned in the midst of his books, including of course his own writings. And in the gradual clearing of the forests, might not our libraries be very reasonably used for straw and brushwood? Most books are born from the smoke and vapour of the brain: and to vapour and smoke may they well return. For having no fire within themselves, they shall be visited with fire. And possibly to a later century our own may count as the "Dark age," because our productions heated the furnace hotter and more continuously than ever before. We are anyhow happy that we can learn to know our time; and if there be any sense in busying ourselves with our time at all, we may as well do it as thoroughly as we can, so that no one may have any doubt about it. The possibility of this we owe to Schopenhauer. Our happiness would of course be infinitely greater, if our inquiry showed that nothing so hopeful and splendid as our present epoch had ever existed. There are simple people in some corner of the earth to-day—perhaps in Germany—who are disposed to believe in all seriousness that the world was put right two years ago,[1] and that all stern and gloomy views of life are now contradicted by "facts." The foundation of the New German Empire is, to them, the decisive blow that annihilates all the "pessimistic" philosophers,—no doubt of it. To judge the philosopher's significance in our time, as an educator, we must oppose a widespread view like this, especially common in our universities. We must say, it is a shameful thing that such abominable flattery of the Time-Fetish should be uttered by a herd of so-called reflective and honourable men; it is a proof that we no longer see how far the seriousness of philosophy is removed from that of a newspaper. Such men have lost the last remnant of feeling, not only for philosophy, but also for religion, and have put in its place a spirit not so much of optimism as of journalism, the evil spirit that broods over the day—and the daily paper. Every philosophy that believes the problem of existence to be shelved, or even solved, by a political event, is a sham philosophy. There have been innum
120. Interestingly, the new variants range in price from £25 to £45. The Aberlour 10 year old looks to be best bang-for-buck and is frequently discounted to around £20 per bottle. Next time we’re together we move onto the Islands. I can bat the ball back to Andy and set him the challenge of an Islay Now and Then. And after that, we will look to do some ex bourbon matured malts – with some of The Glens – Morangie, Livet, Fiddich, Grant, Rothes. The difference between old and new bottlings of the blends was significantly more heavily weighted towards the older variant. With malts, it seems the scores are somewhat closer. The new blends achieved just 58% of the score of the old versions where the new malts achieved 78%… the quality of blends looks to have slipped more than malts… or do blends continue to ‘marry’ in the bottle far more than malts? As the ex-Master Distiller from the (past?) king of sherry, The Macallan, it has been a fascinating tasting and report to compile! Please email in your comments and questions. We’d love to hear your thoughts. Slainte David.President Donald Trump appears in the Rose Garden of the White House on Thursday. Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images There is a lingering question about whether the executive order on religious freedom Donald Trump signed in the Rose Garden on Thursday—which had been seen as a possible threat to the LGBTQ community but ultimately spared them for now—did something, nothing, or less than nothing. Whatever it is the president ultimately did sign, it bore little to no resemblance to the draft orders that had been circulating on Capitol Hill and that had stirred such angst among progressives. It’s just unclear what this EO actually does. Two of the most controversial provisions—one that would have abetted religious conscience objectors in escaping the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive coverage mandate and one that would have loosened prohibitions on participation in political campaigns by churches and other tax-exempt groups that accept tax deductible contributions—had been watered down thoroughly by the time Trump was brandishing his pen. So much so, in fact, that by the end of the day Thursday, conservatives were slamming the effort as “meaningless” and “inadequate.” Meanwhile, the ACLU—which had announced earlier in the day that it had planned to file a challenge—simply tweeted: “We thought we’d have to sue Trump today. But it turned out the order signing was an elaborate photo-op with no discernible policy outcome.” It’s easy to assume that the watering down had something to do with Jared and Ivanka acting as moderating forces on social policy. The more intriguing possibility, though, is that somebody in the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice or in the White House Counsel’s Office actually took a red pen to provisions that would have clearly raised immediate constitutional and legal problems. You know, that they did their jobs (as opposed, for example, to what happened during the implementation of the haphazard and reckless first Muslim ban). For instance, the order directs the secretary of health and human services merely to “consider” issuing undefined regulations to provide relief from the contraception mandate, within the constraints of “applicable law.” In testimony before the House Oversight Committee on Thursday, Rabbi David Saperstein did a good job of articulating the problem with doing anything to unsettle the rule around religious organizations and politicking, known as the Johnson Amendment: We will see a massive diversion of campaign funding to houses of worship, which will become slush funds for local, state, and national campaigns. Since churches do not report who their donors are, funneling campaign donations through houses of worship would greatly reduce transparency in election campaigns, thus becoming conduits for dark money and undermining sensible campaign finance rules. This is, recall, not just about religious speech. It never was. A lawsuit filed at the end of the day Thursday by the Freedom From Religion Foundation serves as a pretty good road map to what the complaint could have been against changes to these provisions had lawyers not apparently pruned back the draft language reporters were circulating in the days before. The suit includes the now-obligatory catalog of every tweet and statement Trump has ever made about the Johnson Amendment that would have made such changes unconstitutional had he enacted them. Should it be allowed to proceed, this new lawsuit will all but force Justice Department lawyers to stand before a judge and explain that the executive order, as signed, achieves none of those goals and in fact does little more than codify the status quo. This is precisely what happened in the litigation over his sanctuary cities executive order last month, and this would make for a pattern. One questionable provision directs the secretary of the treasury to ensure that his department, which includes the IRS, “does not take any adverse action” against any person, “house of worship, or other religious organization” because of “speech about moral or political issues from a religious perspective.” If the sentence had stopped there, several more lawsuits would have been filed because of the clear preference given to religious organizations and speech. But, in a crucial qualification, the order now explains that the directive applies only “where speech of similar character” by others has “not ordinarily been treated as participation or intervention in a political campaign” by the IRS. In other words, when a church or religious organization says something about politics or a campaign, the IRS must not treat that as improper electoral advocacy unless it has treated “speech of similar character” as electioneering by a nonreligious group. That calls for equal treatment of religious and nonreligious speech, not preference. That qualifying language sounds exactly like the type that would be added by career lawyers at the OLC, which traditionally reviews and offers edits on executive orders, and was criticized for failing to adequately review the first Trump order on immigration. Or it could have been added by someone in the White House Counsel’s Office. The point is, it’s not all that hard for lawyers to make an unconstitutional executive order legal. Whether the executive order as modified actually does anything is now between Trump and his lawyers. The question then becomes whether anyone squared the final order either with the spin put out by White House officials or with the prepared remarks offered in the Rose Garden on Thursday. “For too long the federal government has used the power of the state as a weapon against people of faith, bullying and even punishing Americans for following their religious beliefs,” Trump said grandly. “No one should be censoring sermons or targeting pastors. … We are giving our churches their voices back.” Did Trump know that the executive order would achieve none of the things he had promised on the stump or at the signing ceremony? Or did nobody bother to tell him? Either answer offers troubling insight into the functioning of this new administration. One possibility is that, knowing full well that the order actually accomplished little or nothing, Trump and other White House officials deliberately misled the press and religious figures in the Rose Garden and across the country. Another possibility is that the White House Counsel’s Office didn’t realize the effect that legalese would have or withheld that information from White House officials and the president. It’s very good that some lawyer somewhere in the federal government apparently did important editing on this executive order. But it’s also very disturbing that the president either doesn’t know what he’s signing or is willing to try to mislead the press and his own supporters about what his orders actually do. A third possibility, that he doesn’t see any difference between what he is saying and what has been written, is not out of the realm of possibility either. It has become a truism that President Trump has been at war with the law and the courts since his first week in office. Legal minds have been pondering for weeks now whether DOJ or the White House’s own lawyers would have the integrity and commitment to legal norms to occasionally tell the president no. At least in this case, the answer appears to be yes. The days when Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller seemed to be writing executive orders on the backs of executive office napkins may finally be over. That may be somewhat comforting, but it doesn’t change their place in the White House and doesn’t alter the need for continued vigilance.In 1919, the young E.B. White, future New Yorker writer and author of Charlotte’s Web, took a class at Cornell University with a drill sergeant of an English professor named William Strunk Jr. Strunk assigned his self-published manual on composition titled “The Elements of Style,” a 43-page list of rules of usage, principles of style, and commonly misused words. It was a brief for brevity. “Vigorous writing is concise,” Strunk wrote. “When a sentence is made stronger, it usually becomes shorter.” Half a century later, when preparing his old professor’s manuscript for publication, White added an essay of his own underlining the argument for concision in moral terms. “Do not overwrite,” he instructed. “Rich, ornate prose is hard to digest, generally unwholesome, and sometimes nauseating.” Strunk & White, as the combined work came to be known, was issued in 1959 and went on to become a defining American statement of what constituted good writing, with 10 million copies sold, and counting. Its final rule summoned the whole: “Prefer the standard to the offbeat.” Though never explicitly political, The Elements of Style is unmistakably a product of its time. Its calls for “vigour” and “toughness” in language, its analogy of sentences to smoothly functioning machines, its distrust of vernacular and foreign language phrases all conform to that disciplined, buttoned-down and most self-assured stretch of the American century from the armistice through the height of the Cold War. A time before race riots, feminism, and the collapse of the gold standard. It is a book full of sound advice addressed to a class of all-male Ivy-Leaguers wearing neckties and with neatly parted hair. This, of course, is part of its continuing appeal. It is spoken in the voice of unquestioned authority in a world where that no longer exists. As Lorin Stein, the new editor of the celebrated literary magazine the Paris Review, recently put it to me: “It’s like a national superego.” And when it comes to an activity as variable, difficult, and ultimately ungovernable as writing sentences, the allure of rules that dictate brevity and concreteness is enduring. The trouble with the book isn’t the rules themselves, which the authors are sage enough to recognize “the best writers sometimes disregard,” but the knock-on effect that their bias for plain statement has tended to have not only on expositional but literary prose. In this, admittedly, Strunk & White had a few assists, in particular Hemingway. If the history of the American sentence were a John Ford movie, its second act would conclude with the young Ernest walking into a saloon, finding an etiolated Henry James slumped at the bar in a haze of indecision, and shooting him dead. The terse, declarative sentence in all its masculine hardness routed the passive involutions of a higher, denser style. (James, from “The Altar of the Dead”: “He had a mortal dislike, poor Stransom, to lean anniversaries, and loved them still less when they made a pretence of a figure”; Hemingway, from “A Way You’ll Never Be”: “These were the new dead and no one had bothered with anything but their pockets.”) As a result, pared-down prose of the sort editor Gordon Lish would later encourage in Raymond Carver became our default “realism.” This is a real loss, not because we necessarily need more Jamesian novels but because too often the instruction to “omit needless words” (Rule 17) leads young writers to be cautious and dull; minimalist style becomes minimalist thought, and that is a problem. * * * This question of how forms of writing produce forms of thought is one that the literary critic and legal scholar Stanley Fish has been wrestling with most of his career. He first came to prominence in the late 1970s with his theory of “interpretative communities.” This held that all readings of literary texts are inescapably bound up with the cultural assumptions of readers, an uncontroversial proposition now but one that quickly earned him the sloppy epithet of “relativist.” In the late 1980s and early 1990s he turned the Duke University English department into the headquarters of the then-burgeoning “theory” industry before, in 1999, surprising the academic world by moving to the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he set himself the task of trying to renovate undergraduate education in basic skills like writing. Though he doesn’t mention that experience in his new book, How To Write a Sentence and How To Read One, it’s not far offstage. The problem with Strunk & White, in Fish’s view, is that “they assume a level of knowledge and understanding only some of their readers will have attained,” that is, the Cornell kids whose secondary education did at least a halfway decent job of teaching them the basics. Fish’s aim is to offer a guide to sentence craft and appreciation that is both deeper and more democratic. What, at base, is a sentence? he asks, and then goes on to argue that the standard answer based in parts of speech and rules of grammar teaches students “nothing about how to write.” Instead, we should be examining the “logical relationships” within different sentence forms to see how they organize the world. His argument is that you can learn to write and later become a good writer by understanding and imitating these forms from many different styles. Thus, if you’re drawn to Jonathan Swift’s biting satire in the sentence, “Last week I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe how much it altered her person for the worse,” then, Fish advises, “Put together two mildly affirmative assertions, the second of which reacts to the first in a way that is absurdly inadequate.” He offers, “Yesterday I saw a man electrocuted and it really was surprising how quiet he became.” Lame, and hardly Swift, as Fish is the first to admit, but identifying the logical structure does specify how satire functions at the level of the sentence and, if you want to employ the form, that’s a good thing to know. Fish is a sentence connoisseur who describes his enthusiasm as akin to a sports fan’s love of highlights, and relishes the craft of everyone from the endlessly refined Victorian critic Walter Pater (“To such a tremulous wisp constantly reforming itself on the stream, to a single sharp impression, with a sense of it, a relic more or less fleeting, of such moments gone by, what is real in our lives fines itself down”) to Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia (“Interior decorating is a rock-hard science compared to psychology practiced by amateurs”). You won’t come away with dictum such as, “Avoid the use of qualifiers” (Sec V, Rule 8, Strunk & White) but Fish’s catholic taste in prose offers a far richer introduction to the capacities of English language sentences. Why is this important? Because the form and rhythm of sentences communicate as much meaning as their factual content, whether we’re conscious of it or not. In 1863, when Gen. Grant took the city of Vicksburg, Miss., the last hindrance to free passage of Union supplies along the river, President Lincoln wrote in a letter to be read at a public meeting: “The father of waters again goes unvexed to the sea.” It’s a poem of a sentence, “The father of waters” and “unvexed to the sea” perfectly balanced on the unexpected pivot of “again goes” rather than “goes again,” and all in the service of a metaphor that figures the Union as an inevitable force and the Confederacy as a blight on nature, without mentioning either. If cadence had no content, “Union supply lines are now clear” would have the same power. And what is obvious in rhetoric is true in literature, as well. Take the first sentence of David Foster Wallace ’s story, “The Depressed Person”: “The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing emotional pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror.” By mixing heightened feeling and unrelenting repetition (“pain,” “pain,” “pain”) with a Latinate, clinically declarative voice (“component,” “contributing factor”), Wallace delivers his readers right where he wants them: inside the hellish disconnect between psychic pain and the modern means of describing it. The rhythm of the sentence is perfectly matched to its positive content. Indeed, from a writer’s point of view the two aren’t separate. If we could separate meaning from sound, we’d read plot summaries rather than novels. Wallace’s anxious, perseverating sentences are arguably the most innovative in recent American literature. But take a writer who couldn’t be further from his self-conscious showmanship—William Trevor—and listen to a sentence early in his story “A Day”. “It was in France, in the Hotel St.-Georges during their September holiday seven years ago, that Mrs. Lethwes found out about her husband’s other woman.” Here, the barely perceptible aural effect is all about sequence. Mrs Lethwes may be the subject of the sentence but Trevor weighs her down under the qualifying weight of time before she ever appears to then discover her fate. He does this over and over in the story. The reader may never notice it, but when we talk about Trevor’s elegiac tone, this is what we mean. Not simply that he writes sad stories but that the pathology of his characters has been worked down into the rhythm of his sentences. That ability—to graft theme into syntax—is what makes great writing a pleasure to listen to. The German expat novelist, W.G. Sebald, became a literary hero for his unclassifiable books The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, and Austerlitz not long before his early death 10 years ago. He offers a splendid example of what Fish calls “the subordinate style,” in which time and causality are organized into clear hierarchies at the sentence level. His ruminative, meandering sentences (“After I had made an appointment to meet Austerlitz the next day Pereria, having inquired after my wishes, led me upstairs to the first floor and showed me into a room containing a great deal of wine-red velvet, brocade, and dark mahogany furniture, where I sat until almost three in the morning at a secretaire faintly illuminated by the street lighting—the cast-iron radiator clicked quietly, and only occasionally did a black cab drive past outside in Liverpool Street—writing down, in the form of notes and disconnected sentences, as much as possible of what Austerlitz had told me that evening”) are almost too long to quote here. Sebald’s themes, like Proust’s, are memory and loss. What makes his books remarkable is that he reproduces the experience of having memories and losing them in the course of single sentences, like the one above, which often seem to forget their origins, slide off into an associative drift, and then attempt to recoup themselves, just as we attempt to hold together the memories and narratives that make up our sense of self. He’s a maximalist whose prose would drive Strunk & White to distraction (when they wrote, “Make the paragraph the unit of composition,” they didn’t have in mind 400-page paragraphs). As Paul Harding, who won last year’s Pulitzer for his own peripatetic sentences in his novel Tinkers, puts it: “The criteria for caloric prose is that it be nutritious. Getting at essence isn’t always a matter of stripping away length. That’s part of the modernist myth of de-mythification.” When the high-modernist poet Ezra Pound wrote in his 1913 manifesto “A Few Don’ts” that “the natural object is always the adequate symbol,” Hemingway listened, and together they lent artistic force to the notion that the truth is necessarily concise. A generation later in Britain, George Orwell reinforced this notion but with a new political emphasis in his 1946 essay “Why I Write,” in which he stated: “Good prose is like a windowpane.” A lack of political purpose, Orwell wrote, had “betrayed [him] into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.” Elaborateness came to be associated with false rhetoric and the aesthetic indulgences of a bygone world between the two wars. Geoff Kloske, the head of Riverhead Books, publisher of George Saunders and Aleksandar Hemon, thinks current stylistic variety makes it impossible to claim we are in either a minimalist or maximalist period. “More, I fear, there is a flaccidity and casualness of style that has come from writing habits born out of e-mail and social media.” A kind of death of the sentence by collective neglect. Kloske is right that the incessant dribble of mini-messaging has made most people’s daily use of written language brutally factual in character, more private ad copy than prose. I’m old enough to have written letters to friends when I was younger, which took time and a bit of thought. Like most people, I don’t do that anymore, and e-mail hasn’t replaced the habit. The writing of complete sentences for aural pleasure as well as news is going the way of the playing of musical instruments—it’s becoming a speciality rather than a means most people have to a little amateur, unselfconscious enjoyment. This isn’t the end of the world for literature. In a sense, it only intensifies its role as the repository of our linguistic imagination. But it’s a pity nonetheless; there’s a difference between pure spectatorship and semi-participatory appreciation. The latter is much warmer. It creates more room for fellow feeling and a bit less for the glare of celebrity and the correlative abjection of envy and fandom. Fish’s book doesn’t reach this far. We get no analysis of Japanese cell-phone novels or the best of the blogosphere. But for those, and I would count myself among them, who fell in love with literature not by becoming enthralled to books they couldn’t put down but by discovering individual sentences whose rhythm and rhetoric was so compelling they couldn’t help but repeat them to anyone who would listen, it is a blessed replacement to that old Strunkian superego forever whispering in your ear—cut, cut, cut.Sara* can't remember a time in her life when she wasn’t on a diet. In fact, growing up in her Orthodox Jewish community, trying to lose weight was as routine as any other ritual. “The same way we had Shabbos [the Jewish sabbath] every week, we had dieting every day,” she tells SELF. “It was always a part of my life.” While Sara, now 25, says pressure to diet and lose weight came from various family members, the emphasis on being thin seemed to stem from a deeper, core obligation in the Orthodox community: getting married. “It's a very cultural thing to need to be thin for dating. Even if you're not thinking about dating when you're a five year old, there's an immense amount of pressure to think about your size for [future] dating,” she says. “[They think] if you're chubby when you're five, it will be hard to grow out of it, and you're going to be a fat 18 year old.” According to the Pew Research Center, 68 percent of Orthodox Jews and 75 percent of Haredi (the most traditionally observant) Jews in America marry at the age of 24 or younger, compared to 33 percent of the overall population of Jewish Americans. Though research on the subject is limited, it seems that disordered eating and body image struggles have become prevalent—yet not fully acknowledged—parts of growing up as an Orthodox Jewish woman. Data on eating disorders within the Jewish community, and especially the Orthodox community, is nearly impossible to find. A 2011 New York Times report cited an unpublished 1996 study of an Orthodox high school in Brooklyn, where eating disorders among girls in the school were reported to be about 50 percent higher than the national rate at the time. The Times also pointed to a 2008 study of 868 students in Toronto, which found 25 percent of Jewish Canadian girls aged 13 to 20 suffered from clinically diagnosable eating disorders, compared to 18 percent of non-Jewish Canadian girls in the study sample. But much of what we know about disordered eating in the Orthodox community comes from anecdotal evidence. Sarah Bateman, a licensed social worker who is the liaison to the Jewish community for the Renfrew Center, one of the oldest eating disorder treatment institutions in the country, tells SELF that her professional interests stemmed from what she witnessed at her own Orthodox school. “I was in high school and noticed so many of my friends were suffering,” she says. “What struck me was that everyone seemed to know about it and no one was talking about it.” “Whether or not they are textbook eating disorders, there's a lot of unhealthy eating habits happening,” Sharon Weiss-Greenberg, the executive director of the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance, tells SELF. “I can't think of anyone who doesn't know numerous people [that suffer from disordered eating].” That statement can certainly hold true in secular societies, too; but it's possible that the increased emphasis on marriage and the specific dating culture may exacerbate disordered eating among Orthodox women. While Orthodox men are not immune to suffering from eating disorders (just as they aren't in the secular world), the pressure to woo the opposite sex often falls on women because of what's known within the Orthodox community as the “shidduch (matchmaking) crisis,” or the perceived courtship imbalance caused by an excess of available single women. Based on a widespread belief that there are too many single women (whether that's true or not) single men are treated as the high-demand prize. “There is undeniably a certain amount of pressure in some circles where…the women have to prove themselves and have this pressure to find a man and get married,” Bateman says. Many Orthodox families still rely on shadchans (Yiddish for matchmakers) to formally introduce men and women to each other. And shadchans often rely on "resumés" of women—a list of information about her upbringing, family, schooling, and even references to vouch for her character—to give to men (and often their mothers) to determine if they should meet for a date. But other questions are asked about the prospective girl that aren’t listed on the paper. In the past year alone, numerous Orthodox women have revealed to Weiss-Greenberg that they've been told, "Maybe if you'd lose 20 pounds, you'd be married." "It happens on a very regular basis,” she says. “There are people whose parents encouraged them to get liposuction or other plastic surgery to conform to a certain body, to [increase] their chances of getting married." Bateman agrees: “I hear from matchmakers over and over that the number one question men are asking is, 'What size is she?' or, 'Is she thin?'” And, according to Weiss-Greenberg, not only is the weight of the prospective date of interest, but “people ask the weight of the mother because [they] want to know what [their] future wife will look like.” Ironically, this focus on women's shapes and sizes proliferates even though Orthodox dating itself doesn't allow for physical contact between the sexes. Currently, Sara is in the thick of the Orthodox matchmaking world. Even though she’s a professional fitness trainer, because she is not textbook thin (she described herself as “a plus-sized woman” to one matchmaker), she is regularly told she should lose weight to increase her marriage prospects. “I have definitely gotten, ‘You know, if you lose weight, it will be easier to find guys who will go out with you,’ ” she says. “Do I get less dates because of that? One hundred percent. But that's fine with me. I do believe most women are trying to lose weight in response, [though].” Others in the community point to changing mainstream beauty ideals—not strictly matchmaking culture—as the driving force behind disordered eating among Orthodox women. “In the times of the Talmud, there's an example from thousands of years ago that women would wear choker necklaces…to accentuate the fat on their neck, so that they would look healthier, heavier, more affluent, and more attractive,” Devorah Levinson, a referral specialist and the director of eating disorders at Relief Resources, which helps Orthodox Jews find culturally and religiously sensitive mental health services, tells SELF. “If we fast-forward to post-World War II, to be thin was to be sick, so [mothers] wanted their Jewish daughters to look heavier. The system of shidduchim [matchmaking] has remained pretty much the same throughout—but what has shifted now is the vision of beauty.” Levinson argues that the unhealthy focus on thinness is a testament to the power of mainstream media images. She points to how “ubiquitous the thin ideal is that even in this insular community these messages have come across—even with people who don't have television and don't have access to the internet, this message of [the] thin ideal has seeped in so deeply.” Complicating the issue further is the stigma associated with being treated for a mental health condition—particularly when it comes to future marriage prospects for Orthodox women. In the Orthodox community, not only can size hinder one’s marriage prospects, but so can the stigma of having received treatment for an eating disorder. That fear ran through Shelli's* mind when she began formal treatment for her bulimia. Now 29, Shelli tells SELF that after struggling with the disorder on and off since she was 17, it hit her again in her early twenties when she was going through a divorce. “It was my coping mechanism,” she says. “I was thinking, 'No one is ever going to want me because I don't even know how to eat food. I don't know how to deal with food. How is anyone going to want me if I'm like this?’” Shelli says she told her now-husband when they were dating, and, though surprised, he was very supportive. For years after their marriage, though, she did not disclose her long bout with bulimia to his family. “Being Orthodox and struggling with this or any kind of mental illness in general is a very scary thing, because you think you're going to be excluded from the community and that people are going to judge you—and sometimes, people do.” Shelli has started sharing her experiences not only with her family, but as a volunteer speaker for various eating disorder groups. However, she says that she still keeps a “low profile” within her own community, admitting that some of her good friends don’t even know about the eating disorder in her past. “It's a huge struggle, and it's not just about 'I want to be skinny,' ” Shelli says. “It's really a much bigger issue than that, and it needs to be dealt with in an open, loving, and caring way.” Interviewees requested we use their first names only. Related: You May Also Like: This Mom's Eating Disorder Nearly Killed Her—Now She Wants to Change How We Talk About Bodies and FitnessCeltics fans, I don't know what Danny Ainge has up his sleeve but it better be something. Over the weekend the Celtics and 76ers agreed to a blockbuster trade for the upcoming draft which which gave the 76ers the #1 pick and the Celtics dropped down to #3 along with a future first. I didn’t see this one coming from a mile away. While I’ve been watching Danny Ainge trade just about anybody and anything for years, I never would’ve expected him to trade away the chance to take the consensus number 1 prospect, Markelle Fultz. This deal has many people, including me, wondering why now? After years of trying to use his picks to trade up in the draft, Ainge inexplicably just traded his way out of the first pick. (Photo Credit: NBA) From the perspective of Celtics fans, you just have to hope there’s something bigger in the works. Could it be some combination of jimmy Butler, Paul George, or Gordon Hayward? That’s what many Celtics fans are hoping. I can’t find you many Celtics fans who are all in on Josh Jackson or Jayson Tatum right now and rightly so. It’s all speculation at this point but the only thing I see the Celtics doing at this point is trading the #3 pick away. They’ve taken one of the biggest risks in recent memory by trading out of the top spot and the only thing that could justify it is getting the stars that Danny Ainge has coveted for so long. Seven first round picks in the next few years plus a bunch of team friendly contracts on the books should be the kind of package that entices teams such as Chicago and Indiana. With a plethora of directions to go for Boston it will be interesting to see how the rest of their offseason shapes up. The 76ers, if healthy, are going to have one of the most exciting cores in the NBA and I’m sure they’ll torture me for the next decade. The potential of a core consisting of Embiid, Simmons, and Fultz can only be rivaled by Minnesota with Towns and Wiggins. All the years of tanking and being the laughingstock of the league has led Philly to this moment. This is the type of core they envisioned when they started “The Process”. Not only do they have the core to build around but they also have tons of cap space to work with to help fill out the roster and possibly get another star down the line. Of course, there is no guarantees this will work. After all, they are the 76ers and we all know that luck isn’t always necessarily on their side but the possibilities for this team can’t be overlooked. I can’t help but envision the big time potential rivalry on the horizon between the Celtics and 76ers. These two teams are set up in the East for many years to come and other teams are going to be put on notice very soon. I wouldn’t be surprised to a playoff matchup between these 2 teams as soon as the 2020 season. If everything falls into place we could be seeing the NBA’s next great rivalry developing before our very eyes.Chinese investors in Greentech Automotive have filed a lawsuit against Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe and Hillary Clinton's brother Anthony Rodham.From Politico: Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe and former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's brother Anthony Rodham are facing a $17 million fraud lawsuit from Chinese investors in Greentech Automotive, an electric car company that appears to be struggling to survive.A group of 32 Chinese citizens filed the suit last week in Fairfax County, Virginia court, claiming that they were swindled out of about $560,000 apiece as a result of misrepresentations made by McAuliffe and Rodham—two of the most prominent and politically connected proponents of the venture aimed at manufacturing electric cars in the U.S.The suit is yet another headache for McAuliffe as he mulls a potential presidential bid in 2020, buoyed in part by Democrats' strong showing in the state in the election earlier this month. McAuliffe confirmed last year that his business dealings with foreign nationals were under investigation by the FBI and federal prosecutors. It's unclear whether that probe involved Greentech or whether the inquiry is still ongoing.Read more: (Link: www.politico.com)Hertz also conceded that between January 2013 and August last year it had charged customers for repair costs it falsely claimed was the cost borne by the company. In fact, Hertz received spare parts at a discount and did not pass on any savings. In cases involving windscreen or tyre repairs or replacements, the cost to Hertz was much lower than the amount charged to customers. Hertz is refunding, or has refunded, $152,000 to more than 700 customers. Many of these customers are yet to be identified and contacted about the refund. "This case serves as a message to vehicle rental companies that they must have robust compliance procedures in place to ensure they do not contravene the Australian Consumer Law by incorrectly charging customers for damage they are not responsible for," said ACCC deputy chair Michael Schaper. "Vehicle rental companies must also ensure that they are transparent and accurate in communicating with their customers about the charges they are applying for vehicle rentals and repairs."We must be positive until the end Hi everyone, Obviously, our game this weekend has had a disappointing result, but once again I prefer to take the positive side. On one hand, I was back on the pitch after several weeks out, and I felt good physically, which is something positive because the end of the season is going to be thrilling. I was back doing what I like the most, and I’m really excited about being able to help the team as much as I can in the final sprint. Another positive aspect of the game was the debut of both McTominay and Tuanzebe, a sign that the Academy is doing a good job; I’m really happy for them. I think the game was more or less even in the first half, with both teams creating chances, but they were lucky with the first goal soon after the break, and with the second one only a few minutes afterwards things turned quite complicated for us… As I said, we have to focus on the remaining fixtures, starting with Thursday’s important match: the Europa League semi-final second leg against Celta. Our options of entering the Champions League through the Premier League have decreased after this week, but we will keep on trying until the last game, first at Tottenham this coming weekend. As you know, the other way is by winning the Europa League, and we’re going to give everything we have for that goal. We need to play a very solid game against Celta; we have an advantage but I’m sure they will come here hoping to turn the tables and they will be a dangerous team. Meanwhile in Spain, Real Madrid and Barcelona continue their title race. Zidane’s team had a great result against Atletico in the Champions League and they have to play the second leg this week. They have many tough challenges ahead, let’s see how they cope with them. Thank you very much for your messages of support after the defeat, and also for your support during the weeks of my recovery. Now I’m back and I hope to finish the season in great shape, celebrating a European title and winning the remaining games in the Premier League. Have a nice week. Hugs,McDonald's announced it will soon roll out a highly-publicized new menu deal that joins a series of experiments aimed at turning around the beleaguered fast food chain. On January 4, McDonald's will introduce "McPick2," which will let customers pick two of the following items for $2: a McDouble, a McChicken, small fries, and mozzarella sticks. “Customers are looking for choice and flexibility,” Deborah Wahl, senior vice
they did it by ear and instinct. Boston composer Joshua Fineberg, who studied with Murail, says this music is in part a reaction against the avant-garde of the '60s and '70s, and its often private, inaudible arcana: "Pieces like (Stockhausen's) Stimmung, are fundamentally static, from a harmonic perspective. … For [Grisey] it was about reestablishing …, harmonic change that was … directly perceptible." (Here's an interview with Fineberg.) Which is to say that after Schoenberg and his fellow modernists exploded the old scales and harmonies and delved into more complex sounds, the ensuing music tended, whatever its virtues, to have a sense of drifting moment to moment without a discernable path. Spectralists want to use the kind of free harmony that composers (maybe even audiences) have gotten used to, but to imbue it with a sense of forward progress that it has rarely possessed before. Fineberg insists that the essence of spectralism is to find new ways way of achieving an old-fashioned virtue: music with an audible feeling of direction. Back to Mozart, say, but Mozart on another planet—as in say, Murail's Désintégrations. Advertisement Our other two current trends are nicely complementary, one aggressively noisy and the other aggressively pleasant. For the noisy sort, I propose the genre aesthetic brutalism. Since this music tends to have a certain punk sensibility, and authentic punks aren't given to explaining themselves other than with blows to the head, let's listen to a defining example, a cut from "Eight Songs," by Jefferson Friedman. These are arrangements of pieces by the noise band Crom-Tech, played here by the Yesaroun' Duo, Eric Hewitt on baritone sax and Samuel Z. Solomon on drums: Here we have a real colonoscopy of a piece, and I mean that in the best sense. Yes, that was a sax and drums, run through a little mixing, but played live it sounds just as invasive. The person doing the howling was the drummer, who is called upon to scream a lot. Aesthetic brutalism is not so much in the gestures as in the frame of mind. I once went to a lecture by a young academic brutalist. It consisted of incomprehensible mathematical jargon illustrated by slides of cigarette butts on the street. Aesthetic brutalism actually has a long ancestry. One precedent is Iannis Xenakis, the leading Greek avant-gardist of the 1950s through the '70s. Here's Xenakis' solo percussion piece Psappha, which features earsplitting explosions on a bass drum. In this piece the composer does not aspire to move you; he wants to hurt you. In fact, Xenakis is often cited as a forerunner of spectralism, because he was much involved in new sounds—mainly sounds of the loud and hairy variety. There is a general overlap between spectralism and brutalism; the difference is mainly in sensibility. Xenakis was highly individual but still within the orbit of the midcentury European avant-garde, the generation of Stockhausen, Ligeti, and Boulez. Brutalists often have a background in heavy metal or punk and an often ahistorical sensibility formed in a riotous milieu. Advertisement The pop/ classical circuit is nothing new, either. As of 50 years ago a number of high-modernist classical composers came out of a jazz background. Among them was Mel Powell, who once played piano in the Glenn Miller Band. As a rough guess, more than half of current new-music composers started in rock. The most unreconstructed, ultra-academic 12-tone composer I know used to play lead guitar with a band called the Ohio Express, * who were leaders of the '60s "bubblegum" genre and whose hits include the immortal "Yummy Yummy Yummy I've Got Love in My Tummy." Finally there is a new generation of composers who have fled as far as possible from the old avant-garde and offer the public a warm, fuzzy embrace. Composer Andy Vores has dubbed this aesthetic the new niceness. It can be really pretty. At its worst, new niceness would suit a commercial for gummy bears. Somebody who's ridden a flair for the pretty to a nice career is Boston's Michael Gandolfi. Here's a clip from his Y2K Compliant, played by Gil Rose and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project: New niceness made the map definitively last year when Jennifer Higdon's mellifluous Violin Concerto won the Pulitzer Prize. It may not have been since the '50s that a piece this attractive in the old-fashioned sense of the word last won the big P. Here's the climax of the second movement, played by the impeccable Hilary Hahn, who the year before won a Grammy with the Schoenberg Violin Concerto (which she made sound as nice as it's ever going to). The orchestra is the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic under Vasily Petrenko, and the clip is courtesy of Deutsche Grammophon. Higdon and Gandolfi are members of what's become known as the "Atlanta School," because they've been championed by Atlanta Symphony conductor Robert Spano. Another member is Osvaldo Golijov, much of whose celebrated Passion of St. Mark sounds like salsa on steroids. Advertisement The current scene in all the arts is chaos and anarchy on every hand, but as the Chinese or somebody says, in danger there is opportunity. If I'm right that there's a youngish and hipish audience who respond to the noisier sort of music, that's surely to the good. Go to YouTube and listen to Murail, Grisey, and the late Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi, who's just now getting the attention he deserves. (Here's a taste of Scelsi, the uncanny first movement of his Uaxuctum.) Read the rapturous comments on these composers and note their tone. One rave ends with the reminder, "smoke dope everyday." That Schoenberg wins Grammys and sells recordings, and Jennifer Higdon wins a Pulitzer, and Ligeti at his most riotous sells out the Philharmonic—these are all good things. The audience for the noisier stuff may end up going backward from Le Grand Macabre to Stravinsky, Bartók, Schoenberg, and Ives. After that they might be forced to admit that they're actually into classical music, and who knows what might happen then. Here's two cents more. The archetypal avant-garde sensibility was captured in the dictum "Make it good or make it bad, but make it new." I suggest that it's time to take that attitude out behind the barn and shoot it. Standing in the middle of the sometimes interesting chaos and anarchy that is the scene in all the arts, I suggest in its place: Make it old or make it new, but for chrissake make it good. Over the years one has encountered too many splendidly innovative, yet boring and annoying works of art. Besides, as a prominent composer noted, with a touch of despair, about 25 years ago: "It's hard to make a revolution when, two revolutions ago, they already said anything goes." Making the same point with more hope, the great Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu said to me around that same time: "We are free now." He meant free of musical ideologies of left or right, tonal or atonal, and so on. There are advantages in anarchy. At the same time we should keep in mind that, in the end, what's truly new and also truly good is the best of all. Stravinsky's Sacre du printemps will always be unique, hair-raising, and revolutionary. And while labels can be useful, often the most interesting artists are unclassifiable. The most apt description of Franz Kafka is "Kafkaesque." The best label for Charles Ives is "Ivesian." (Of course, the lingering postmodern sensibility says there's no such thing as "good" and "bad." This is essentially the aesthetic foundation of the current farrago in the arts, everyone speaking his or her own language and only the law of the jungle to decide who wins. To which I answer: If you really believe there's no good and bad, that wisdom, skill, talent, and judgment don't make any difference, next time you need an operation, hire me. I'm as good a surgeon as anybody, and I'll give you a deal on it.) Voilà, my survey and my modest proposals. File this one with articles on "The Sorry State of the Arts" going back 400 years. For my part, I view all this with a certain distance, looking for things that excite me whatever their aesthetic and not judging the product by the label. I don't like minimalist or conceptual art except for the ones I like, etc. Labels can be handy, or you might not know the sugar from the cyanide. But what matters is what's inside.Over the years, I’ve had fun mocking the silly extremism of the environmental movement. That being said, protecting the environment is a worthy and important goal. And that’s why some of us want to give the private sector a bigger role. John Stossel, for instance, has a must-watch video on how capitalism can save endangered rhinos. Professor Philip Booth expands on the lesson in the video and urges broad application of market forces to preserve the environment. Especially well-enforced property rights. …what is needed for better husbandry of ecological resources is more widespread and deeper establishment of property rights together with their enforcement. The cause of environmentalism is often associated with the Left. This is despite the fact that some of the worst environmental outcomes in the history of our planet have been associated with Communist governments. …a great deal of serious work has been produced by those who believe in market or community-based solutions to environmental problems, and a relatively small role for government. For example, Ronald Coase and Elinor Ostrom are two Nobel Prize winners in economics who have made profound contributions to our understanding of how markets and communities can promote environmental conservation. Indeed, the intellectual and moral high ground when it comes to environmentalism ought to be taken by those who believe in private property, strong community institutions and a free economy. Philip explains why private ownership produces conservation. If things are owned, they will tend to be looked after. The owner of a lake will not fish it to near extinction (or even over-fish the lake to a small degree) because the breeding potential of the fish would be reduced. He then explains the downside of public ownership. On the other hand, if the lake is not owned by anybody, or if it is owned by the government and fishing is unregulated, the lake will be fished to extinction because nobody has any benefit from holding back. Local businesses may well also pollute the lake if there are no well-defined ownership rights. The much-cited work here is Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons (1968), though, in fact, Hardin was simply referring back to a pamphlet by William Forster Lloyd which was written in 1833. In that pamphlet, a situation was described whereby common land was open to grazing by all. The land would then be over-grazed because a person would get the benefit of putting additional cattle on the land without the cost that arises from over-grazing which would be shared by all users. He points out that one advantage of Brexit is that the U.K. can implement a fisheries system based on property rights. Now that fishing policy has been repatriated, the UK should establish property rights in sea fisheries. Few would seriously question private property when it comes to the land. For example, it is rare these days to find people who would suggest that farms should be nationalised or collectivised or returned to an unregulated commons where anybody can graze their animals without restriction. It would be understood that this would lead to chaos, inefficiency and environmental catastrophe. And since we have real-world evidence that fisheries based on property rights are very successful, hopefully the U.K. government will implement this reform. So what’s the bottom line on capitalism and the environment? If we want sustainable environmental outcomes, the answer almost never lies with government control, but with the establishment and enforcement of property rights over environmental resources. This provides the incentive to nurture and conserve. Where the government does intervene it should try to mimic markets. When it comes to the environment, misguided government intervention can lead to conflict and poor environmental outcomes. The best thing the government can do is put its own house in order and ensure that property rights are enforced through proper policing and courts systems. That is certainly the experience of forested areas in South America. Let’s close by noting one other reason to give the market a bigger role. Simply stated, environmentalists seem to have no sense of cost-benefit analysis. Instead, we get bizarre policies that seem motivated primarily by virtue signalling. And don’t forget green energy programs, which impose heavy costs on consumers and also are a combination of virtue signaling and cronyism. No wonder many of us don’t trust the left on global warming, even if we recognize it may be a real issue. P.S. There is at least one employee at the Environmental Protection Agency who deserves serious consideration for the Bureaucrat Hall of Fame. Reprinted from International Liberty.Occupational Hazards - Page 20 ❮❮ Newer Download \| Full View Older ❯❯ Submission © 2014 MintyCandy Main Gallery 529 submissions Occupational Hazards - Page 20 - by MintyCandy Submission information: Posted: Category: Artwork (Digital) Theme: All Species: Horse Gender: Multiple characters Favorites: 5 Comments: 1 Views: 180 Image Specifications: Resolution: 1024x536 Keywords: Mlp fim my little pony friendship is magic fallout equestria minty candy steel ponies brotherhood of steel Nova Tesla cannon “Ugh… my head…” I groaned as I started to gain consciousness again. I tried to put a hoof to rub my head, but I found something was holding it down. I blinked several times, my vision returning to me slowly. I found myself lying on a large metal table that was tilted up. My legs were bound to the table by metal rings, except- My eyes widened as I looked left. Where was my leg?! What happened to my leg? I wiggled my stump of a left leg in panic. Well, at least it healed over well. I tried to pull my legs free, but the bindings were too tight. My armor was missing as well, the cold metal pressed firmly to my back. I focused as I tried to call upon some magic to undo the latches. Nothing more than sparks flew. My panic grew. My horn… shit, did they take my horn too? My heart was pounding as a door in front of opened. The circular lock spun open, the door rising up into the ceiling. A teal pony with a mix of light blue and green mane walked in. She was wearing a dark blue robe and her mane was tied back in a ponytail. She trotted up to me holding a clip-board in her hoof and a pencil in her mouth. “So, how’re you feeling?” She asked, scribbling something down onto her clipboard. I just stared at her, confused and irritated. She looked up from her clipboard, raising an eyebrow. “Well?” “Oh, you know,” I said. “A little stiff, kind of hungry, and wondering what the hell is going on!” I almost shouted, but I tried to retain my composure. After all, if she was to get angry, I’m not exactly holding an advantage. The mare only scrawled down my response before looking back to me, as if expecting another response. “Seriously, where is my leg? Unless you’re planning on giving me an upgrade, I don’t approve of this.” The mare grinned a little. “Your leg contained technology unfit for civilians. Section 23B, Article IV of the Codex states we are to reclaim any technology, functioning or not, deemed to pose a threat to the user, others, the wasteland, or civilization as a whole.” She said. “Your horn was also considered contraband, or at the very least worthy of study. The remaining technology is planned for removal in a few minutes.” The bottom of my stomach fell out. They were planning on tearing open my skull? I could feel my heart pounding in my throat. “B-but… that’s fatal!” My mind went to producing images of scalpels, wire cutters, and nope, didn’t need those ideas. I struggled in my bindings, the mare wheeling in a gurney. She was followed by another pony in robes, this one a unicorn. The teal mare stood over me as the unicorn’s horn began to glow. I felt the bindings around my hooves open. Adrenaline, don’t fail me now! I quickly sat up and punched the mare in her temple. She gave a cry of pain before falling to the floor. I felt the unicorn lift me into the air, to pin me into the gurney as quickly as he could, but he didn’t bother to keep me away from his face. One swift kick in the jaw and he fell to the floor. I stood over them, panting. Ok… ok, calm down, figure something out. Ok… one leg short, running is out of the question. I’m not going to be able to sneak around. I looked down at the stallion’s robes. Well… it might not fool everyone, but it’d better than nothing. I pulled his robes off, slipping them over me. I pulled the hood up over my head, covering the nub of my horn that hadn’t been torn off by these madmares. I looked down the hallway, various exposed pipes were running along the ceiling and under the grated floor. Thankfully it was empty… first things first, find my leg. I turned left down the hall, the claustrophobic passage not helping my nerves. I closed the door behind me, lest the obvious unconscious bodies give me away. I came across another room, and after confirming there was no one hanging around in it, I slipped in. The room looked like an old conference room, a large, round, wooden table sat in the middle, surrounded by chairs. There was a large, tattered flag hanging on the wall. It contained a sun hovering over a moon, twin Alicorns, one white, the other a dark blue circling it. The darker one seemed oddly familiar, but my mind was quickly pulled back to reality as I heard footsteps clanging down the hallway. I slipped into the corner, praying the pony passing by wasn’t going to check on the others. As I stood in the corner, I noticed a gleaming pole leaning against an open locker. The pole itself was simply well polished hardwood, but the top was adorned with a golden head of a unicorn. Upon closer inspection, it looked similar to the unicorn from the memory orb, albeit with a ridiculous grin on its face. Well, this is better than going unarmed. I grabbed the cane, using it partially as a walking stick. I peered down the hall again before sneaking down, hoping I could find my leg soon. I crept through, thankfully not running across anyone else. I was honestly surprised those who were planning on tearing the wires out of my brain hadn’t been alerted yet. I passed by a few rooms, one of which looked like a small library. Come on, there had to be a workshop or vault around here. As I walked through the hallways, I came across a room filled with broken tech. A few other ponies in robes were standing over a large weapon. I scanned the room, and my mood immediately lifted. In a large glass container imbedded in the wall, my leg and horn were being held. I glanced over at the ponies in robes, one reaching for a wrench. I snuck into the room, doing my best to stay hidden. I slipped over to the container, a keypad imbedded in it. Ugh… if my horn wasn’t on the opposite side of the glass I could hack this. Guess stealth isn’t an option now. I lifted up the cane in my hoof, shifting my weight to lean against the wall so I didn’t fall over. I swung the cane into the glass, causing it to shatter and an alarm to go off. I swiped my leg and horn from the cabinet as the two scribes looked up in surprise before their eyes landed on me. I jammed my leg into the mechanical clamp, feeling it close over, the large wire plugging into the one embedded into leg. The scribes each pulled out a laser pistol. Well, I can get my horn later. I dashed out of the room, holding my horn in my teeth. I charged through the hallway, the robed ponies hot on my heels. As I ran, I saw the stallion I’d stolen the robes from walking out of the room, wheeling the gurney in front of him. Thank you, sir! I leapt onto the cart, paddling against the floor with the scepter. I wheeled down the hall, the robed ponies firing at me, a couple ponies in power armor joining them as I sped down the passage way. I leaned to the right and let the bottom of the cane scrape along the floor, attempting to turn along with the hall. The gurney started to lean too far, and I used the staff as a vaulting pole, the gurney falling to block the hall. I galloped ahead, the ponies behind me firing and quickly moving the gurney out of the way. Ach, that was my ear! I ran through a room of computers, one old pony in red robes jumping out of the way of the parade of energy wielding ponies. As I ran through tunnels, more ponies started to follow and the lasers and plasma getting harder to dodge. I turned into a room with two guards standing on either side of the door, an older mare sitting in the center. I skidded to a halt, the ponies behind me ceasing their fire. The mare stood up from her chair. She was wearing purple robes, but they appeared to be much more elaborate than those of the ponies in the workshop. "What is going on?" She demanded. The teal mare who I'd first seen stepped forward. "The outsider managed to escape while we were attempting to bring him to study." She said. The purple robed mare nodded, waving a hoof to dismiss the crowd. All aside from the teal mare and the stallion from who I'd stolen the robes obeyed. The older mare sat back down behind her circular desk. "Nova... did you follow protocol?" The mare asked. The younger mare looked away, her ears flopping down. The older mare sighed before turning to me. "Well, outsider, now that you've seen our inner workings and I doubt you have a good impression with us, why shouldn't I have the guards proceed with the operation?" She asked coldly. My already racing heart sped up, sweat starting to bead up. "W-well," I began, spitting my horn into my hoof. "Obviously you have a fascination with my... tech." I took a breath, trying my best to calm down a bit. "But, wouldn't it be better to study a live... uh, specimin?" I asked. The mare nodded slowly as the stallion trotted over and jabbed my side. I started to take off the robes as the mare simply said, "A fair point. Go on." I handed the robes off to the stallion, who took it roughly. He also took the staff from me before turning to leave. I shifted a little, trying to collect my thoughts. "You don't know exactly how these work." I said, motioning to my horn. "Tearing out the wires would only give you a vague idea, and you couldn't put them to any use after studying them." The mare nodded again, and I gained a little confidence. "Suppose I allow you to run a couple tests on me and afterwards I'm let out of here. With my armor and weapons." I said. The mare thought the idea over a little before speaking. "You have a deal, outsider, but bear in mind you will not be allowed to speak of this bunker's location beyond its walls." I nodded and the mare looked to Nova. "Take him for testing, but leave him alive." She said. Nova immediately brightened up. "Yes mo- Elder Quazar." She started to lead me down the narrow halls of the bunker. "You have no idea how glad I am, I was worried you'd be killed for sure!" She said excitedly. I cocked my head to one side, confused. "Wait... but you were the one who was going to take me to be killed in the first place." I said. Nova grimiced a little as we took a right down another hall. A few more ponies were trotting around in power armor and robes... I think I even spotted the one we ran into at the Megaspell testing facility. "Well, those were orders. Believe me, if I had the ability to convince the Elder, there's no way you'd even been on that table in the first place." She said. We turned into a small room with various device lying on tables. She walked to one with a small needle protruding from one end. "Here, place your hoof next to the needle." I complied, Nova pressing a button which shot the needling quickly into and out of my hoof. "Just a DNA test, more a formality than the others." She then led me to a small machine with several wires and nodes spread out along side it. "We normally use this one to measure brain activity to see if somepony is lying. I hope whatever you have in your head won't blow the circuitry." She giggled, starting to place nodes in various spots on my temple and forehead. I noticed she seemed a bit too... loving with the movements, for lack of a better word. As if she was worried she'd press to hard down and hurt me. "Alright... try levitating the pencil around a bit." She said, removing one from her robes and placing it beside the machine. I focused, a little surprised my magic reserves still had some energy remaining, and an aura appeared around the pencil. The machine started to tick quietly, paper flowing from one end as several needles sketched lines on it. I made the pencil rotate, fly left, right, up, and down as Nova studied the paper. "Well... I have to say this is... interesting." She said, a light blush appearing on her face. If I just found another pony as obsessed with machinery as much as me, Cross might have a little competition! We continued, levitating larger objects, performing more complex acts, and I demonstrated how I recharged my magic supply, Nova taking notes all the while. "Well, that looks like everything for now. Let's check the DNA information to see if there's anything you need to correct. It can be a little unreliable sometimes." She said. We walked over to the machine that had taken a sample of my blood, a new paper with digital lettering having printed itself out from the side. Nova tore off the paper, scanning it. "White... blue mane... unicorn... It all looks correct. Hang on.... there's a relative that's popped up in our databanks." She said. I raised an eyebrow. Was this the machine acting up? Nova scanned the paper repeatedly. "No... this... but... no..." Her eyes grew wide as she scanned it again. "This says... your grandmother was Elder Quazar's mother... You... I..." She didn't need to finish the statement for me to put the pieces together, my eyes widening a bit too. She stood still for a moment, horrified. Then suddenly said loudly. "I was trying to sleep with my cousin? Ew, ew, ew, euch!" She said, dropping the paper. I stepped back from her, both of us freaking out a bit. My cousin tried to hit on me! She didn't know but... gross! As we freaked out though, a resounding "boom" echoed through the bunker, throwing each of us off balance a bit. "What was that?" I asked, worried. Nova paused for a moment, before drawing her pistol. "I think we're under attack! And whoever it is has large artillery!" I gulped, hoping Twintails hadn't just decided to start a one colt suicide run to get me. "Come on, let's get your stuff!" She said, running out of the room. I ran after her, power armor clad ponies rushing past us towards, presumably, the exit. We entered an armory, Nova punching in a code on a locker. It opened up, revealing my gear. I grabbed it, slipping it on as Nova ran to an intercom. "Mom? Mom, I've got Minty... the outsider... it doesn't matter how I found out his name, but we're getting his stuff, he's going to help us defend the attackers. Yes, yes I'll be careful." She paused for a moment, blushing, before whispering. "I love you too." She took her hoof off the intercom button as I finished sliding on my armor. I was about to draw my rifle when I noticed another, large, wrapped up object in the locker. I was sure I didn't have anything on me this big when I was in the hotel... I pulled it out, letting the fabric, which seemed very similar to the robes worn by Nova, if not as elaborate, slide off. My heart practically froze. I had a full blown, Mark IV Tesla Cannon in my aura. I squeed, lifting it onto my shoulder. I buckled a bit beneath its weight, but just the feeling of its smooth glass and exposed wires running along my neck. Ooh, I think I'm in love. Along the back end was inscribed a fancy "i", and whoever it meant, I thanked them to the very heavens for this gun. Nova looked back at me, her expression turning to one of surprise immediately. "Where did you get that?!" She asked. I only chuckled, walking with some difficulty out of the room. I followed the group of guards to the exit, itching to fire this thing off. As I stepped out into the cold air, I saw a small figure dart about. I shifted the Cannon slowly before magically pulling the trigger. I felt the electricity jump from the cannon, to me, to into the air, sending a tingle down my spine again... and almost knocking me over. I grinned. I may have missed, but I was more than willing to fire again. Just as I was about to though, my eyes landed on a familiar golden figure armed with shoulder mounted machine guns... "Twintails?"Prime Minister Tony Abbott has promised a "no jab, no pay" policy will help curb the rising rates of conscientious objection to immunisation. "We are reducing the grounds on which people can object," he said in Sydney today. Under the reforms, which are expected to be supported by the Labor opposition, people who do not have their children vaccinated will only be able to receive benefits if they object on religious or medical grounds. "If we want our children to be safe, if we want our families to be secure, it's important that all our youngsters are immunised," Mr Abbott said. "This is a very important community objective to raise immunisation rates as high as they can possibly go." The changes are set to come into effect from next year. It will mean parents who fail to immunise their children will no longer be paid the $200-a-week childcare benefit, the $7500-a-year childcare rebate or the $726 Family Tax Benefit A annual supplement. Objectors often claim vaccinations can cause conditions such as autism in children. However, medical professionals say there is no evidence vaccines have any negative affect. With AAP. © Nine Digital Pty Ltd 2019The Colorado State men’s basketball team took their frustrations out on the court Saturday night, ending a two-game losing skid with a 64-56 road victory over the Utah State Aggies. In a game which the Rams never trailed, CSU (12-8, 4-3 Mountain West) won with a gritty defensive effort and smart, unselfish team basketball on the other end. Emmanuel Omogbo shined in the victory, leading the team in scoring and picking up the 18th double-double of his career (20 points, 16 rebounds). Omogbo’s 10 double-double’s this season leads the Mountain West. His presence is vital to this team on both ends of the floor and the senior did a nice job at putting himself in a position where he could stay on the floor and help close out the victory. “We had some good days leading up to today,” CSU head coach Larry Eustachy said in a statement. “When we started the Fresno State game, we got the tip and Prentiss (Nixon) flipped it back with one hand to J.D. (Paige) and the rest was history. Today he snapped it back to him. We are talking about maturing an inch at a time and I thought we showed great poise until the very end and that’s just immaturity trying to mature. But what a win.” Advertisement Along with a strong performance from Omogbo, the Rams guards also played a big role in the victory by protecting the basketball. Gian Clavell, J.D. Paige and Prentiss Nixon combined for just three turnovers while contributing a total of 38 points. After being blown out by the Bulldogs Wednesday night, Saturday night’s victory was huge for a Rams team that has struggled to do the basics over the last couple of games. Tonight, the Rams were able to get back to what they do best, which is playing strong defense and owning the post. The Rams out-rebounded the Aggies 41-37, while holding them to 37 percent shooting from the field. Colorado State has won the rebounding battle in 12 of their 20 games this season, going 10-1 in those contests. The win over the Aggies is just the second of Larry Eustachy’s Colorado State tenure and first since March 7, 2015. The win also puts the program at one game above.500 in their 115-year history (1,228 – 1,227). Colorado State will take the court again this Wednesday, when they host the San Jose Spartans (9-8) at Moby Arena. Collegian sports reporter Justin Michael can be reached by email at sports@collegian.com or Twitter @JustinTMichael.(CNN) On Saturday night a vehicle drove near Vice President Joe Biden's residence in Delaware and fired multiple gun shots, but the vice president and his wife, Jill, were not home at the time, Secret Service spokesman Robert Hoback told CNN. The incident occurred around 8:28 p.m. "A vehicle drove by the vice president's residence at a high rate of speed and fired multiple gun shots. This occurred on a public road outside the established security perimeter. The shots were heard by Secret Service personnel posted at the residence and a vehicle was observed by an agent leaving the scene at a high rate of speed," Hoback said. There were also reports of shots fired nearby, according to the New Castle County Police Department. "Officers learned a short time later there was a report of shots fired in the nearby area of Hoopes Reservoir," the police said on Sunday in a statement. The vice president was expected to spend the weekend in Delaware. A spokesperson for Biden says the vice president and his wife were briefed on the incident on Saturday night. President Barack Obama was also briefed on Saturday night, according to a White House official. Thorough searches will be conducted on the outside of Biden's residence and nearby residences to see if any rounds hit any structure, a Secret Service official separately told CNN. The vice president's residence is several hundred yards away from the main road from where the shots were fired. But according to county police officials, no damage was found at any of the local residences. JUST WATCHED State of the Union: 67 years in 67 seconds Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH State of the Union: 67 years in 67 seconds 01:09 New Castle Delaware County police are working with the Secret Service and the FBI's Baltimore division to investigate the incident. "While the incident scene was being searched at approximately [9 p.m.], an individual in a vehicle attempted to pass a New Castle County police officer who was securing the outer perimeter of the area. As a result of the interaction with the officer, this individual was arrested for resisting arrest," Hoback said. The New Castle Country police confirmed on Sunday that the man was not charged in relation to the shooting. A Secret Service official told CNN that individual will be questioned regarding the shooting incident to see if he was involved.Rapidly growing banks of mosses on Antarctica's northern peninsula striking evidence of climate change Researchers in Antarctica have discovered rapidly growing banks of mosses on the ice continent's northern peninsula, providing striking evidence of climate change in the coldest and most remote parts of the planet.Amid the warming of the last 50 years, the scientists found two different species of mosses undergoing the equivalent of growth spurts, with mosses that once grew less than a millimeter per year, now growing over 3 millimeters per year on average."People will think of Antarctica quite rightly as a very icy place, but our work shows that parts of it are green, and are likely to be getting greener," said Matthew Amesbury, a researcher with the University of Exeter in the UK and lead author of the new study. "Even these relatively remote ecosystems, that people might think are relatively untouched by human kind, are showing the effects of human induced climate change."The study was published Thursday in Current Biology, by Amesbury and colleagues with Cambridge University, the British Antarctic Survey, and the University of Durham.Less than 1 percent of present-day Antarctica features plant life. But in parts of the peninsula, Antarctic mosses grow on frozen ground that partly thaws in the summer - when only about the first foot of soil ever thaws up.The surface mosses build up a thin layer in the summer, then freeze over in winter. As layer builds on top of layer, older mosses subside below the frozen ground, where they are remarkably well preserved due to the temperatures.Amesbury said that made them "a record of changes over time."Soil samples from a 400-mile area along the northern part of the Antarctic peninsula found dramatic changes in growth patterns going back 150 years.The Antarctic peninsula has been a site of rapid warming, with more days a year where temperatures rise above freezing. The consequence, the study found, was a four- to fivefold increase in the amount of moss growth in the most recent part of the record."This is another indicator that Antarctica is moving backward in geologic
is progress. The fact that, as previously mentioned, some of the biggest bands in the world have covered his songs (usually “The Money Will Roll Right In”) also helps provide him focus. “It was too hard to even fathom, especially when I was still in prison,” he says. “There’s definitely a feeling when you’ve been incarcerated for a number of years that you’re never getting out. I’ll never forget — they let me out and my wife at the time was driving me home, and I kept looking in the rearview mirror, looking behind the car, expecting them to say, ‘Oh no, this was a mistake, you have to come back.’ When I started hearing that huge bands were doing [Fang songs], it was too hard to even wrap my mind around.” So Sammytown is going to keep doing his thing — with Fang, with the Promise Sober Living House, with the Tiger’s Blood Social Club tattoo parlor. What choice does he have? And for those people justifiably thinking, “He should never be allowed to forget what he did,” rest assured that he never will. Prison changed him, for the better, but it didn’t wipe his memory. “I had a lot of big changes in prison,” Sammytown says. “I had a moment of clarity when I had gotten clean and it really changed everything. But I also think that prison will either break people or change them in positive ways. More often than not, though, people do not change in positive ways. It makes people worse. I think I was extremely lucky. A lot of prisoners go to prison and never get out, or they cannot keep themselves from just repeating the same mistake, doing it over and over again.” Fang will be at Alex’s Bar on Feb. 16, and the choice is yours to go or not. There will be new and old songs aired. There will be a pit of friends and fans going wild, because many people believe that redemption is a real thing. As for Sammytown, he’s not asking for sympathy. He’s not asking for success. He’s not even asking for forgiveness. He’s just trying to be the best man he can be, today. Fang play with Stalag 13, Rhino 39 and Spider at Alex's Bar on Thursday, Feb. 16. Tickets and more info.A new land has been discovered! As the ruler of your own tiny kingdom, this is your big chance to expand your territory and (more importantly) make some serious gold. But the rulers of the other nearby kingdoms have also learned of this new land, and they're gathering their troops for battle! Prepare for all-out war as you try to build bigger villages than your neighbors... no matter what it takes! Villages is a casual rummy-style card game with a competitive edge. The rules are simple--collect 3 or more cards of the same color and lay them down to build a village. Build bigger villages than everyone else to earn more gold! But not everybody likes to play nice. If another player's village contains a card you'd like to have (or if you're just feeling mean!), you can fight them for it in a one-on-one duel. Each unit has its strengths and weaknesses, so a knowledge of each unit's unique abilities (and a little bit of luck) is crucial to winning the battle and taking home the prize. How you decide to play is up to you, but one thing is clear: the only way to send your rivals packing is to be the first to earn 100 gold coins. Do you have what it takes to rule an empire? Villages supports 2 to 5 players and takes between 30 minutes and an hour to play. After playing a few hands of rummy with some friends one night, I got the idea to add a battle mechanic to make the game more interactive. The concept took off quickly from there, and it wasn't long until I had a completely new game on my hands. I released the first edition of Villages on The Game Crafter, an awesome print-on-demand site for board games and card game, back in November of 2011. It was a fun personal project and I didn't really expect to sell very many copies, but thought I'd take a chance and put it up for sale anyway. Since then, Villages has become one of the best-selling games on the site, and it was chosen as a Game Crafter staff pick in October of 2012. I've sold copies of Villages at two local conventions and I sold out both times. I've even been told by a grateful mother that my game was the only item on her son's Christmas wishlist after he played it at a birthday party. (That news gave me butterflies for a week.) JT, a founder of The Game Crafter, gave the game 5/5 stars and left this review: You can read more reviews like this one at the Villages shop page on The Game Crafter. Working on Villages has been a constant source of pleasant surprises and fun experiences. I still love playing it with the same group of friends who first helped me develop the idea. Honestly, I can't seem to get enough of it! And now, I want to run this Kickstarter campaign to share a new edition of the game with even more potential fans and give everyone a chance to try it out. I've taken everything I've learned about game design over the past few years and applied it to this brand new edition. It's more fair and more fun, and I think you'll enjoy it whether you've played a previous edition before or not. Thanks for stopping by to check out Villages. I hope you like it as much as I do. Want to support Villages and get a copy of your own? Check out the pledge levels listed below! The Farmer level includes: Update notifications Ability to leave comments The ability to claim a free +1 Power bonus in a game of Villages. May only be used once, ever. The Builder level includes: Villages (PnP) See the Add-ons section below for expansion PnP file prices. All backers who order a physical copy of the game or expansions will also receive the corresponding PnP files for free. The Knight reward level includes: Villages (Small Box) Any Small Box version of Villages can be upgraded to the Medium Box version for free. The Ace reward level includes: Villages (Small Box) Anyone who can make it is invited to the party and can pick up their rewards there, even if you don't get the Ace level. We'll work out the details later. The Wizard reward level includes: Big Box Villages Distant Lands Ghost Town The Archer reward level includes: Villages (Small Box) x3 The Dragon reward level includes: Big Box Villages Distant Lands Ghost Town Holiday Pack A pair of Power Dice (red, black, or mix) The Princess reward level includes: Big Box Villages Distant Lands OR Ghost Town Royalty Pack (KS Exclusive) Custom card design in Royalty Pack The Queen reward level includes: Big Box Villages Distant Lands Ghost Town Holiday Pack Royalty Pack (KS Exclusive) A pair of Power Dice (red, black, or mix) Custom card design in Royalty Pack The King reward level includes: Big Box Villages Distant Lands Ghost Town Holiday Pack Royalty Pack (KS Exclusive) A pair of Power Dice (red, black, or mix) x2 Early base game delivery Custom Super Villager for everyone Once you've chosen your reward, show your support with some Villages avatars! Just add extra money to your pledge to add these bonuses to your reward. After the campaign ends, you'll receive a survey that will ask for any necessary details regarding these add-ons, so don't sweat the small stuff for now. Villages contains 90 cards and a rulebook. or +$2 for the PnP file only. Distant Lands is a Villages expansion that introduces new units, animals, and buildings from the farthest corners of the world. Expand your territory by exploring the new location deck, adding new rules and challenges to every game. Do you have what it takes to rule an empire? Distant Lands will contain about 40-45 cards. or +$2 for the PnP file only. Ghost Town introduces the evil Dark cards, including such horrors as Zombies, Skeletons, and Vampires. Will you survive the night on your own? Or will you be forced to call upon the power of the divine Light cards to thwart the forces of darkness? Ghost Town will contain about 40-45 cards. or +$1 for the PnP file only. When a pure-hearted king went looking for new allies in the midst of a terrible war, he discovered a band of mythological beings that were thought to only exist in fairy tales. In the name of protecting the seasons and holidays they represent, legends such as Santa, Mother Nature, and Uncle Sam joined the king's armies and turned the tide of battle. The Holiday Pack will contain about 12 cards. or +$2 for the PnP file only. Add the 30 custom cards created by the Princess and Queen backers to your game! Only they know what kind of interesting cards this pack will contain... This pack is eligible for the Early Delivery option. Kickstarter Exclusive. What are Power Dice? They are an optional component of Villages that adds a bit more luck and drama to each battle. Each time two units face off on the battlefield, each participating player rolls one of these dice and adds the value to their unit's power. These dice will be manufactured by Daft Concepts, who recently ran their own successful Daft Dice Kickstarter campaign. You'll be able to choose black dice, red dice, or one of each. The numbers on the black dice are a bit safer (0-1-1-2-2-3), while the red dice have a wider range of results (0-0-1-1-3-4). +$5 shipping to Canada Builders (getting PnP files only) +$10 shipping to other International Builders (getting PnP files only) These Kickstarter-exclusive Villages card sleeves will feature high-quality full color art on the back! See Update #20 for more info and a breakdown of card counts in each deck. Sleeved cards won't fit in the Small Boxes, so be sure to remember this if you are considering the Small Boxes in Big Box add-on! Kickstarter Exclusive. +$4 shipping to Canada. +$8 shipping to other International. Knight backers can choose to receive their game in a the Small Box or Medium Box. Upgrade to the Big Box with this add-on! See Update #19 for more information. Normally, the Big Box doesn't come with any of the individual Small Boxes inside of it, but this add-on will get you all of the Small Boxes for the base game and expansions! This add-on requires a Big Box first, meaning it's available to Wizards, Dragons, royalty, and Knights who also get the add-on directly above. Sleeved cards won't fit in the Small Boxes, so be sure to remember this if you are also considering the Card Sleeves add-on! Each Archer bundle includes three (3) copies of Villages. Each Dragon bundle includes one (1) copy each of Villages, Distant Lands, Ghost Town, and the Holiday Pack, as well as a pair of Power Dice. The base game is going to be ready earlier than the expansions, but shipping is very expensive, especially to countries outside the US. Because of this, if you order any expansions, your base game will be held until everything can go out in one package. But if you don't think you can wait that long, you can pay for the full price of the extra shipment and I will send you the base game (and Royalty Pack) as soon as it's ready, a full 2 months or so before the expansions are finished. If you did not order any expansions, you will get your game at the early date without the extra shipping costs. See Update #9 for more information. The following items can be delivered early: Villages Royalty Pack Power Dice Card Sleeves If we go above and beyond our campaign goal, everyone who gets a copy of the game will also get some extra bonuses. These include the Super Villagers, special cards with extraordinary abilities. As more stretch goals are reached, more Super Villagers will join the fight. These cards may appear later as a paid mini-expansion for the rest of the world, but Kickstarter backers get them for free! The King reward level also allows YOU to design your very own Super Villager and add him or her to every copy the game sent to backers as part of the Kickstarter campaign. Your card will take its place alongside any Super Villagers unlocked by these stretch goals! Another type of stretch goal is Alternate Art. These are limited-edition upgrades to the card or packaging artwork, one piece at a time. Because each unit appears multiple times in the game, the Alternate Art will be used to replace duplicates. Kickstarter Exclusive. Kickstarter Exclusive. Kickstarter Exclusive. Check update #5 for more information. You can also read more about the previous versions of these expansions at the links below. Adds the Gambler bonus card to each set of Power Dice. His power level is decided by a roll of the dice! Kickstarter Exclusive. Check Update #18 and Update #19 for pictures and more information. Kickstarter Exclusive. Villages: Gold Vault is a score tracker app that lets you easily keep track of your earnings from one round to the next. It will be available for free on iOS and Android! See Update #11 for more information about this little guy. Backers who add Power Dice to their pledge can choose red dice, black dice, or one of each! Kickstarter Exclusive. Unlocks Alternate Art for the Warrior, Thief, Archer, Assassin, and Princess! Kickstarter Exclusive. Village Assault is a new variant of Villages that you can play by yourself (or compete with friends to see who can get the highest score). As a greedy warlord, all that stands between you and the treasure of your dreams is a valley full of unsuspecting enemy villages. No problem! Carefully manage a dwindling army as you fight your way through wave after wave of enemies, taking prisoners and hiring troops along the way. How many villages will you destroy before you are forced to admit defeat? Check out the free rules PDF! Unlocks Alternate Art for the King, Ace, Scout, Orc, and Builder! Kickstarter Exclusive. Create your own cards! The Villages Cardsmith Kit is a digital content package that contains everything you need to design your own Villages cards and print them at home. I'll even set up a community forum where you can share your cards and ideas with other Villages fans! Work won't begin on this kit until later this year after the expansions have been delivered, but it will be worth the wait! They came from the depths of the ocean... All remaining Alternate Art unlocked! Every card with multiple copies in the base game will get a second sprite. Kickstarter Exclusive. Each expansion (Distant Lands, Ghost Town, and the Holiday Pack) will get a Super Villager! That's 3 Super Villagers in one stretch goal! Whaaat?! If we hit this legendary stretch goal, I'll take 30 of the best cards created with the Cardsmith Kit, as voted on by the Villages community, and turn them into an official printed expansion! If you missed your chance to join the royalty during this campaign, why not try your hand at democracy? Even better, this expansion will come a few months after everyone's had a chance to become Villages experts, so you know it'll bring something fresh and polished to the table! The final stretch goal. The goal to rule them all. Thank you for an amazing campaign, backers! For those of you who have played Villages before, here's a detailed run-down on what's different about the new edition: Improvements were made to some of the unit sprites, the box art, and the backs of the cards. The new design of the card face also allows for longer names and more lines of ability text than before. Two colors have been removed from the game: pink and brown. Having fewer colors means it's easier to build villages, it's more likely that another player will have a village you want to steal from, and cards like the Ace and Wizard become more exciting. All in all, it's just more fun. Some cards from the expansions are now part of the base game, including the Archer, Scout, Golem, Goblin, Merchant, Bunny, and Tavern. I felt that these cards added so much to the basic gameplay that I just couldn't leave them out of the core set. A few new cards will eventually fill the gaps they left behind. A few brand new units, the Joker and the Orc, have also found their way into the base game, while the Brute and Paladin have been removed. The Breeder is now a Farmer. He does the same thing, though. Most units have had their base power or ability text tweaked to provide a wider range of power levels and simpler, more useful abilities. Attackers now win ties. But don't worry: the penalties for losing a battle are now a bit more lenient. If you attack someone and win, you now have to choose between sending the losing unit to the graveyard and stealing a card. If the defending player hired their defending unit, it will go to the graveyard anyway, but they can now guarantee that they will lose no more than 1 card during a battle by sending out a defending unit from their village. This helps weaker villages stay on the table longer and gives them a chance to turn the tide. There are two special cards included with the game that help make the Hero and Goblin much easier to understand. The High Score and Low Score cards are handed out to the appropriate players at the end of each round, and the Hero and Goblin refer to the owners of these cards, rather than their score directly. This avoids the ambiguity around what it means to be in "last place" or what a player's "total score" is. The game now includes a fancy full-color rule-book, full of diagrams and bullet points. There are also reference cards that outline the steps of a turn, the steps of battle, and how to score your villages at the end of the round. I have a few other game ideas in the works, not only for card games, but also for larger board games and even video games or mobile apps. I never quite know where my mind will take me next, but I know I'll definitely be working on something and sharing it with the world. I've never been happy doing otherwise.A 30-year-old man was shot in the head Sunday morning after a confrontation over a car that was double-parked, police said. The shooting happened about 3:30 a.m. in the 7100 block of South Maplewood Avenue in the Marquette Park neighborhood, police said, one of three shootings overnight that left three people wounded. Police said the 30-year-old man was shot in the head after an argument, ran west and fell in an alley where an ambulance picked him up and took him to Advocate Christ Medical Center. He was "walking, talking, breathing, living," according to police. According to a witness, the confrontation started when a car with two men inside tried to slide past the parked car on Maplewood Avenue. The eventual victim was on the sidewalk next to the parked car. The parked car was partially blocking the street, the witness said, but there was enough room for the other car to get by. According to the witness, a woman in the parked car exchanged words with the other car's driver, and the man who eventually was shot told the two men, "Go ahead on now, we're cool, we not on that." The second car's driver moved past the parked car, stopped at the corner of 72nd and Maplewood, about 50 yards south. One of the two men got out of the vehicle, walked up close to the eventual victim, lifted a handgun and said "Talk that (expletive) now" before firing a single shot, the witness said. The man who was shot and the witness, his friend, are both from DeKalb and were in town to celebrate the 29th birthday of the witness. The man who was shot has family on the block, the witness said. Soon after the shooting on Maplewood, a 27-year-old woman was shot in the South Shore neighborhood, police said. The woman was shot in the chest and leg in the 7500 block of South Coles Avenue about 3:37 a.m., said Chicago Police Department News Affairs Officer Michael Sullivan. She'd been seated inside her vehicle in front of a residence there when a blue car pulled up and someone inside shot her multiple times, said News Affairs Officer John Mirabelli. The woman was taken to Northwestern Memorial Hospital where her condition had stabilized, said Mirballi. In the Belmont Central neighborhood on the Northwest Side, in the 2800 block of North Melvina Avenue, a 35-year-old man was shot in the leg about 1:35 a.m. It's not clear where he has been hospitalized. pnickeas@tribune.com Twitter: @peternickeasMyths can fix themselves to events with remarkable rapidity. Established wisdom already has it that the general election was a triumph for Labour, that those who previously doubted Jeremy Corbyn’s suitability to be leader did so solely or even principally on grounds of his electability, and that even those who remain unconvinced by the leadership thought highly of the manifesto. As the summer ends, I want to look briefly at what seems to have happened on 8 June, and to argue that we are almost as far from power today as we were before the election, that in important respects we might actually be further, and that both our manifesto and our political strategy for the campaign left much to be desired. It is testament to the astonishingly low expectations people had for Labour in this election that being 60 or so seats short of an absolute majority, and almost a hundred seats short of our last election-winning performance in 2005, has somehow been cast as a triumph (or at any rate a good result). I am delighted by all the new additions to the Parliamentary Labour Party and pleased that there were so few losses, but I find it hard to rejoice in a result that gives us fewer than ten seats more than we managed in 2010 when we were last kicked out of power. Seven years of Tory austerity and incompetence have passed since then, but we are pretty much back to where we started: a hung parliament where the Tories have to do deals with a minor party. There has been almost no net improvement to the parliamentary arithmetic for Labour. I am sitting on the same green benches listening to the same Tory ministers take decisions about the future of our country. I have 30 more colleagues than I did six months ago, and that’s great, but I never forget we still need another 60 or so before we can hope to govern Britain. In the first week or so after the election, the narrative developed that it was young people who won it for Labour. Leaving aside for a moment the point that Labour didn’t actually win, this strikes me as a rather inadequate analysis. If a lot more young people voted than in the past, and yet turnout was still, overall, below 1997 levels and only up slightly on 2015, then others were staying at home. Whether more of them were Tory supporters staying at home, or Labour supporters staying at home, isn’t clear to me – at least, not yet. Turnout in my seat, where almost half of the electorate has a postal vote, was a little higher than usual, but I am still working through the marked register before forming a judgement about what exactly happened in terms of voting patterns. Among the postal voters with whom I spoke in the first half of May, there certainly seemed to have been a huge swing towards the Conservatives. Yet because postal votes drop early in Sunderland, many people had already voted before the first terrorist attack of the campaign and – critically – before the Tory manifesto started to unravel. Lord Ashcroft’s polling suggests that many Labour voters made up their minds to support us later in the campaign than Tory voters, but what his polling doesn’t cover so clearly is who decided not to vote at all. Crucially, the structure of our vote can change sharply even as the numbers change little. This brings me to three observations which I think can be safely made already. The first is that the structure of our vote did change in this election, or perhaps more accurately, continued to change. That change should concern all of us who believe that the Labour Party was founded to represent the working people of this country, that we are at our best when we look afresh in every generation at who is most disadvantaged by society as it stands, and what we need to do to improve their lives. The shift in the Labour vote is borne out by the loss of seats like Mansfield and North East Derbyshire, as well as some traditional marginals such as Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland that we had previously held for 20 years. We hung on only by the skin of our teeth in seats like Ashfield and Dudley North. This underlines that the patterns of the past – rural areas returning Labour MPs if they are also mining country – are slowly fading as the mines pass from memory. Labour is becoming, slowly but unmistakably, a party of the larger towns and cities, a party of graduates and young people, a party of the socially liberal. I do not wish for a moment to suggest that any of these groups of people should be unwelcome among our supporters, but merely to note that we are not the same as the party we once were. The second observation is about how our surprise at the set of victories we did achieve has blinded us to the bigger picture. It is often said that history is written by the victors, but we have become so self-absorbed as a movement that we have ceased to pay much attention even to the victors, and our narrative of this general election is being written instead by a dominant faction among the losers. By contrast, the real victors – the Tories – are very clear about why they didn’t win a bigger victory. In an era when campaigns seem to matter more than before, senior Tories freely admit that they ran an astonishingly poor one. ConservativeHome’s recent stories of the string of failings at the heart of the Conservative machine are eye-opening in two ways: they reveal quite what a mess they made of their campaign, and they also identify all the things the Tories will be carefully and painstakingly making sure they don’t get wrong next time. Their tortured navel-gazing is different from the narratives circulating on our side both in substance and in structure: when they fail, the Tories examine their own weaknesses rather than blaming their misfortunes on the Opposition. The third observation starts from an acknowledgement that this was a sharply polarised election, with the two major parties taking over 80 per cent of the vote between them. It is worth remembering that before Paul Nuttall and Ukip imploded in Stoke, and before the Liberal Democrats failed to make any headway in the local elections, it seemed quite plausible to expect the slow demise of the two-party system to continue. Indeed, many confident predictions were made when the snap general election was called that Labour would get less than 30 per cent of the vote – all predicated on an equally confident assumption that minor parties would account for at least a quarter. In the end, nothing of the sort happened, and the minor parties were squeezed across the board. While Labour successfully pulled together a coalition of people who wanted an end to the Conservative government, we nonetheless failed the sole test that matters: we secured fewer seats than the Tories. * Given that uncomfortable fact, it’s no good saying that we got a higher vote share than Blair did in 2005: in 2005 the Tories took 32.4 per cent of the vote and this time they took 42.4 per cent. The test for us at every election is to beat the Tories, not to set a new personal best: a parliamentary election is a race, not a parkrun. What this election therefore demonstrated all too clearly was that we have so far failed to make much progress towards attracting that key component of a winning coalition: previous supporters of the Conservative Party. Switchers from the Tories count double: a vote on our pile, and a vote off the pile we need to beat. Without switchers, there can be no victory. Core vote plus protest vote is not a route to Downing Street. We should have understood this lesson from 2015 if we’d not learnt it in the 1980s. After all, this was by far the worst Tory campaign that anyone can remember. It was led by a Prime Minister running away from the media as if she were afraid, defined by a core policy of their manifesto ripped up after no more than a week, and a tone of relentless negativity – without even a contrasting message about what a Tory government would actually do – on which many of my constituents commented. Even in a fight with that, we lost. Jeremy lost against the weakest Tory leader and the weakest Tory campaign anyone can remember or imagine. The miracle of this election isn’t that we did so well. It’s that up against what appears to have been an election special of The Thick of It, we nonetheless contrived to lose – and then reimagined that as success. And that distorted history is perhaps most notable for the starring role the manifesto has now been given in the victory that didn’t happen. A manifesto should provide a crisp vision of how Britain could and will be better with Labour, by making clear in-principle commitments that can carry legislation through parliament. Manifestos, as opposed to campaigns, are aimed at the Salisbury Convention, future backbench rebels, and the civil service. They are not aimed at the floating voter, and they need not nail down every detail. If David Axelrod thought our offer in 2015 was too much like "vote Labour and get a microwave", then a whole kitchen’s worth of appliances was on offer this time. I mean that on two levels. Firstly, there was a lot more on offer in terms of the number of policies that would have required substantial new spending commitments – far more indeed than during the fiscal conservatism of the Balls/Miliband era. My main concern isn’t primarily whether these policies were all properly costed in the funding document released alongside the manifesto, but that – to stretch that kitchen metaphor a little – the policy offerings weren’t fitted together very well. The manifesto contained plenty of uncontroversial things that should be part of any Labour manifesto, plus a variety of policies and positions for which the case is less clear. There was a healthy dose of ideas popular with the wider movement and activists, but neither straightforward to achieve nor a high priority for my constituents. One notable example was the pledge to renationalise the railways – are railways really the assets a Labour government most urgently needs to acquire so as to pursue social justice? There was also some nostalgic posturing such as the creation of a new Ministry of Labour – is this really a priority in 21st century Britain? There were some significant resource transfers towards middle-income families, above all through the outright abolition of tuition fees. Welcome pledges for more funding for the NHS were accompanied by a set of detailed commitments to halt local strategic planning of health services, while a promise to deliver health services without any apparent regard to cost could have been transcribed word-for-word from a protestor’s placard. I have also begun to question, following discussion with health professionals and academics, whether Andy Burnham’s much-trumpeted National Care Service is in fact the best way of sorting out the funding and provision of long term social care. By focusing on structures and governance, not outcomes and efficiency, I think it falls into the same trap as Tony Blair’s later public sector reforms. This was all topped off with a marked reluctance to countenance any change to the amount of money we transfer as a society from working people to pensioners. To put it bluntly, our manifesto was a nod to every stakeholder and lobbyist, as if the Clause V meeting was like the caucus-race in Alice in Wonderland where all must have prizes. The shopping list feel to the manifesto reflected a second, deeper problem: there was no vision or strategy behind our electoral offer to engage in any detail with the context in which we find ourselves. Last year I wrote an article highlighting Labour’s failure to properly come to terms with the transformation of our economy, culture, and society since we last won an election. There was little in our manifesto to give me confidence the leadership is rising to that challenge. The promises on the NHS could not have been kept in a country without easy access to migrant medical labour. Above all, the economic backdrop following the EU referendum was not one we were prepared to spell out to people. Unless there is a deal, or at least a transitional period to soften the blow, the impact of leaving the EU will be a very long winter for working people in which any spending promises – from either Labour or from the Conservatives – will be extremely hard to deliver. Tony Blair was therefore quite right to point out that there is no majority for a hard Brexit, that the supposed advantages of a soft Brexit over continued membership might not in fact exist, and that in time people might reconsider their vote in the referendum as the reality of leaving came close, or came to pass. While we successfully dodged taking a clear view on Europe in the manifesto, and I am very pleased we are now in our opposition to the government’s horrendous repeal legislation, we should take a long hard look at ourselves. A jobs-first Brexit is a great soundbite, nothing more. The final criticism of the manifesto’s depressing inadequacy I want to make is perhaps the most personal. Before I came into parliament, I managed a refuge, near where I grew up, for women escaping domestic violence. I will always argue in favour of funding refuges properly, because I know what it’s like to manage a tight budget with little long term security. Managing a service that helps desperately vulnerable people taught me that starving those services of money is a vile and cowardly saving for any government to make. But refuges, by their nature, are a symptom rather than a cause of domestic violence. Tackling problems in our society always takes more than a blank cheque for the victims, even if there are many worse places to start. It requires imagination to identify causes, the determination to introduce policies to tackle them, and a willingness to track results, so as to learn from failure and from success alike. This was all completely absent from the section on domestic violence in our manifesto: in fact you could read it through without discovering that domestic violence has perpetrators as well as victims. More broadly, the rich vein of learning from the successes and failures of efforts at improving outcomes in public services between 1997 and 2010 seems a foreign literature to the leadership and the advisers around them. Perhaps more charitably, it is at best a form of learning they wear lightly. But incoherence and inadequacy do not exhaust the criticisms of the manifesto we should make. Those of us who remain unpersuaded that the current political turn will take us into government and keep us there need to be clear about that right now, for I suspect that adherence to the 2017 manifesto will be a political battleground to come in trigger ballots and selections up and down the country. There are two much more serious problems I would point out. The first is whether our manifesto matches our values. If you believe, as I do, that Labour’s historic mission is to achieve and sustain a radical transfer in power, wealth and opportunity towards working people, then it is hard to see our manifesto as anything but an extraordinary failure to focus on how to bring that redistribution about. Tuition fees and their associated repayments are, in their current shape, an impossible burden on young people and in time on the whole economy. Yet the total abolition of tuition fees, coupled with an ambition to write off all existing debt, is for me a far lower priority than free childcare and improved early years support for young working people, or decent in-work pay and benefits for working families. As the Resolution Foundation has observed, our manifesto either left most of George Osborne’s benefit freeze intact, or hid an absence of funded plans to reverse those cuts behind a fudged commitment to reviewing them. If we are serious about the redistribution of power, wealth and opportunity, we have to be serious about in-work poverty and the living standards of working people and their children. A Labour Party that is genuinely for the many and not the few should prioritise that above the immediate abolition of fees for university education. The second problem concerns the wider political strategy enshrined within the manifesto. Take tuition fees, again. We won majorities, often huge, in university seats like Oxford East, Sheffield Central, Leeds North West, Cambridge, and most spectacularly, Canterbury. An important reason for that was Jeremy’s character and politics appeal strongly to people who are both hopeful about the future and more than a little fed up of what politics has been like in recent years. There are lessons there, as there have been across Europe and North America, but we are kidding ourselves if we think that a degree of self-interest, however enlightened, was not there. If the offer to students was to have tens of thousands of pounds of their debts cancelled, should we be surprised that they voted for it with such alacrity? It is, after all, a lot of microwaves. Yet winning over groups of voters by segment-specific promises – whether that means a triple lock for pensioners or no more debts for students – isn’t a strategy that we can either afford in general, or sustain anywhere. Imagine for a moment that we had formed a government and we had carried through that promise. Imagine that we had fulfilled the manifesto in full. There would still be plenty of reasons for idealistic students to vote against a Labour government that froze benefits and renewed Trident, even if it was a government that had abolished fees. Gratitude for previous munificence is not an emotion that long sustains political loyalty, or else Gordon Brown would still be prime minister. A political strategy that secures and shores up support through election-specific fiscal transfers rather than by putting forward a convincing, relevant, and clearly articulated vision to command the country for the long term is unsustainable. It wouldn’t take much for that electoral house of cards to come crashing down. * To return to the observations about the changing pattern of our support, it isn’t at all clear to me that there is much road left to run for the strategy we have for now adopted as a party. We have taken Ed Miliband’s supposed 35 per cent strategy – mop up the protest votes, hold as much as possible of the core vote – to its logical conclusion, and yet still we are behind the Tories. As we have done so, we have lost important components of our own historic support. As the academic Paula Surridge’s work has already shown, working-class voters – especially white working-class voters – moved even further away from us than they did under Ed Miliband. These are hardly groups that are numerically insignificant in Britain. If we are losing more of these voters directly to the Tories with every election, the struggle to overtake the
liest example’ of the genre, True History is a satire of the classic epics of the past, put into the stars instead of the clouds and across the seas. There are aliens, interplanetary wars, space travel, planet colonization, and what may even be an early precedent to the concept of a robot. This has all the tropes of your average B-movie sci-fi feature, yet it was written over a millennium before the invention of the telescope. Think about that. Read it online here. 1 The Description of a New World Margaret Cavendish, Publication Date: 1666 Full title: The Description of a New World, Called The Blazing-World. Blazing World is considered by a number of scholars to be the earliest example of science fiction as we would come to know it, and it is unique in that, given the century, it was written by a woman. The story follows a woman from Earth who finds this blazing world and becomes empress. This is a (satirical) utopian piece, and the world she arrives in has submarines, anthropomorphized beings, and talking animals. It is a relatively short piece of prose (by modern standards, at least), and it is truly an interesting look at the roots of the genre. It was also referenced in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, for those who are fans of Alan Moore. Read it online here. Bonus The Coming Race Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Publication Date: 1871 This novel would have been my number one, without a doubt, but it just barely missed the cut off date set for this article. Nonetheless, I believe it deserves a mention for being one of the most influential, and underrated, science fiction novels of all time. The word vril, used in the novel, was a short-lived word in the English language, and the novel itself has been linked to many a conspiracy theory involving the Nazis (due to the themes of a superior race present in the novel). All the elements of a classic, yet overlooked by many, even within the science fiction fandom. Also, Bulwer-Lytton is responsible for the clichés “It was a dark and stormy night,” and “the pen is mightier than the sword,” so you know, if nothing else, that this novel is quite quotable. Read it online here.As the NDP and Conservatives spar over whether or not Canada is involved in a ground combat mission in Iraq, one NDP MP has taken his red teacher's pen to the talking points of a Tory minister. On Wednesday, NDP foreign affairs critic and former public school teacher Paul Dewar took to Facebook to post his corrections to a newsletter statement on the Iraq mission released by Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Denis Lebel. Dewar, unsurprisingly, gave Lebel's fact sheet a failing grade. Dewar posted the corrections with the caption: "Once a teacher, always a teacher. I expect better from Denis Lebel, a minister in government." Dewar told The Huffington Post Canada in an email that the corrections are "effective and humorous way of engaging Canadians." So far, he seems to be right. The post has more than 1,000 likes. Dewar's Facebook post comes amid mounting debate over the status of Canada's mission in Iraq. Earlier this week, the military revealed that Canadian troops involved in a battlefield planning exercise exchanged fire with Islamic State fighters.. It also acknowledged its soldiers have helped Kurdish forces by directing coalition air strikes. The Conservative government has repeatedly assured Canadians that troops on the ground in Iraq are there to assist Iraqi and Kurdish forces and not to engage in combat. NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair has argued that the exchange of fire proves that Prime Minister Stephen Harper was not honest with Canadians about the nature of the mission. Dewar told HuffPost that he has been criticizing the Tories all along for calling this a non-combat mission "when it was clear that mission creep was a real possibility." "The Conservatives didn’t know what exactly they were getting into," Dewar said in an email. "They thought NDP questions would go away if they kept repeating their 'non-combat' line." For their part, Lebel and the Tories are staying on message. "Our Special Operations Forces Personnel are not seeking to directly engage the enemy, but we are providing assistance to forces that are in combat. These activities are entirely consistent with the advise and assist mandate," said Lebel's spokesperson Vincent Rabault in an email. "As the Prime Minister has said, the international jihadist movement has declared war on Canada and its allies. We must confront this threat head on, which is exactly what this government is doing." Dewar counters that while "terrorism is a real threat to peace and security at home and abroad," the notion that the government is confronting the threat "head on" is a "matter of opinion." The MP from Ottawa said government cuts to the RCMP and Canadian Border Services Agency have actually reduced "front-line resources" needed to protect public safety. This isn't the first time Dewar has voiced exasperation with a Conservative for voicing talking points on Iraq he thinks are less than convincing. In September of last year, Dewar became frustrated with Tory MP Paul Calandra for steadfastly adhering to his talking points, regardless of the question. His facepalm response went viral. As for his feelings about Lebel, Dewar said that the minister's work does not compare favourably with that of his former students. "My students were a lot more rigorous in their research – and always interested in improving their work." With files from The Canadian Press Also on HuffPost:EDITOR'S NOTE: Scroll down for live updates from Springfield. There won't be any formal announcement until this morning, after everything has been reduced to writing and everyone has had a chance to review it. Springfield seems to finally have reached a critical, if short-term, deal on the state budget, one that will include substantial new aid for Chicago Public Schools but also reportedly impose a $250 million tax hike on city property owners. The deal passed the executive committee without dissent and the House quickly went into caucus this morning before a floor debate. Reached over 48 hours, the deal appears to be a classic compromise, one in which neither Gov. Bruce Rauner nor Democrats—especially House Speaker Mike Madigan—will get all of what they wanted. For starters, the state will have a stopgap budget designed to carry it through the November elections, when all parties will meet again and try to determine how to pay for it and how much of Rauner's pro-business, union-weakening Turnaround Agenda to enact. Included will be money for such things as social welfare spending and the Monetary Award Program college grants that Democrats wanted, and funding for prisons and state operations that Rauner sought. Similarly, there was a deal on the item that had been holding up the stopgap budget: how much help to give Chicago Public Schools. As I reported earlier, the deal includes roughly $400 million more for CPS than current law provides. Roughly $100 million would come from a new grant for serving large numbers of students from poor families. (Another $150 million would go to other high-poverty districts in the state.) CPS also would not lose the $75 million Rauner originally proposed because of its dropping enrollment, and would get $25 million for early childhood education. Beyond that, the district finally would get its long demanded "pension parity": roughly $200 million a year, starting next June. That figure is tied to passage of statewide pension reform to Rauner's liking, quite possibly a reform plan pushed by Senate President John Cullerton that would force workers to choose between getting a guaranteed 3 percent annual bump in benefits and continuing to have all salary hikes included in their pension base. In exchange, the city would be required to boost its property tax by about $250 million a year—this on top of the $543 million in tax hikes for pensions that was approved by the City Council in December. Rauner originally opposed any new aid, saying Chicago should take care of its own needs, and Democrats had sought hundreds of millions of dollars more. I'll have more later on who's closer to the truth. Meanwhile, all of this has to be approved by a three-fifths majority of both houses if it's to become law. But a House committee was to start working on preliminary matters last evening, and, without action, lawmakers will face the possibility that schools statewide won't open on time for the fall term. Also likely to pass sometime today is a capital bill, mostly for road construction. All of the players surely will have lots to say about this later. I'll report that, too, as it comes in.next Image 1 of 2 prev Image 2 of 2 French presidential candidate Francois Fillon says he would step out of the race if he were given preliminary charges by national financial prosecutors investigating an allegedly fake job held by his wife. Fillon, speaking on French channel TF1 on Thursday night, said there was nothing improper or illegal about his employing his wife, Penelope, as his parliamentary aide for years. He says "her work was real" and that he would give explanations to investigators. Fillon said: "Only one thing would prevent me from being a candidate: it's if my honor was harmed, if I were given preliminary charges." Prosecutors opened a probe into suspected embezzlement and misappropriation of public funds after it was reported that Fillon's wife was paid about 500,000 euros ($537,000) for a job she allegedly didn't do.This week, a German fisherman pulled a 101-year-old message in a bottle out of the Baltic Sea. The message was written by a man named Richard Platz, and set to sea in 1913. It may be the oldest message in a bottle ever recovered, according to the Guardian. The International Maritime Museum was able to identify Platz’s granddaughter, Angela Erdmann, and sent her the message. When she saw the bottle and postcard inside, Erdmann said she was touched. "Tears rolled down my cheeks,” she told the Guardian. According to the Guiness Book of World Records, the oldest known message in a bottle is from 1914, a year after this one. But according to Matt Novak at Gizmodo, there’s an even earlier bottle that actually takes the prize—having been written and set afloat in 1906 and found by a man named Steve Thurber last year. Or at least that’s the most likely date for the message, Novak explains why there’s some difficulty in dating it: The curious wrinkle in the Canadian bottle story? Thurber doesn't want to open it. This makes independent verification difficult, and will probably lead to the German bottle being officially declared the oldest by the Guinness Book of World Records. Before Thurber's Canadian capsule was found, the oldest known message in a bottle was discovered near Scotland in 2012 and dated back to 1914, having spent nearly 98 years floating at sea. According to Therber, you can make out a date by looking through the glass to the message inside, which he says reads September 29, 1906. So while this new Baltic bottle will probably take the prize for oldest verified message in a bottle, Theber’s find probably trumps it. But how common is it to find a really old message in a bottle? Well, for a while, people were really into sending these kinds of messages. In 1914, a World War I soldier tossed a letter to his wife into the English Channel two days before being killed. It was recovered in 1999, and returned to their daughter. In 1916, the crew of a Zeppelin sent their final words as messages in bottles, and they were found on a beach in Sweden six months later. In 2012, one of the 1,890 messages in bottles that a scientist in Scotland cast into the ocean in 1914 to study currents was found. At the time, the 98-year-old bottle was the oldest in the world. Only 350 of those bottles have been recovered, so it’s possible that there are more still out there to find. Time to go sailing.Alabama lawmakers are holding public hearings on Wednesday on four different anti-abortion bills, each of which was drafted by the state’s Pro-Life Coalition. Individually, the bills are serious threats to reproductive rights. But taken together, the package of restrictions represents an “assault on women,” according to the executive director of Alabama’s chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. The most controversial measure would forbid doctors from performing an abortion after a fetal heartbeat can be detected — which can occur as early as six weeks of pregnancy, before many women even realize they’re pregnant. So-called “heartbeat” bills are clear violations of Roe v. Wade, narrowing the window during which women can access legal abortion services by about 18 weeks. Nonetheless, they’ve been proposed in a handful of states over the past few years, and North Dakota actually passed one last year. North Dakota’s law is currently the harshest abortion ban in the nation — although it’s blocked from taking effect while it’s being challenged in court — but it appears that Alabama Republicans are eager to catch up. And they’re not stopping there. In addition to the heartbeat ban, Alabama lawmakers are also considering a measure that would require women to wait 48 hours before being allowed to proceed with an abortion. The state already has a 24-hour waiting period. But state Rep. Ed Henry (R), who sponsored that bill, claims it’s important to give women even more time to consider a “monumental” decision that will impact the rest of their lives. Henry says the new requirement wouldn’t place a hardship on women because there are abortion clinics in each of the state’s major cities, which means they can’t be more than a two and half hour drive away. The third proposed measure would also lengthen the abortion waiting period to 48 hours. On top of that, it would require women to receive information about hospice services if they are seeking an abortion because of fatal fetal abnormalities. The type of abnormalities specified in the bill would prevent a woman’s fetus from living for more than three months out of the womb. “The more information potential parents are provided with under these difficult circumstances about positive alternatives to abortion the more likely they will be to make an informed decision and a positive choice,” the legislation’s sponsor, state Rep. Kurt Wallace (R), said in a statement. The fourth bill would tighten the law requiring parental consent for a minor who wants to have an abortion, further complicating the process for teens who need to end a pregnancy in potential situations of incest or abuse. Susan Watson, who heads up the ACLU chapter in the state, told the Montgomery Adviser that the cluster of bills feels like an “assault on woman,” and that they go much too far to interfere in women’s relationships with their doctors. She noted that the legislation directly oversteps Roe v. Wade, and will make it harder for the most vulnerable women in the state to receive the care they need. Indeed, political leaders in Alabama are upfront about the fact that the ultimate goal of this package of legislation is to end abortion altogether. “It is unfortunate that liberal activist judges on the U.S. Supreme Court have made abortion legal in the United States, but Alabamians are fortunate to have a Republican legislature that continues to protect and prioritize life in our state,” Alabama House Speaker Mike Hubbard said in a press release about the new bills, which are described as “four common sense measures.” Alabama already has several harsh anti-choice laws on the books, including stringent restrictions on abortion clinics that may force them to close, depending on whether a court allows the law to stand. NARAL Pro-Choice America gives the state a failing grade on several measures of reproductive rights. Tara Culp-Ressler Think ProgressMy name is, I am a filmmaker and an investigative journalist (full bio here ). Some of you may have seen some of my documentaries online, such as ". (For info and trailers from my previous films go to luogocomune.net. You can also read the reviews on my previous films on thepages).The next film I'm working on - and the one I'm asking for your support - is on the so-called'moonhoax' debate, the almost 50-year long discussion on whether the Apollo missions really went to the moon or not.You can hear about the project in detail by watching the presentation above.Please help me make this film, as I don't have the funds to cover all the expenses. Any donation, even the smallest, will be highly appreciated. ().For those who will donate a certain amount I have established a list of perks, which you can see below, together with the budget breakdown.Thanks for your supportMassimo Mazzucco$ 50+ : YOUR NAME IN FILM'S CREDITS (Il tuo nome nei titoli di coda)$ 200+ : AUTOGRAPHED COPY OF NEW FILM + NAME IN CREDITS (Copia autografata del nuovo film + nome nei titoli di coda).$ 500+ : FULL SET OF ALL MY PREVIOUS FILMS + NEW ONE + NAME IN CREDITS. (Tutti i miei film precedenti [7 titoli nella vers. italiana] + nuovo film + nome nei titoli)$ 2,000+ : ASSOCIATE PRODUCER CREDIT + ALL MY FILMS (Titolo di Produttore Associato + tutti i miei film)Director - $ 15,000Screenwriter - $ 10,000Editor - $ 5,000Location / Travel - $ 12,000Tech / Crew - $ 5,000Equipment - $ 5,000Graphic / 3-D Animation - $ 5,000Post-production - 3,000Int'l Translations - $ 6,000Int'l Narrators - $ 6,000Musical score - $ 3,000A man killed with a sword in a targeted attack in South Vancouver Wednesday night was 19-year-old Manraj Akalirai, whose family says had no ties to gangs or drugs. Akalirai, who recently graduated from Gladstone High School, was attacked by a large group on Elgin Street near East 47th Avenue, just south of Memorial South Park, at about 10:30 p.m. PT, police said. Several weapons were used in the attack, including bats, clubs and a sword. Police said the sword hasn't been recovered, but they've determined it was the weapon that killed Akalirai because of the nature of his injuries and a scabbard found on scene. Five men aged between 19 and 21 were arrested in connection with the attack. Two have since been released. No charges have been laid. Police said four of the five suspects were arrested at Vancouver General Hospital, where one suspect was treated for injuries. A vehicle was also seized at the hospital, along with another from East 41st Avenue and Ross Street. Police believe the fight originated in the house next door to the yard where Akalirai was found. Vancouver police Const. Brian Montague said Akalirai did not have a criminal record but said there are suggestions the attack had ties to the drug trade and a loose gang connection. But in a statement sent to CBC News Thursday night, the Akalirai family denied those allegations. "Manraj was a well-mannered, humble, and respectful individual. Contrary to police reports, we maintain Manraj had no drug or gang affiliations," the statement said. "We are still in shock and coping with our loss." The incident was the city’s first homicide of 2013.WHEN Ebola was at its worst in west Africa a few months ago, many worried that weak governments in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone might be swept away by riots or the collapse of order as the virus took hold. In fact, the opposite appears to be the case. Governments have tightened their grip and are displaying authoritarian inclinations in ways rarely seen in the three young democracies. Sierra Leone announced on December 17th that it would conduct house-to-house searches in Freetown, the capital, to find hidden Ebola sufferers. The president, Ernest Bai Koroma, also banned all public Christmas celebrations as well as some market trading and travel between regions. Yet restrictions on movement and trading have been counter-productive. When food is in short supply, hungry and potentially infected people evade checkpoints and travel long distances to feed themselves. Get our daily newsletter Upgrade your inbox and get our Daily Dispatch and Editor's Picks. Other civil liberties are also being curtailed. A Sierra Leonean journalist has been arrested after criticising the government. Officials accused him of making “disparaging and inflammatory statements” about its anti-viral work. In Liberia restrictions on public gatherings remain in place, despite the government’s decision in November not to extend a state of emergency. During senatorial elections—moved from October 12th to December 16th—campaign events and transport to polling stations had to comply with new safety regulations. Queuing voters had to stand three feet apart and bring their own pens, restrictions that did little to encourage a high turnout. Nor did a ban on political rallies that was lifted by the supreme court only after candidates objected. Across the region, rulers are accused of trying to gain political advantage from the epidemic by directing international aid toward their support bases. In Guinea the opposition has cried foul over the delay of municipal elections and perhaps even presidential elections in 2015. Although the country has had more success in fighting the virus than its two neighbours have, occasional bouts of violence have been a problem. The Guinean military took over a town near Wombe where health workers had been killed; some of them were found dismembered in septic tanks. The soldiers are said to have taken revenge and villagers to have fled into the bush. Violent outbreaks have also occurred in Liberia—where security forces fired on people protesting against a quarantine imposed on part of the capital—and in Sierra Leone—where police cracked down in the eastern city of Koidu after rioting The disease, meanwhile, continues to spread. In the week to December 21st, Guinea experienced its highest incidence of the virus since the outbreak began (see chart). In Liberia dozens of new cases have been reported along the border with Sierra Leone. Despite these setbacks officials and observers are starting to contemplate the challenges that will face the region once the illness has been tamed. Chief among them will be getting children back to schools that have been closed for months and are unlikely to open soon. In the meantime families are getting used to having children at home. Girls are doing more housework and boys are being pushed to earn money. Teachers fear that when schools reopen parents will be reluctant to send their children back. Some speak of a lost Ebola cohort of teenagers who may never return to school. Economies are struggling, too. Few ships or planes arrive. Expatriate workers and the educated elite have mostly fled. Imported industrial equipment idles in port. Shipping containers gather rust. About half of all Liberians who had formal jobs have lost them. The misery is heightened by the fall in commodity prices. Prices for the oil and iron ore that are exported from the region have plunged. Public finances are being strained. In responding to the crisis the spending by all three affected governments has gone up by about 30%. At the same time revenues have fallen as a result of the slowdown in trade and tourism. Infrastructure development, such as road-building, has been postponed. The IMF and World Bank have had to step in with financial aid packages. The drop in household incomes is estimated to be 35% in Liberia, 30% in Sierra Leone and 13% in Guinea. Still, the economic impact is not as bad as some had feared. Worst-case forecasts by the World Bank estimated that Ebola could cost the region as much as $32 billion if it were allowed to spiral out of control. Efforts at containing it mean the real cost will probably be a tenth of that figure. Trade is slowly coming back. Some land borders have been reopened, albeit some only for lorries rather than cars or pedestrians. One positive legacy may be improved health-care systems in countries that generally fare poorly on measures such as infant mortality and life expectancy (see chart). In the short run, deaths from preventable diseases are likely to increase. Vaccination programmes have collapsed and overwhelmed hospitals have been turning away pregnant women and those sick with malaria and other illnesses. Yet billions of dollars have been lined up to boost hospitals and training in ways that will reach far beyond Ebola. Much of this money is being allocated on the assumption that weak health systems, even in remote countries, can exacerbate the risks of a global pandemic. According to Thomas Frieden, the director of Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, America’s national public-health agency: “There is an urgent need to reinforce basic public-health systems in countries such as those in west Africa where disease threats can quickly arise and ultimately threaten the health of Americans.” The three worst-affected countries have averted catastrophic collapse, even if they still face a long convalescence. The pluralistic institutions of their young democracies seem so far to be holding up. Yet they are threatened by the continuation of draconian and authoritarian policies. The erosion of democracy might yet turn out to be a cure as bad as the disease.SANAA, YEMEN — The abduction of American photojournalist Luke Somers in Yemen’s capital in late September 2013 happened in an unlikely place. The British-born U.S. national had just exited Sanaa’s Al Huda Supermarket, a popular Western-style shopping center, when armed men wrestled him from the crowded sidewalk into an idling getaway car. It was the latest in a spree of violent kidnappings of foreigners, which took place in the lingering power void left from a 2011 popular uprising that forced President Ali Abdullah Saleh to step aside. His successor, Abd Rabu Mansur Hadi, made strides in rebuilding the central government, but Yemen’s Al Qaeda franchise, known as Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, was also expanding its reach and influence, in part by ransoming foreigners to raise money. But unlike the Islamic State, which in recent months has paraded a series of orange-clad foreign hostages in front of the camera just prior to executing them, AQAP had never killed any of its foreign captives. At least until 33-year-old Somers and a South African hostage, Pierre Korkie, were killed during a Dec. 6 twilight raid by U.S. commandos on an AQAP stronghold. The raid followed a previous mission by U.S. Special Forces on November 25, which freed eight hostages, but failed to rescue Somers. In a statement after the failed Dec. 6 operation to free the hostages, President Barack Obama said he had authorized the rescue mission because Somers’ life was in “imminent danger.” But according to several sources in Yemen, Somers was not in immediate danger prior to the first raid launched to free him last month. Two of those sources also claim that the United States thwarted attempts by a mediator to negotiate his release by paying a ransom. The murky world of hostage negotiations leaves few good choices, but Somers’ death highlights the continuing tension the U.S. government faces when dealing with Americans kidnapped by Al Qaeda and its various affiliates and offshoots. It also calls into question the effectiveness of using military raids, rather than negotiations, as the primary tool to free hostages. The American Response The U.S. response to the Somers’ kidnapping was disjointed from the start. In the month prior, the American embassy in Sanaa had been virtually emptied over heightened terrorist threats. Western journalists who knew Somers, rather than the State Department, served as the initial conduit of information. Local media outlets widely reported Somers’ name and kidnapping, claiming they had received authorization from the State Department, despite what was supposed to be a media blackout. One State Department official expressed frustration over the handling of news about Somers’ kidnapping. “[I]n this bureaucracy I need magical powers, kryptonite — and prayer [to get an answer],” the official wrote in an email to a reporter, when asked to confirm a media blackout. The family, in the meantime, was advised by the FBI not to raise a public campaign, but was given “very little information” from the U.S. government throughout his captivity, Luke Somers’ stepmother, Penny Bearman, told The Intercept. “It was absolutely awful, the silence,” she said. For the next year, Western media largely held to the blackout, as negotiations were conducted between a mediator and AQAP for the release of Somers and Korkie, who had been held since spring of last year, according two sources affiliated with AQAP. Both sources maintain that negotiations broke down in April, however, when the U.S. government blocked the talks. The negotiations went so far as to reach an agreement on a price for the two hostages, which would be paid by a third party, according to one of the AQAP sources. The source did not identify the third party—and declined to discuss the agreed ransom amount on the record—but in the past the Omani and Qatari governments have served as intermediaries and have paid to release hostages held by the Islamic State and AQAP. The embassies of Oman and Qatar in Washington did not respond to questions from The Intercept. The National Security Council and the State Department declined to comment on any involvement by a third party in negotiations or ransoms. Asked about a third-party offer, Yemeni government spokesman in Washington, Mohammed Albasha, said he was “not aware of such talks.” Bearman, Somers’ stepmother, said the family didn’t know about any negotiations. Bearman and Luke’s father, who live in the U.K., had also reached out to British authorities, but they were told the U.S. was handling the situation. On November 25, U.S. Navy Seals conducted a raid in Yemen’s eastern province of Hadhramaut in an attempt to free Somers. Seven Yemeni hostages and one Ethiopian were freed, but AQAP had already moved Somers, Korkie and other captives to another location. Seven kidnappers were shot dead by the U.S. commandos during the operation. Following the raid, AQAP released a video message on Dec. 3 that showed Somers pleading for help. “I’m certain that my life is in danger,” he said in the video. Also appearing in the video, Sheikh Nasser al-Ansi, an AQAP leader, referred to the failed operation in Hadhramaut, and warned that Somers would face his “inevitable fate” in three days if the group’s demands were not met. No specifics demands were outlined, however. Hoping to re-open communications with the militants, Somers’ brother, Jordan Somers, and mother Paula Somers, released a video Dec. 4, following the first raid. “Please show mercy and give us the opportunity to see our Luke again, he is all that we have,” Somers’ mother said. In the video, Jordan Somers said they had “no prior knowledge” of the US raid carried out on November 25. Two days later, on Dec. 6, several dozen U.S. Special Forces loaded onto V-22 tilt-rotor aircraft, and flew to Yemen’s southern province of Shabwah. Backed up by drones and fighter jets, the commandos fought with local tribesmen and AQAP militants before entering a house in the village of Daffar, Abadan district. Both Somers and Korkie were seriously wounded during the raid, with U.S. officials claiming their captors shot them, and an AQAP source insisting the men were shot during the exchange of fire. Both Somers and Korkie died from their wounds shortly after being airlifted by U.S. forces from Shabwah. No Threat to Life While the U.S. military raids were justified by the threat on Somers’ life, a Yemeni intelligence official, who asked to remain anonymous, said that they had “no information, or intelligence that al Qaeda was about to kill any hostages before the Nov. 25 raid.” One of the AQAP sources also told The Intercept that the militant group had no plans to kill the photojournalist prior to the first attempt to rescue him. “There was no risk to Luke Somers’ life; his life was not in danger from AQAP before the first US raid,” the source told The Intercept. In a tragic twist, the Gift of the Givers Foundation, which had been negotiating separately with the militants for the release of Korkie, said the South African aid worker was due to be freed on Dec. 7. In a statement on their website, the disaster response charity said it was in the final stages of preparing logistical arrangements to bring Korkie home. Korkie was kidnapped along with his wife, Yolande, in May of last year. His wife was released in January due to concerns over her health. Imtiaz Sooliman, the director of Gift of the Givers Foundation told The Intercept that in the midst of negotiations in early November, tribal leaders informed the organization that they would have to delay a meeting with AQAP, “because some of their members were killed in [a] drone strike.” The Yemeni government was “not involved in the ‘non-state’ actors’ negotiations with Al Qaeda,” Albasha, the Yemeni government spokesman said. The State Department says that the U.S. government was unaware of any negotiations for Korkie’s release, and at no point was the U.S. government involved in ransom negotiations. “[P]aying ransoms would only sustain the very same terrorist organizations that we are working to destroy,” said Jen Psaki, a State Department spokeswoman, during a Dec. 8 press conference. “So nothing has changed on that front.” A Dangerous Trend Kidnappings have long been commonplace in Yemen, where disgruntled tribes abduct foreigners as bargaining chips to resolve disputes with the central government. Those kidnappings usually end quickly, with abductors releasing captives unharmed, often in exchange for imprisoned family members. Somers’ abduction exemplified a more recent trend, however, in which mercenary kidnappers sell foreigners to AQAP, which in turn demands large ransoms in exchange for their safe release. A Finnish couple and Austrian student were kidnapped in 2012 and sold on to the militant Islamic group; all three were later released. AQAP is also believed to be holding an Iranian diplomat and a Saudi Arabian deputy consul, snatched in March 2012; a British oil-worker kidnapped in February this year is also still missing. While acknowledging its role in ransoming hostages, AQAP has also tried to distinguish itself from the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, whose videos have featured captives condemning U.S. policies, followed by bloody executions. AQAP claims it doesn’t torture its hostages. On Monday, AQAP released a video of al-Ansi, the AQAP leader, condemning the Islamic State’s use of beheadings as “savage” acts and denouncing videos showing violent executions, calling it “a big mistake and not acceptable.” Somers’ death underscores what some see as a glaring flaw in America’s policy toward dealing with victims of kidnapping in the Middle East. European captives have often been freed through secretive multi-million dollar transactions, while Americans have languished. Ransoms are credited with sparing lives, but at the cost of enriching Al Qaeda and its cohorts–an unacceptable tradeoff in the eyes of the U.S. administration. Yet the U.S. government’s “no ransom” policy also limits options for freeing hostages, leaving military raids as the only viable alternative. When successful, the raids can free hostages, depriving militant groups of ransom income, but they all risk the lives of hostages, who have been caught in the crossfire, or killed by their captors in revenge. “My instinct was that we could have raised a ransom and perhaps worked with another country, but we didn’t know what was going on,” said Penny Bearman, Somers’ stepmother. “My feeling now is that all the strategies [for freeing hostages] seem to be really egocentric around individual government’s policies.” One of the AQAP sources said that the death of seven of its members in the late November U.S. raid had angered the group, though it’s unclear what the consequence would have been for Somers. Even after the November raid, no decision had been made to execute Somers, the source insisted. “The group leadership is not, you know, vampires,” he said. Photo: EPA/Landov; Supermarket: Casey L. CoombsChairman Dean deserves enormous credit for all the good work he did for the Democratic Party. But, his opinion piece begins by saying "If I were a Senator, I would not vote for the current health-care bill." He goes on to argue that the bill does not bring "real reform." Signing his article as a "former chairman of the Democratic National Committee," I am sure, made Howard's comments particularly newsworthy, and I note that he is a guest on one of tomorrow morning's talk shows. After reading many erroneous statements in the article that led him to his faulty conclusion, as they say in the world of health care--"we better get Howard a second opinion!" As a former Chairman of the National Democratic Party myself, let me begin where Howard began, but by taking a contrary position. I am a United States Senator, and I will vote for the current health-care bill precisely because it does bring "real reform." I hope Howard is reading, because I believe with a better understanding of the real reforms this bill does bring to America's health care system, he will join me as a forceful advocate for its enactment. Let me first explain why I believe this bill is, in fact, the kind of "real reform" that Chairman Dean rightly seeks. What is "real reform"? Real reform would create competition in insurance markets. The Senate bill does precisely that by establishing insurance exchanges that will create competition for enrollees, and by requiring that all insurers provide standardized information to consumers so that they can comparison shop for the best insurance product available at the most affordable price. Real reform would redirect funds from administrative expenses to investment in quality health care benefits. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has already found that the insurance exchanges created by the Senate bill will lower administrative costs. In addition, the Senate bill will force any insurance company that doesn't spend enough of its premium dollars providing benefits to rebate the difference to its customers. Real reform would significantly lower costs. Here too, the CBO has found that the Senate bill will reduce existing premiums for the insured, and reduce the deficit by cutting federal spending on health care. One way it achieves these savings is by finally focusing our health system so that it rewards the quality and value of outcomes instead of the quantity and volume of tests and procedures provided. Real reform would improve the delivery of health care. The Senate bill contains delivery system reforms that the Business Roundtable has concluded could save up to $3,000 per employee. Real reform would give all Americans a meaningful choice of coverage. That is precisely what the health insurance exchanges created by the Senate Bill are designed to do. These exchanges will provide competitive options to people who today have no health insurance choices. Real reform would eliminate discrimination against those needing insurance based on their preexisting medical conditions. The Senate bill does precisely
the form of bone marrow transplant, but only more recently has it been used for ortho and pain applications," explained Dr, Mark Miedema of OrthoArkansas. Ron George, 72, is a patient of Dr. Miedema. "I can't even do a 3/4 knee bend right now," said George. "By the time someone is 85, about one in two people have doctor diagnosed knee arthritis. Arthritis is the leading cause of disability in the U.S., back pain being the second leading cause of disability," said Dr. Miedema. Until now, the best option was to replace the knee or just try to treat the pain, but with regenerative medicine, the goal is to reverse the problem. Ron George could hardley believe how painless the procedure was, especially compared to his other option of a knee replacement. "Unlike a steroid injection that can really work for three to six months, the hope with this is that if it regenerates the tissue and helps the bodies own healing process to take place, you only need one of these injections," said Dr. Miedema. George's cells were taken from a donated umbilical cord. In a month, he hopes to find out his knee isn't just feeling better but actually regenerating "I want to go back playing golf. I want to ride my bicycle, I want to walk more, and this gave me the opportunity," said George.Click here to see the hottest neighborhoods of 2014. Most analysts now agree that 2012 was the bottom for the housing market, and 2013 is likely to usher in further gains in both home prices and sales, but not all neighborhoods are created equal. When you buy a home, you want to know that you’ll be moving into a desirable neighborhood. With more than 600 real estate agents helping our customers buy and sell homes across the country, we decided to go straight to our sources in the trenches to find out which neighborhoods will be the hottest; where trendy appeal and growing buyer interest will drive up home prices more than other nearby areas in the coming year. We asked our agents which neighborhoods or cities in their area will be the most up-and-coming in 2013, then we dove into the data to narrow down their suggestions to the three hottest ‘hoods in each market. We evaluated how each area’s market was trending at the end of 2012 in four categories: on-market listings, sales volume, median price per square foot, and sale-to-list ratio. We ranked every neighborhood in each category and selected the areas with the most consistent trends in each category as the hottest. The hottest neighborhoods are all seeing shrinking selection, increasing sales, and increasing prices—often at rates far above the metro areas that contain them. Here are the ten hottest neighborhoods (or small cities) for 2013, along with their year-over-year trend in listings, sales, and median price per square foot as of December. Rank Metro Area Neighborhood Listings Sales Price 1 Los Angeles Highland Park -48% +73% +31% 2 San Diego Mira Mesa -69% +48% +21% 3 Los Angeles Faircrest Heights -63% +17% +29% 4 Los Angeles Eagle Rock -54% +44% +11% 5 Bay Area Livermore -71% +13% +20% 6 Bay Area Willow Glen -60% +9% +32% 7 Los Angeles Glassell Park -64% +31% +17% 8 Chicago Logan Square -10% +94% +20% 9 Bay Area The Mission -29% +17% +80% 10 Seattle N. Maple Leaf -44% +15% +22% “The housing market may be recovering nationwide, but the reality on the ground is sometimes more complicated than that,” said Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman. “For 16 markets across the country, Redfin’s local real estate agents collaborated with our analytics team to identify the neighborhoods where we expect prices to rise the most this year, based on activity from about 10,000 active homebuyers, and data from more than more than 130,000 listings. The results surprised us: the hottest neighborhoods aren’t the well-known bastions of privilege. They’re once-gritty urban areas and far-flung suburbs with school districts on the rise. This is the surest sign that the recovery is broadening, and that home-buyers are venturing out to once-marginal areas hit hard when the bubble burst.”Sorry this is so late. I had some potentially worrying news yesterday and dealt with it the way I deal with things: by doing stupid crp, which meant I spent the morning finishing outdoor holiday decorations. I hope Drak forgives me posting this so late. Also, will 60 guilders, and whoever else sent me blog posts that haven’t run re-send with “blog post” in the title? Thunderbird is a pain to search, and right now all I can find is William Lehman’s and Foxfier’s. – SAH* The American Race – Drak Bibliophile No, not the Indianapolis 500 or other auto races. Awhile back some idiot over on AccordingToHoyt said that Sarah Hoyt isn’t a real American because she wasn’t born in America. At the same time, this idiot appears to be saying that American Indians aren’t real Americans because they aren’t part of the American Race. So what is the American Race if there is “such an animal”? First we have to consider “what is the English Race” as the Founders generally considered themselves English and their major gripe with England was that Americans were not treated as Englishmen should be treated. Well, the English can be considered to be the descendants of the Angles, Saxons and Jute tribes that conquered the area now considered England. Yet, we can’t forget the Celts that lived in that region. John McWhorter, author of Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English, points out that spoken English has major differences from any other Germanic languages. These differences can’t be traced to other languages known to have been an influence on English, such as French or Latin. Mr. McWhorter points out that spoken English shows influence from Celtic languages so it is very likely that the Angles-Saxons-Jutes must have ruled over a good sized population of Celtic speakers which influenced the development of spoken English. So the English race is a combination of Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Celtics. However, we can’t forget the Danes who made successful invasions of England. While the Anglo-Saxon Kings managed to conquer the invaders, the English language of those areas shows marked differences from the language elsewhere in England. Therefore, we have to add the Danes to the mixture that is the English race. Then we come to the last successful invasion of England by the “Frenchified Vikings” known as the Normans with their Flemish men-of-arms. Not only did they “add” to the English language, they added their genes to the English race. Then we have those Scotsmen and Welsh who didn’t stay in their “proper places” and added their genes to the English race. So even before the English pushed their way into North America, they could be considered mutts. Even before America became a nation, plenty of other groups found their way into the developing American Race. There were the Dutch already in America who got conquered by the English. The so-called Pennsylvania Dutch (actually Germans) who found their way to America followed by other German groups. French Protestants found their way to America. Paul Revere’s family was originally from France. Even before the Revolution, we got plenty of Scotsmen who didn’t like living directly under the English Crown. [Note from Sarah: there were a lot of Portuguese, also in the New England Region, apparently escaping the Napoleonic invasion. But also a lot of British immigrants imported Portuguese servants (this was a thing in England, too, as early as the 1500s.) Curiously one of the heroes of the American revolution was Portuguese. I don’t remember his name, but since his claim to fame was being able to single-handedly carry a cannon, and since he came from Azores, I figure he’s one of Larry’s relations – SAH] Of course, let’s not forget the American Indians. While Americans weren’t too nice to them, plenty of them married into American families or otherwise became part of the developing American society. So even before we kicked the English Crown out of America, the American Race was a race of mutts. Afterwards, Americans welcomed into the US plenty of people from Europe. More Germans, Italians, Irish, French and others. While there were some rough spots, in general Americans welcomed these people and allowed them to be part of the American Race. Still Sarah and others are correct, these people were allowed to be part of the American Race because they accepted the American Ideals. As long as they accept the Ideals, Americans as a group didn’t care if their ancestors were Polish, etc. Our problems today appear to be that some “born-Americans” don’t accept the Ideals and those “born-Americans” don’t see the need for Immigrants, legal or illegal, to accept the Ideals that make us Americans. IMO those people who see a difference between themselves and people like Sarah who while born elsewhere accepts the American Ideals, show themselves to be Not-Americans even if their ancestors have been here since 1776. Note, comments and corrections are welcome.Original Airdate: July 12, 2010 Written & Storyboarded by: Elizabeth Ito & Adam Muto One of Adventure Time‘s strongest influences, as well as creator Pendleton Ward’s greatest inspiration, are the Dungeons and Dragons video game series. While I was never a D&D junkie, or even a big roleplaying game fan myself, there’s no denying the impact it has had on society. From numerous pop cultural references to even immensely popular actors such as Robin Williams (God rest his soul) have admitted that its one of their favorite games of all time. It really seems like all of that passion towards one of the most popular roleplaying games of all time went specifically into this incredibly fun episode. One of the first things I noticed while rewatching this episode is that this is the first episode where Finn’s voice is noticeably changing. It’s only a slight change, but the reason I mentioned this was to make an observation on how Jeremy Shada’s voice work as Finn has developed so naturally throughout the years that it’s barely even noticeable when it begins to change. For example, though I think Zach Callison’s voice work as Steven on Steven Universe, while his inflections are terrific, his transition through puberty has been a bit less gradual. It’s understandable; he’s 19-year-old trying to force a 14-year-old’s voice, so it’s bound to be less natural sounding. Finn’s voice has always replicated a gradual journey from adolescence into adulthood. In addition, this is the first episode to really stress the differences between Finn and Jake. Finn is, of course, the energetic and pure hearted hero, while Jake can be a giant lazy fuck at times. It brings out the strongest parts of each character, but also makes an effort to still make Jake likable and fun to be around. In addition, we’re showcased to some creative and fun video game esque villains. Demon Cat, voiced by Clancy Brown, is an incredibly designed and amusingly creepy character. I love how his approximate knowledge of everything coincides with his limbs not fully connecting to his body. Nice little touch! There’s also a Bucket Knight who grows when adding water and an evil Guardian Angel. All of these foes are so interesting that they could easily have entire episode devoted to them, especially that evil Guardian Angel. I wanna know what her deal is. The real draw of this episode, however, is the relationship between Finn and Jake. Jake is written terrifically in this episode; once it’s revealed that both Finn and Jake couldn’t make it through the dungeon, Jake doesn’t gloat or rub it in Finn’s face, but instead goes so far as to help Finn win a bet against. That’s true friendship right there. This is a delightful fun romp. AT has done several terrific dungeon episodes following this one (Dad’s Dungeon, Mystery Dungeon, Dungeon Train, Hall of Egress, etc.) and Dungeon is no exception. It highlights everything that makes the first season so great: lots of poppy animation, high energy, a lot of random humor, very creative locations and characters, and two likable heroes in the spotlight. What more do you need? AdvertisementsOculus Rift makes virtual sex with AV star Mana Sakura a reality For most men, the ability to engage in sex with an adult video actress remains but a dream. In a special section dedicated to pleasurable adult activities performed solo, however, Spa! (Dec. 2) says that erotic software maker Illusion is bringing that fantasy closer to reality. Launched on November 14, the game series Playgirls allows users equipped with an Oculus Rift headset to have virtual intercourse with a 3D rendering of a popular AV starlet, one of whom is Mana Sakura. In making the product, the company photographed Sakura in a number of stages of undress using a 3D scanner to replicate each of her curves in digital form. “We reproduced her skin’s texture right down to the moles,” Naoyuki Otsuru, a producer at the company, tells the magazine. Naturally, the game is customizable: Users can instruct Sakura to erotically pose in 17 ways and in 51 scenes (such as at the beach or poolside) across a 180-degree panorama inside the headset, which is likely to be available for consumers in. A number of costume changes for the actress are available (including bikinis), with below-the-belt nudity — obscured by a mosaic — a crucial possibility. Another version of Playgirls, which sells for 4,800 yen, features actress Yui Hatano. The company expects to release more editions starring other actresses in the future. “Lighting, facial expressions and angles can be modified — you are the director of the scene,” continues Otsuru, “and saved videos can be shared on the Web.” Source: “Otona no kairaku onanii shinka-ron,” Spa! (Dec. 2, page 55)May 2, 2016, 6:26 PM GMT / Updated May 2, 2016, 6:26 PM GMT By Frances Kai-Hwa Wang After the highly publicized casting of Tilda Swinton and Scarlett Johansson in movie roles that were originally written as Asian characters, Asian-American actors and artists in theater took to Twitter last weekend to share stories about the challenges they face as Asian Americans in theater. Using the hashtag #MyYellowFaceStory, many revealed issues of representation and employment equity. “I think the general public is unaware how few opportunities are open to minority actors,” Tony Award-winning playwright David Henry Hwang told NBC News. “Sharing these stories may help folks understand why it's so damaging when the few Asian roles that do exist end up going to white actors, two of the most publicized recent examples being Tilda Swinton and Scarlett Johansson. Moreover, since actors of color are routinely excluded from even auditioning for many roles, how can anyone believe that the white actors hired were truly the best men or women for those jobs?” Some Asian-American actors shared stories about not being considered for roles because of their Asian ancestry. At the same time, the practice of casting white actors to play Asian roles, often with additional makeup, known as yellowface, is prevalent. The practice of white actors playing African-American roles in blackface is no longer considered acceptable. Other Asian-American actors shared stories about not looking Asian enough to play Asian characters. The use of vague Asian accents, especially when one is not necessary or accurate, were a point of contention. Asian Americans in theater often face stereotyped assumptions of what is Asian and that all Asian people, cultures, and languages are alike. Asian-American playwrights spoke about the frustration of creating more roles for Asian and Asian-American actors, but then not being able to get those characters cast with Asian and Asian-American actors. Latino and Latina actors in theatre also joined the conversation with #MyBrownFaceStory. In one word, Actor BD Wong summed up the issues of both representation of Asian characters and employment equity for Asian-American actors with a photograph of British actor Johnathan Pryce, who played “The Engineer” in the original cast of “Miss Saigon,” recalling the nationwide protests by Asian-American actors, artists, and activists in 1990 when Pryce was brought to America to reprise the role on Broadway without any consideration of Asian-American actors. "Uncooooomfortable," he wrote in the caption of the photo. A group of four arts organizations — the Asian American Arts Alliance, the Asian American Performers Coalition (AAPAC), the Theatre Communications Group (TCG), and the Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts in association withthe Fordham University Theatre Program — will sponsor “Beyond Orientalism: The Forum” tonight at Fordham University in New York City. This forum will launch a national initiative to address the negative effects of yellowface and brownface and to advocate for diverse representation of Asian Americans and other characters of color in theatre. Follow NBC Asian America on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr. RELATEDExpert tips to enjoy barbecue season safely Are you hungry for the barbecue season to begin? Here’s some useful barbecue safety tips advice to chew on! The secret of safe grilling: location! If you live in an apartment or condo, first check that you have permission to use a barbecue on your balcony. If you live in a house, set it up outdoors in a well-ventilated area on a stable surface. The clearances are as follows: at least three metres away from doors and windows and at least one metre from the house. Avoid placing it near any flammable objects (trees, plants, logs, patio furniture, plastic chairs, etc.). Be careful while using the grill When you get your barbecue out of storage after a long hibernation, check the general condition of its fittings, hoses, burners, grates, etc. A good spring cleaning is necessary to prevent fires that can be caused by grease deposits, insects, birds’ nests, or any other animals that can clog the pipes. But watch out how you clean your barbecue! The safety of metal brushes has recently been put into question following a number of incidents. Look for signs of wear and damage on your brush, or pick a safer alternative to the stainless steel version! Turn it on in the usual manner: open the lid, then open the valve on the propane tank, and finally, turn on the main burner and press the barbecue’s automatic ignition button. If the burner does not light, immediately shut off the tank, keep the burner open a few seconds and then close it; this will give any gas that has collected in the pipes time to evaporate. To light the barbecue when the automatic ignition button does not work, follow these steps: lift the lid, open the tank, then insert a lit barbecue lighter or long match in the side port of the grill, provided for this purpose, and turn on the main burner. If you hear a hissing sound or an unusual smell, immediately shut off the tank and come up with another menu plan. Contact a professional to identify the problem and fix it before you try again. Never leave your grill unattended. The tank and barbecue lid can remain hot for a long time, so it is advisable to keep children away. If you store your grill indoors during the winter, or if you have a second gas tank, remember that it is illegal to store a tank containing fuel in an enclosed area (house, garage, vehicle, etc.). Tips for safely handling food Food can be contaminated when handled outside in hot weather and you need to be especially careful with ground beef, sausages, steaks, poultry and pork. Make sure to wash your hands thoroughly before and after handling raw meat. Make sure the meat is well cooked, using a thermometer if necessary. Afterwards, clean all surfaces that have come in contact with meat using warm water and soap. Have yourself a smoking hot grilling season!We have been contacted by a distraught young Muslim woman who was pictured walking on Westminster Bridge just after the terrorist attack yesterday which was carried out by West Midlands based terrorist, Khalid Masood. The young Hijab wearing Muslim woman was pictured as she walked past victims and the circulated picture, which was used by anti-Muslim bigots and news agencies, has undermined the confidence of an innocent young woman who was also caught up in the melee after the attacks. The reality is that the victim has informed us of her shock having seen and walked into the incident and her further distress on having her pictures circulated by US and UK based anti-Muslim haters. In fact, pictures were also circulated of her with Nazi Swastikas around her arms, thereby playing to anti-Muslim tropes of all Muslims being extremists and potential killers. Sadly, press sources have also used her pictures and the victim has expressly asked that her picture not be used and be taken down from such sites. The greater the exposure of the picture, the greater has been the harassment and the intimidation of this young Muslim female who found herself in the middle of a situation that affected the whole country. This scenario shows how heated and charged the whole situation around Muslim communities has become where a young Muslim female has in the eyes of some, become the focal point after a major terroriist ncident. This is not only perverse, it fetishes Muslims from being citizens and Londoners, into bestial characters, which feeds the cycle of hatred against Muslims.CLOSE Celebrating 10 years of Michigan State University football coach Mark Dantonio. Laura Trabka/Lansing State Journal Mark Dantonio has led MSU's football program to three Big Ten championships, Rose Bowl and Cotton Bowl victories and an 87-33 record. He begins his 10th season with the Spartans on Sept. 2 against Furman in East Lansing. (Photo: Dave Wasinger/Lansing State Journal) EAST LANSING –Mark Dantonio erupted inside the visitors’ locker room on a frigid Halloween night in Minneapolis. It wasn’t because of Michigan State’s frustrating loss to Minnesota, nor the 42 points and 505 yards his defense allowed. It wasn’t because of the two touchdowns in the first two minutes of the game or the two in the fourth quarter that sealed the Gophers’ victory. It wasn’t even because the Spartans’ 2009 bowl hopes were in peril. Dantonio was livid with his players for how they left the field. “They did not go across and shake a lot of hands and so forth,” assistant coach Dave Warner recalled. “I don’t know if that’s a defining moment or not, but that just shows what is most important to him after a game. It wasn’t necessarily the wins and losses, it’s how our players handle themselves.” In the last decade, there have been a lot more wins than losses for the Spartans. MSU’s 10th season with Dantonio as head coach begins Sept. 2 at home against Furman, a small South Carolina school from the second-tier Football Championship Subdivision. It’s been a decade of extreme highs – three Big Ten titles, four top-10 finishes – and a very few lows, particularly when compared to the previous 50 years. He has pushed his program to the point where the Spartans are annually in the conversation about winning a national championship. “You're always going to try to go a little bit farther,” the 60-year-old Dantonio said Monday about his program’s past decade. “We've had success here. We can sell that, as I said earlier. With that being said, I think you always need to aspire to be a little bit better or go a little bit farther. That's the way we need to be built here.” 'On the same page' On another frigid night, hours after Dantonio was hired by MSU on Nov. 27, 2006, he sent a plane to the airport in Cincinnati. It was the same thing his old boss, Nick Saban, did at Capital City Airport in the winter of 1999. None of the Saban’s assistants followed him from East Lansing to Louisiana State, including Dantonio, who was the Spartans’ defensive secondary coach at the time. Seats filled quickly on Dantonio’s flight. “When he accepted the job, that night, he sent the plane down and he said, ‘If you’re coming, jump in the plane,’” Warner said of Dantonio’s offer. “We didn’t have a whole lot of time to think about it, but you didn’t need any time to think about it. I think every guy but one jumped in the plane. … It was a no-brainer.” MSU’s program was in disarray. Outside of a brief bump under Saban between 1995 to 1999, the Spartans never won consistently after Duffy Daugherty retired in 1972. Off-field issues doomed Bobby Williams after three seasons. John L. Smith had just one winning season, his first, in four years and a host of comically cringe-worthy on-camera antics before his dismissal. “It was just tough times,” said fifth-year senior receiver Matt Macksood, who followed the Spartans growing up and played at nearby Lansing Catholic High.“It wasn’t cool to be a Michigan State fan. … I don’t want to say it was embarrassing to be a State fan, but it was hard for sure.” Enter Dantonio. Newly hired MSU head football coach Mark Dantonio speaks at a press conference at MSU Monday November 27, 2006. Published Date: 11/29/2006, Section: Sports, Page: 1C Published Date: 11/30/2006 Published Date: 12/31/2006, Page: 10A (Photo: Rod Sanford, Rod Sanford) His coaches have been loyal. Four of those assistants – offensive coordinator Warner, co-defensive coordinators Harlon Barnett and Mike Tressel, and offensive line coach Mark Staten – remain with him today. Three of his nine original assistants - Dan Enos, Don Treadwell and Pat Narduzzi - left for head coaching positions, and one - Dan Roushar - for an NFL job. “How did we get here now? By being consistent, by everybody being on the same page like coach D talks about,” said Barnett, who played at MSU from 1986 to 1989. “We have cohesion, just everybody working together, believing in the goal that, hey, we can get it done. If we work together, we can win.” 'Culture of winning' And winning is exactly what Dantonio and his staff has done, presiding over one of the most prolific eras in Spartan football history. Even his old boss Saban, who has won five national titles since leaving MSU, is impressed his protegee. "I always thought he'd do great if he ever got an opportunity to be a head coach," Saban said before the two met in the College Football Playoff. "He's certainly done a lot better job at Michigan State than I ever could do. Dantonio owns an 87-33 record at MSU. He has directed nine straight bowl appearances. He's the first Big Ten coach to produce five 11-win seasons in six seasons. He beat Michigan for the first time in 2008, the first of four straight in the series, and is 7-2 against the rival Wolverines. MSU Football Head Coach Mark Dantonio leads his team out of the tunnel prior to their game with Michigan Saturday October 9, 2010 in Ann Arbor. KEVIN W. FOWLER PHOTO (Photo: Kevin W. Fowler, Kevin W. Fowler) Outside of a down year in 2012, Dantonio has built a consistent winner. The Spartans’ 65 victories since 2010 are tied for fifth-most in the Football Bowl Subdivision in that time and include a Rose Bowl and Cotton Bowl crown. It also has included a string of memorable victories, including the "Little Giants" fake field goal-for-a-touchdown against Notre Dame in 2010, the "Rocket" Hail Mary touchdown against Wisconsin in 2011 and the botched punt returned for a touchdown against Michigan last season. “It’s a statement for your program that you're here to stay,” Dantonio said. “Go back to what you talk about, your culture. Culture is consistency – whether that's winning or losing, it's doing something over and over. Right now, we have a culture of winning. We need to continue to do that.” The Spartans captured Big Ten titles in 2010, 2013 and 2015. Last year’s championship propelled MSU into the second College Football Playoff, where it lost to Dantonio’s mentor Saban and eventual national champion Alabama. “How has coach D changed? I wouldn’t say he’s changed,” Barnett said. “That’s the good thing about it. He has stayed consistent in who he is and what he does. And the program has stayed consistent in who we are and what we’re doing.” Handling adversity Delton Williams knew he was in big trouble. He didn't know what Dantonio's reaction would be when he learned his player had pulled a gun on another driver during a road rage incident on campus in March of last year. But he knew it wouldn't be good. “He was really, really mad because, at the end of the day, he didn’t think it would be me,” Williams recalled. "I’m a guy he looked at as being a leader … and I should know that’s not the way to handle things." Dantonio and the university suspended Williams from the team for spring practice and that summer. Williams feared for the worst. He eventually was allowed to rejoin the Spartans before last season, but only after Dantonio also stripped Williams of his scholarship. “He always let me know, ‘The door is cracked. It’s not shut yet, it’s cracked.’ That’s the first thing he said to me," said Williams, now a senior. "He said, ‘I’m not closing the door on you. It’s about to close, but it’s cracked. So if you want that door to open up, you gotta take care of what you need to take care of.’” Success at MSU hasn’t come without problems. Early in Dantonio's tenure, in particular, he dealt with the sorts of problems that had plagued previous head coaches. Glenn Winston went to jail after a fight with MSU hockey players, then was one of two players kicked off the football team by Dantonio in December 2009 following another fight at Rather Hall. Chris L. Rucker, one of 11 players involved in the Rather Hall incident, was arrested for DUI and a probation violation in 2010, but Dantonio kept him on the team. Max Bullough was suspended for undisclosed reasons in December 2013, days before the Spartans played in the Rose Bowl. Other players have been quietly dismissed from the program or punished for minor transgressions. But major issues have become less frequent as Dantonio made his imprint on the culture of his program. “There’s a confidence level and a trust where everybody else 100 percent believes in what he says,” Tressel said. “There’s no doubt if this is the direction we’re going, like coach says, we’re all going in the same direction. … Adults handle adversity a little bit better than young kids do, and we really preach on trying to teach our guys how to handle adversity.” Coach Mark Dantonio talks to quarterback Connor Cook (18) before MSU's win at Nebraska on Nov. 11, 2013. (Photo: Bruce Thorson, Bruce Thorson-USA TODAY Sports) Senior linebacker Riley Bullough, who first met Dantonio at MSU’s 2007 summer camp, said, “He’s just a stern guy. He tells you how it is. As a young player, that’s what you want.” Williams said his mother’s “tough love” when he was growing up allowed him to appreciate Dantonio’s approach to his issues. When Williams was struggling with a class this past spring, Dantonio once again had a firm discussion with his fullback. “He said, ‘You’re going to swim all the way across the water and drown right when you’re about to be at the shore?’” Williams said. “He put it in that perspective, and I was like, OK, it’s time to really buckle down and push through. Throughout the whole process, he always stayed on top of me and kept me focused, and I appreciate that.” Tough, but gentle The no-nonsense, gruff side of Dantonio typically is the one he shows in the media. If you only knew him from his soundbites, you might think of him as caustic and curt. But there also is a softer side to the man, one he rarely presents for television cameras. It’s the part that fosters a family atmosphere within his program, for his players, his staff and their families. “Everyone gives him this rap that he’s a hard tough coach – which he is, do not get me wrong. He is not soft by any means,” Macksood said. “He really and truly cares about his players. And he will do whatever it takes for any one of us, whether that’s helping us network with people, whether it’s keeping us safe. I mean, anytime we need to call him and talk to him, anytime we can go do that. “I think people see his scowl when he’s up there at a press conference or (giving) short answers. They don’t really understand.” Dantonio suffered a mild heart attack after MSU’s thrilling fake field goal victory over Notre Dame in 2010. The next week, per doctors’ orders, he did not coach the Spartans. Instead, he looked on as his oldest daughter, Kristen, was named Lansing Catholic's homecoming queen. That stuck with Macksood, who played for the Cougars that day. Dantonio chose to be with his family instead of watching MSU defeat Northern Colorado a few miles away at Spartan Stadium. It made the young player realize Dantonio wasn’t all about football all the time. MSU coach Mark Dantonio walks with his wife, Becky, after the Spartans? win over U-M on Nov. 2.?I think one thing we?ve done that we?ve changed, maybe, is we?ve tried to celebrate the wins,? Becky Dantonio said. Rod Sanford/LSJ MSU head coach Mark Dantonio and wife Becky celebrate after MSU's 29-6 victory over Michigan at Spartan Stadium in East Lansing Saturday 11/2/2013. (Lansing State Journal \| Rod Sanford) (Photo: Rod Sanford \| Lansing State Jour, Rod Sanford) “He has such a good faith life, which is big for me coming from a Catholic school,” Macksood said. “He’s always trying to help people out and explore different faith lives, pray after practice. Just the little things like that that I think a lot of coaches take for granted, that’s what I like most about coach D.” In 2009, less than three years after Staten followed Dantonio to East Lansing from Cincinnati, his 4-year-old, Quinn, lay in a hospital with an IV in his arm after suffering an allergic reaction. Dantonio gathered about eight of his players and took them to the hospital to cheer up his assistant and his family. The visit lifted the spirits of Staten and his son. As Dantonio prepared to leave, he asked Quinn if he and his players could do anything else to help the boy feel better. “Quinn goes, ‘Um, how about we play in the band?’” Mark Staten said. “We had just gotten him this toy trumpet, and he says, ‘You be the leader, you play the drums, you play the dadada, you play the dadada.’ Coach D goes, ‘All right, guys, you got it? One, two, three …” Quinn blew his horn. The big, burly Spartans standing by his bed started mouthing the sounds of the other instruments. Dantonio smiled silently, nodded his head and waved his arms back and forth in rhythm. Fittingly, he played the conductor. Contact Chris Solari at (517) 377-1070 or csolari@lsj.com. DANTONIO BY THE YEARS Year Overall Big Ten (finish) USA Today poll 2007 7-6 3-5 (t-7th) - 2008 9-4 6-2 (3rd) 24th 2009 6-7 4-4 (t-6th) - 2010 11-2 7-1 (t-1st) 14th 2011 11-3 7-1 (1st-) 10th 2012 7-6 3-5 (4th) - 2013 13-1 8-0 (1st+) 3rd 2014 11-2 7-1 (2nd#) 5th 2015 12-2 7-1 (t-1st#+) 6th Totals 87-33 63-31 Legends Division finish - Lost Big Ten Championship Game + Won Big Ten Championship Game # Big Ten East Division finish RACING TOWARD HISTORY Mark Dantonio enters his 10th season having already etched his name among MSU’s coaching elite. He has a chance to close in on a few more program records before he retires. MOST WINS 1. Duffy Daugherty 109 2. Mark Dantonio 87 3. Charlie Bachman 70 BEST WINNING PERCENTAGE 1. John Macklin.853 2. Biggie Munn.846 3. Mark Dantonio.725 BIG TEN WINS 1. Duffy Daugherty 72 2. George Perles 53 3. Mark Dantonio 52 BOWL APPEARANCES/WINS 1. Mark Dantonio 9/4 2. George Perles 7/3 LONGEST TENURE 1. Duffy Daugherty 19 2. Charlie Bachman 13 3. George Perles 12 4. Chester Brewer 10 5. Mark Dantonio 9 DANTONIO ON... Here are four of Mark Dantonio’s “philosophies for football … and life success” from the 2006 University of Cincinnati media guide. SUCCESS: “Success is a journey that starts with knowing what you want to accomplish. Hard work, persistence, confidence, and the ability to handle adversity are all integral parts of being successful.” WINNING FOOTBALL: “Football is
). Several researchers have attempted to come up with a single measure to capture social complexity (5⇓–7), but a more common approach has been to use proxy measures, such as the population size of the largest settlement (7, 8), number of decision-making levels (9), number of levels of settlement hierarchy (10), or extent of controlled territory (11). Others have criticized this approach on the grounds that these proposed measures focus too narrowly on size and hierarchy (12, 13) or that there are multiple dimensions or variable manifestations of complexity (14). However, another common view is that different societies have unique histories and cannot be meaningfully compared in this way (15). Indeed, most historians have abandoned the search for general principles governing the evolution of human societies (16, 17). However, although every society is unique in its own ways, this does not preclude the possibility that common features are independently shared by multiple societies. How can we study both the diversity and commonalities in social arrangements found in the human past? In this paper, we address these issues by building a global historical and archaeological database that takes into account the fragmentary and disputed nature of information about the human past. To test hypotheses about the underlying structure of variation in human social organization, we apply a suite of statistical techniques to these data, including principal component analysis (PCA). We then compare evolutionary trajectories in world regions by plotting the estimated first principal component (PC) of variation against time. Building a Comparative Database of Human History Previous attempts to address these questions have been limited by a reliance on verbal arguments (15, 18, 19), comparisons involving a small number of polities (20, 21), noncomprehensive data samples (3, 22), or nonsystematic methods of data coding and purely descriptive analyses (6, 23⇓–25). To advance beyond purely theoretical debates and comparisons based on limited samples, we have built a massive repository of systematically collected, structured historical and archaeological data known as “Seshat: Global History Databank” (26) (Materials and Methods). In collecting data, we used a targeted, stratified sampling technique that aims to maximize the variation in forms of social organization captured from as wide a geographic range as possible [thus minimizing pseudoreplication of data points (27)]. Specifically, we divided the world into 10 regions and in each, selected three locations or “Natural Geographic Areas” (NGAs), representing early, intermediate, and late appearance of politically centralized societies (Fig. 1). The construction of this databank has been accomplished in collaboration with a large number of historical and archaeological experts. Our goal is to capture the state of the art knowledge about past societies, including where information is uncertain or there are disagreements between researchers (Materials and Methods). The online version of the databank (seshatdatabank.info/) illustrates how entries in the databank are supported by explanations of coding choices and references (SI Appendix, SI Methods). Fig. 1. Locations of the 30 sampling points on the world map (the size of the dot reflects the antiquity of centralized societies within the world region). The key to the numbers is in SI Appendix, Table S1. Our unit of analysis is a polity: an independent political unit that ranges in scale from groups organized as independent local communities to territorially expansive, multiethnic empires. To populate the databank, we coded information on all identifiable polities (n = 414) that occupied each of the 30 NGAs at 100-y time slices from the beginnings of agriculture (in some cases, as far back as 9600 BCE) to the modern period (in some cases, as late as 1900 CE) (SI Appendix, SI Methods). To capture different aspects of social complexity, we systematically collected data on 51 variables that could be reliably identified and categorized from the historical and archaeological records. These variables were then aggregated into nine “complexity characteristics” (CCs) (Fig. 2A). The first set of variables relates to the size of polities: polity population (CC1), extent of polity territory (CC2), and “capital” population (the size of the largest urban center; CC3). A second set of variables measures hierarchical complexity (CC4), focusing on the number of control/decision levels in the administrative, religious, and military hierarchies and on the hierarchy of settlement types (village, town, provincial capital, etc.). Government (CC5) variables code for the presence or absence of official specialized positions that perform various functions in the polity: professional soldiers, officers, priests, bureaucrats, and judges. This class also includes characteristics of the bureaucracy (e.g., presence of an examination system), the judicial system, and specialized buildings (e.g., courts). Infrastructure (CC6) captures the variety of observable structures and facilities that are involved in the functioning of the polity. Information system (CC7) codes the characteristics of writing, record-keeping, etc. We also record whether the society created literature on specialized topics, including history, philosophy, and fiction (texts; CC8). Finally, economic development is reflected in monetary system (CC9), which represents the “most sophisticated” monetary instrument present in the coded society, and indicates the degree of economic complexity that would be possible. Our data collection process also allows us to incorporate uncertainty in this coding or disagreement among sources (Materials and Methods). Fig. 2. (A) Nine CCs (ovals) aggregating 51 variables (SI Appendix has details on all CCs). Line width and color are proportional to the correlation coefficients between CCs (darker and thicker lines indicate stronger correlations). All CCs are significantly correlated with one another (correlation coefficients range between 0.49 and 0.88). Some variables show stronger linkages with each other, such as the scale variables (ovals shaded in gray), whereas money is less strongly correlated with the other variables. (B) Proportion of variance explained by PCs. (C) Factor loadings for CCs on PC1 indicating strong contributions by all CCs to a single dimension of social complexity. CP, capital population; G, government; I, infrastructure; L, levels; M, money; PP, polity population; PT, polity territory; T, texts; W, information system (writing). Testing Hypotheses About the Evolution of Social Complexity To test between the different hypotheses laid out above, we analyzed these data using PCA, which assesses the extent to which different variables are tapping into shared dimensions of variation. We expected CC1–CC3 to cluster tightly together, as they all measure size, albeit in somewhat different ways. Beyond this, if the variation in social organization across different societies can be meaningfully captured by a single measure of social complexity, we would predict that the different CCs would correlate strongly with each other and be captured in one PC of variation onto which all CCs load. If social complexity is predictably multidimensional, then other PCs capturing significant amounts of variation might also be present. We hypothesized that social complexity could be captured by two PCs (7). Size variables (CC1–CC3) should exhibit a strong relationship with hierarchical organization (CC4), as hierarchy is often thought to be a necessary mechanism for enabling effective information flows in large polities (19). We refer to the combination of size and hierarchy as “scale” (Fig. 2A). The other variables might form another dimension of “nonscale” complexity, perhaps reflecting specialization of roles and the products that emerge from such specialization. Another possibility is that these CCs covary in other ways or are free to vary independently (that is, they do not evolve together in a predictable manner). In the latter situation, we would not expect correlational analysis or the PCA to reveal any structure in terms of the relationships of these variables with each other. Contrary to these expectations, all nine CCs showed substantial and statistically significant correlations with each other, with coefficients ranging from 0.49 to 0.88 (SI Appendix, Table S4). We found that a single PC, PC1, explains 77.2 ± 0.4% of variance. The proportion of variance explained by other PCs drops rapidly toward zero (Fig. 2B). Furthermore, all CCs load equally strongly onto PC1, indicating that PC1 captures contributions from across the multiple measures of social organization used here (Fig. 2C and SI Appendix). This result provides strong support for the hypothesis that social complexity can be captured well by a single measure. In running these analyses, we have to take into account a number of factors, including missing data and various sources of autocorrelation. However, our results are robust to a large number of different assumptions and potential sources of error and bias (SI Appendix, SI Results). We can also test directly the idea that societies that developed on distant world continents share enough similarities in their complexity dimensions to allow for meaningful comparisons. We used the statistical technique of k-fold cross-validation (28), in which models are fitted on one set of data (“training set”) and evaluated on another independent set (“testing set”). We reserved all data for polities in a particular world region, such as North America, as the testing set; developed predictive models on the rest of the data (by regressing each CC in turn on other CCs); and then, used the fitted models to predict each CC for North American polities. We then repeated this analysis for all other world regions. The accuracy of prediction is measured by the coefficient of prediction, ρ 2, which approaches one if prediction is very accurate, takes the value of zero when prediction is only as good as simply using the mean, and can take negative values if model prediction is worse than the mean. Our results show that the values of CCs can be predicted by knowledge of other CCs (Table 1), and as Table 2 shows, median ρ 2 ranges between 0.08 (Southeast Asia) and 0.91 (North America), indicating that this predictive ability holds across all world regions. Low ρ 2 values do occur for some variables and seem to be lowest for those regions with the fewest number of polities to be predicted (SI Appendix, SI Results). This is to be expected, as with fewer cases to predict, there is less chance for general relationships to be detected. Some decreases in ρ 2 may also occur if smaller societies adopt some of the features, which make up CCs, from other societies, because they may be useful in dealing with larger societies (perhaps especially aspects of money and writing). Such selective adoption may not necessarily lead to the rapid development of other aspects of complexity. Lower ρ 2 may also occur if some traits are retained when others are lost (see below). Table 1. Cross-validation results for out of sample prediction of CCs across all world regions Table 2. Cross-validation results for out of sample prediction of CCs summarized for different world regions Comparing Evolutionary Trajectories Our results, thus, indicate that there is striking similarity in the way that the societies in our global historical sample are organized. Examining PC1 enables us to compare how social complexity evolved in different parts of the globe over time. We plotted PC1 values estimated for each polity that occupied each of the 30 NGAs at 100-y time intervals. Fig. 3 compares the trajectories of the NGAs with early appearance of politically centralized societies in each of the 10 world regions (SI Appendix has all 30 trajectories). These trajectories indicate a general increase in complexity over time, albeit with occasionally substantial decreases in complexity (29). This comparison shows that there are crucial differences in the timing of takeoff and the rate of change as well as level of social complexity reached in different regions by 1900—differences that become clearly revealed through the analyses performed here. For example, although it is well-known that complex societies of the Americas emerged later than those in Eurasia, using our data, we can quantify their differences in social complexity. The difference in PC1 levels indicates that societies in the Americas were not as complex as those from Eurasia at time of contact, which may be a contributing factor in explaining why European societies were able to invade and colonize the Americas (30). Fig. 3. Trajectories of social complexity in 10 world regions quantified by PC1 values for locations where centralized, hierarchical polities first appeared in a particular region. (A) Africa and east Asia. Broken lines indicate 95% confidence intervals. (B) Southwest Asia, south Asia, Europe, and central Asia. (C) Southeast Asia, North America, South America, and Oceania. Confidence intervals for B and C are shown in SI Appendix, Figs. S4 and S5. PC1 has been rescaled to fall between 0 (low complexity) and 10 (high complexity) to aid interpretation. Flat horizontal lines indicate periods when there is no evidence of change from our polity data. The tight relationships between different CCs provide support for the idea that there are functional relationships between these characteristics that cause them to coevolve (3). Scale variables are likely to be tightly linked, since increases or decreases in size may require changes in the degree of hierarchy (both too few and too many decision-making levels create organizational problems) (19). A similar argument has been put forward for size and governance (20). The production of public goods, such as infrastructure, may require solutions to collective action problems (31), and these can be provided by governance institutions and professional officials (32). Despite these linkages, because of their nature, different CCs are likely to show different temporal dynamics. Levels of nonscale characteristics, such as information systems, monetary systems, or infrastructure, may be retained and used even if a polity does decrease in size. Indeed, by retaining such features, the scale of the polity may more readily bounce back and return to its former level. This cultural continuity may be one reason why the trends that we see in our data are for social complexity to increase over time in a cumulative, ratchet-like manner (3, 33⇓–35). For example, polities in our Italian NGA had writing, texts, and coins before the dramatic rises in scale of the Roman republic and empire, and they retained these features after the fall of Rome. Discussion One major conclusion from these analyses is that key aspects of human social organization tend to coevolve in predictable ways. This result supports the hypothesis that there are substantial commonalities in the ways that human societies evolve. Thus, societies can be meaningfully compared along a single dimension, which can be referred to as social complexity. Our analyses suggest that the estimated first PC of social complexity can be interpreted as a composite measure of the various roles, institutions, and technologies that enable the coordination of large numbers of people to act in a politically unified manner. However, as noted in the Introduction to this paper, the term “social complexity” has previously been defined and discussed in many ways. Indeed, complexity is a term that has many colloquial meanings, and there are many valid ways in which it could be applied to human social organization. For example, the kinship systems of some Australian Aboriginal groups, such as the Aranda, involve many complicated rules that determine who can marry whom (36, 37), and Turkana pastoralists have sophisticated social rules and norms that enable them to join together in large groups to conduct cooperative raiding missions (38). Building historical databases, such as Seshat, allows us to take the vast amount of information about the human past and use it to test and reject competing hypotheses in the same cumulative process that characterizes the sciences (39, 40). It is important to emphasize that we attach no normative judgment to the measure of social complexity that we have identified here; more complex societies are not necessarily “better” than less complex societies. We need to separate out these issues as well as ethnocentric judgments about non-European societies (2) from the kind of questions about how societies have actually evolved that we address here (3). Our purpose here is not to propose that one definition of social complexity is superior to another. Instead, by supplying evidence that at least some aspects of human societies evolve in predictable and interconnected ways, this study illustrates that it is possible to move beyond the kind of verbal arguments that too often dominate debates about the evolution of human social organization. Furthermore, quantitative comparative analysis forces us to be more explicit about the evidence needed to support different claims and brings greater clarity to debates and discussions. It is important to recognize that, in any study, including this one, there are many subjective judgments about the coding of variables. Our goal in establishing the databank is to provide a summary of what is currently known about past human societies based on the literature and the expert knowledge of academics. It is not our aim to provide a more objective or definitive representation of such evidence but rather, to make the decisions and assumptions behind our data more explicit than has often been the case in the past. Our databank thus allows others viewing these data to challenge these decisions and provide alternative assessments. Future analyses can then assess whether alternative coding decisions substantially affect the results presented here. The choice of variables and CCs themselves is also an important consideration in evaluating these results. We have attempted to be inclusive by choosing variables that would not favor particular forms of governance from certain parts of the world as being more complex. The variables are broad enough to allow for such features to come from a variety of specific institutions and are not biased toward Western forms of governance, which ultimately have their origins in early states in Greece and Mesopotamia. Our government variables (CC5), for example, capture the degree of specialization and professionalization of those involved in decision-making in sociopolitical affairs, a characteristic that has long been central to discussion of social complexity in different parts of the world (41). Our information system and texts variables (CC7 and CC8, respectively) capture the extent to which different types of information are being recorded and transmitted and reflect diversity and specialization in learning. Such information is potentially important in organizing societies or enabling societies to solve adaptive problems. Again, the variables within this category are broad enough to not be specific to any particular cultural tradition a priori. In particular, writing has been independently invented in such distant world regions as western Eurasia, east Asia, and Mesoamerica. As with the coding of specific variables, future analyses could assess whether the inclusion of alternative variables substantially affects the results presented here. Importantly, if our choice of variables was biased toward certain cultural–historical traditions, then this would reduce the correlations between different aspects of complexity, and these patterns would be different in different parts of the world. However, the overall high degree of correlation between CCs, as our cross-validation results indicate, suggests that the patterns that we have identified are relatively stable across regions. The approach that we have taken in this paper can be used to resolve other long-standing controversies in the study of human societies. For example, some researchers have argued that traditional approaches to social complexity have overemphasized hierarchical relationships and did not pay enough attention to more horizontal or heterarchical forms of complexity (13, 42). Power relationships within societies can range from being autocratic or exclusionary (certain individuals or groups aim to control sources of power) to more corporate/collective, in which power is broadly shared across different sectors of societies (12, 43, 44). Other authors have identified additional patterns that might be seen in human social evolution (21, 45), which can be fruitfully studied with the approach in this article. Indeed, some of the features that we have already coded, such as types and numbers of official positions, could be important in addressing such issues. We are already collecting data to test the idea that the balance between autocratic and collective forms of power has changed systematically over time, with autocratic forms being more prevalent in chiefdoms and early states. The emergence of institutions that held despotic leaders to account is argued to have occurred later (26), perhaps in connection with the emergence of certain religions (46, 47). Our approach is also well-suited to go beyond identifying patterns and investigate the processes of sociopolitical evolution. The systematic compilation of long-term diachronic data for multiple variables on a large number of societies has been relatively rare in comparative history and archaeology (refs. 20, 35, and 48⇓–50 have comparative studies of evolutionary trajectories for a smaller number of cases or time periods). Previous large-scale comparative approaches have generally focused on comparing evolutionary outcomes (end points) or snapshots at a single period of time rather than entire long-term trajectories (25, 51⇓⇓–54). By analyzing trajectories, we can both examine the processes that lead to variation in human societies across space and time and also take into account the historical changes that are contingent on the particular conditions and past history of the societies involved (3, 4, 55, 56). In this study, the focus on looking at comparative changes over time enables us to investigate questions about the tempo of evolutionary change in human social systems. One pattern that is already apparent (Fig. 3 and SI Appendix, Fig. S6) is that many trajectories exhibit long periods of stasis or gradual, slow change interspersed with sudden large increases in the measure of social complexity over a relatively short time span. This pattern is consistent with a punctuational model of social evolution, in which the evolution of larger polities requires a relatively rapid change in sociopolitical organization, including the development of new governing institutions and social roles, to be stable (3, 4, 57). One example that has been investigated in previous work is the emergence of bureaucratic forms of governance, which tend to develop around the time when polities first extend political control beyond more than a day’s round trip from the capital (20). A related idea is that, if there are strong relationships between these variables and if change is relatively rapid, then societies may tend to evolve toward certain types of sociopolitical organization based on associations between certain combinations of traits (3, 24, 57). Cluster analysis of PC1 shows some initial support for this idea, indicating a clear distinction between large societies that exhibit many of the nonscale features of complexity and smaller societies that lack most of these features, with other potential groupings within these clusters (SI Appendix, SI Discussion and Figs. S12 and S13). Our data also indicate a shift toward more complex societies over time in a manner that lends support to the idea of a driving force behind the evolution of increasing complexity (3, 10, 58, 59) (SI Appendix, SI Discussion, Fig. S11, and Table S9). Such a driven trend is consistent with the hypothesis that competition between groups, particularly in the form of warfare, has been an important selective force in the emergence and spread of large, complex societies (10, 11, 60). In future work, the kind of systematic approach that we have used here will allow us to assess the large number of alternative mechanisms that have been proposed to explain the evolution of social complexity (2, 11, 14, 26). We are currently expanding the Seshat databank to collect information on agricultural productivity, warfare, religion, ritual, institutions, equity, and wellbeing in past societies to assess such competing hypotheses (26, 47, 61, 62). Our focus in this paper has been on the increase in social complexity over time. However, understanding the causes of collapses and decreases in social complexity is an equally important research topic. As is clear in the evolutionary trajectories (Fig. 3 and SI Appendix, Fig. S6), declines in social complexity, some quite dramatic, are frequently seen in most NGAs. Furthermore, some of the large decreases are “hidden” when a polity collapses, but the NGA is immediately taken over by another large-scale society nearby. While different analytical approaches than the ones used in this article and additional data will be needed to study the processes explaining social collapse, such an investigation is entirely within the scope of the Seshat project. In summary, our results indicate that it is indeed possible to meaningfully compare the complexity of organization in very different and unconnected societies along a single dimension (6, 30). Although societies in places as distant as Mississippi and China evolved independently on different continents and followed their own trajectories, the structure of social organization, as captured by the interrelations between different CCs, is broadly shared across all continents and historical eras. Key elements of complex social organization have thus coevolved in highly consistent ways across time and space. Differences in the timing of takeoff, the overall rate of increase, and the depth of periodic declines in social complexity provide us with highly informative data for testing theories of social and cultural evolution. Our databank was built via a collaborative relationship with humanities scholars who provided expert knowledge of past societies and helped guide data collection at all stages. This paper has shown the power of the sciences and the humanities working together to help us better understand the past by testing and rejecting alternative hypotheses about the general rules that have shaped human history. Materials and Methods Data. Data were collected as part of “Seshat: Global History Databank” (26) (SI Appendix, SI Methods). We collected data in a systematic manner by dividing the world into 10 major regions (Fig. 1 and SI Appendix, Fig. S1 and Table S1). Within each region, we selected three NGAs to act as our basic geographical sampling unit. Each NGA is spatially defined by a boundary drawn on the world map that encloses an area delimited by naturally occurring geographical features (for example, river basins, coastal plains, valleys, and islands). Within each world region, we looked for a set of NGAs that would allow us to cover as wide a range of forms of social organization as possible. Accordingly, we selected three NGAs that varied in the antiquity of centralized, stratified societies (giving us one early-complexity, one late-complexity, and one intermediate-complexity NGA per region). Our unit of analysis is a polity, an independent political unit that ranges in scale from villages (local communities) through simple and complex chiefdoms to states and empires. To code social complexity data, for each NGA, our team chronologically listed all polities that were located in the NGA or encompassed it (SI Appendix, SI Methods has a discussion of how we deal with cases where identifying a single polity is not appropriate). For each NGA, we start at a period just before the Industrial Revolution (typically 1800 or 1900 CE depending on the location) and go back in time to the Neolithic (subject to the limitation of data). We chose a temporal sampling rate of 100 y, meaning that we only included polities that spanned a century mark (100, 200 CE, etc.) and omitted any polities of short duration that only inhabited an NGA between these points. Data collection was accomplished by a team of research assistants guided by archaeologists and historians who are experts in the sampled regions and time periods. These experts also checked all data collected by research assistants. SI Appendix, SI Methods contains details about coding procedures, including how we decided on the variables to include in the Seshat codebook and how we explicitly engaged with such issues as missing data, uncertainty, and disagreement between experts. We have created a website (seshatdatabank.info/) that illustrates the databank. This online version currently displays information on the social complexity variables in the NGAs and polities analyzed in this study (see also SI Appendix, SI Methods). The website shows how entries in the databank are supplemented by explanations of coding decisions and references. The goal of the databank is to make as explicit as possible the evidentiary basis of inferences about the past and to share that information as widely as possible. Multiple Imputation: Dealing with Missing Data, Uncertainty, and Expert Disagreement. Because of the fragmentary nature of the information that is available about past societies, it was not possible to reliably code all variables for all polities. There is, therefore, a nontrivial amount of data points for which we have been unable to assign even a broad range of possible values because of a lack of evidence (3,700 of the total of 21,000). The presence of such missing data is an important feature of our dataset, in that it accurately reflects our current understanding (or lack of it) about any particular feature in any particular past society. Missing data, however, present a challenge for the statistical analyses. One way of dealing with incomplete datasets is to simply omit the rows in the data matrix that contain missing values. There are two problems with this approach. First, it can be very wasteful in that omitted rows may contain much useful information relating to the variables that we were able to code. Had we used this approach with our social complexity data, for example, we would have to throw away nearly one-half of the rows. Second, case deletion may lead to biased estimates, because there are often systematic differences between the complete and incomplete cases. In our case, in many NGAs, small-scale societies were present far back in time, and as a result, they are much harder to code. Additionally, some regions of the world have been subject to greater levels of research effort than others. Omitting many of the lesser known cases because of their larger proportion of missing values would give too much weight to later, better known societies from only some parts of the world. As an example, had we used the casewise deletion approach for our current dataset, we would end up with only a single observation for Australia–Oceania. Such unequal dropping of observations would very likely bias the results, since the analysis would be dominated by such regions as Europe and southwest Asia (each with ∼40 complete rows in the data matrix). To deal with missing values as well as incorporate uncertainty and expert disagreement into our analyses, we use a technique known as multiple imputation (63), which utilizes modern computing power to extract as much information from the data as possible. Imputation involves replacing missing entries with plausible values, and this allows us to retain all cases for the analysis. A simple form of imputation, “single imputation,” might replace any unknown cases for a binary “present/absent” variable with simply “absent” or to replace unknown cases of continuous variables with the mean for that variable. These approaches have similar drawbacks to case deletion, in that they tend to introduce a bias. Therefore, in this paper, we perform multiple imputation: analysis done on many datasets, each created with different imputed values that are sampled in probabilistic manner. This approach results in valid statistical inferences that properly reflect the uncertainty caused by missing values (64). Multiple imputation procedures can vary depending on the type of variable and the type of data coding issue faced. Expert disagreement. In cases where experts disagree, each alternative coding has the same probability of being selected. Thus, if there are two conflicting codings presented by different experts and if we create 20 imputed sets, each alternative will be used roughly 10 times. Uncertainty. Values that are coded with a confidence interval are sampled from a Gaussian distribution, with mean and variance that are estimated assuming that the interval covers 90% of the probability. For example, if a value of [1,000–2,000] was entered for the polity population variable, we would draw values from a normal distribution centered on 1,500 with an SD of 304. It is worth noting that this procedure means that, in 10% of cases, the value entered into the imputed set will be outside the data interval coded in Seshat. For categorical or binary variables, we sample coded values in proportion to the number of categories that are presented as plausible. For example, if our degree of knowledge does not allow us to tell whether a certain feature was present or absent at a particular time, then the imputed datasets will contain “present” for roughly one-half of the imputed sets and absent for roughly one-half of the sets. Missing data. For missing data, we impute values as follows. Suppose that, for some polity, we have a missing value for variable A and coded values for variables B–H. We select a subset of cases from the full dataset, in which all values of A–H variables have values and build a regression model for A. Not all predictors B–H may be relevant to predicting A, and thus, the first step is selecting which of the predictors should enter the model (information on model selection is given below). After the optimal model is identified, we estimate its parameters. Then, we go back to the polity (where variable A is missing) and use the known values of predictor variables for this polity to calculate the expected value of A using the estimated regression coefficients. However, we do not simply substitute the missing value with the expected one (because as explained above, this is known to result in biased estimates). Instead, we sample from the posterior distribution characterizing the prediction of the regression model (in practice, we randomly sample the regression residual and add it to the expected value). We applied the same approach to each missing value in the dataset, yielding an imputed dataset without gaps. The overall imputation procedure was repeated 20 times, yielding 20 imputed sets that were used in the analyses below. The 20 imputed datasets are available online as Dataset S1. Statistical Analysis. PCA. PCA was used to investigate the internal correlation structure characterizing the nine measures of social complexity. PCA was run on each imputed dataset to estimate the proportion of variance explained by each PC (PC1–PC9), component loadings (correlations between the original variables and the PCs), and the values of PCs for each polity. Because we have 20 sets of all of these results, we also report the confidence intervals associated with these estimates. Values for PC1 derived from the 20 imputed datasets are available online as Dataset S2. Cross-validation. For the multiple imputation to be a worthwhile procedure, we need to ascertain that the stochastic regression approach for predicting missing values actually yields better estimates than, for example, simply using the mean of the variable. To do this, we used a statistical technique known as k-fold cross-validation (28). In addition to this methodological issue, this cross-validation procedure allows us to address another substantive question, namely the extent to which the relationships between variables are consistent across different parts of the world. This is done by quantifying how well we can predict the value of a particular feature of a particular society based on known information about the values of other features in that society and the observed relationships between the known and the unknown variables in other societies. Cross-validation estimates the true predictability characterizing a statistical model by splitting data into two sets. The parameters of the statistical model are estimated on the fitting set. Next, this fitted model is used to predict the data in the testing set. Because the prediction is evaluated on the “out of sample” data (data that were not used for fitting the model), the results of the prediction exercise give us a much better idea of how generalizable the model is compared with, for example, such regression statistics as the coefficient of determination, R2. The accuracy of prediction is often quantified with the coefficient of prediction (65): ρ 2 = 1 − ∑ i = 1 n ( Y i ∗ − Y i ) 2 ∑ i = 1 n ( Y ¯ − Y i ) 2, where Y i indicates the observations from the testing set (the omitted values), Y i ∗ is the predicted value, Y ¯ is the mean of Y i, and n is the number of values to be predicted. The coefficient of prediction ρ 2 equals one if all data are perfectly predicted and zero if the regression model predicts as well as the data average (in other words, if the model is simply Y i ∗ = Y ¯ ). Unlike the regression R2, which can vary between zero and one, prediction ρ 2 can be negative—when the regression model predicts data worse than the data mean. Prediction ρ 2 becomes negative when the sum of squares of deviations between predicted and observed is greater than the sum of squares of deviations from the mean. In k-fold cross-validation, rather than having simply a single fitting set and one testing set, we divide the data into k sets. We selected those cases that had complete coding for all variables and divided our dataset into 10 sets for each of our 10 world regions. Next, we set aside one region (for example, Africa) and used the other nine regions to fit a regression model for the variable of interest. Let us say that Y is polity population, and we are interested in how well it can be predicted from knowing the population of the capital, hierarchy levels, writing, etc. We fit a regression model to the data from the other nine regions. We then predict the values of Y (polity population in this case) for Africa using the known values for other variables in African polities and the regression coefficients. Next, we omit another region (for example, Europe) and repeat the exercise. At the end, we have predicted all data points by the out of sample method, while fitting the model on 9/10th of data at any given step. One important aspect of this procedure is to guard against overfitting (i.e., including too many predictor variables in the model), which is known to yield much worse predictability than a model that uses the “right” number of predictors (66). We have experimented with several methods of model selection that prevent overfitting. We found that a frequentist approach in which predictor variables are selected based on their P values (using the 0.05 threshold) does as well as the more commonly used model selection approach using the Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) (66). In fact, AIC tended to slightly overfit compared with the frequentist approach. As the frequentist approach has an additional advantage of consuming less computer time, we used this approach for all cross-validation analyses reported below. Multiple imputation, cross-validation, and PCA were all conducted using scripts written in the R statistical programming language (67). Acknowledgments We thank Paula and Jerry Sabloff, Santiago Giraldo, and Carol Lansing who contributed to the development of Seshat. We also acknowledge Prof. Garrett Fagan, who passed away on March 11, 2017. He was a valued contributor to the Seshat Databank project, helping at an early stage in developing a coding scheme for social complexity variables and overseeing the coding of Roman polities. This work was supported by a John Templeton Foundation Grant (to the Evolution Institute) entitled “Axial-Age Religions and the Z-Curve of Human Egalitarianism,” a Tricoastal Foundation Grant (to the Evolution Institute) entitled “The Deep Roots of the Modern World: The Cultural Evolution of Economic Growth and Political Stability,” Economic and Social Research Council Large Grant REF RES-060-25-0085 entitled “Ritual, Community, and Conflict,” an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme Grant 694986, and Grant 644055 from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (ALIGNED; www.aligned-project.eu). T.E.C. is supported by funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant Agreement 716212). Footnotes Author contributions:
he and co-writer Ben Affleck inserted the scene as a test to see if studio executives actually read their re-writes but the following analysis suggests that such a scene might not have been so out of place after all. Happily Ever After At first sight Gus Van Sant’s Good Will Hunting appears to be a fairly conventional love story albeit in the style of a gritty, urban, expletive-ridden art movie. A boy genius with intimacy issues overcomes his abusive past with the help of an understanding psychiatrist, gets the girl and lives happily ever after. On closer inspection, however, intentionally or not, the film alludes to so much more. The Good And The Wise The philosopher Plato wrote, ‘There are very few good men in the world, and a great many very bad; and the very good are wise and the very bad are foolish…’(Cratylus). With not one but three different people vying for the attention of good Will Hunting (Matt Damon) – ‘the one’ they love – this is not so much a love triangle but a love quadrangle. It is easy to see what they love about Will. In a world of wolves dressed in sheep’s clothing Will is a refreshing change. Honest, true to himself, he has no hidden agenda or ulterior motive other than ‘to be’. He is transparent, stripped of pretension and self-serving desire – a precious stone in a world of murky pebbles. His room too, a reflection of his persona, stripped bare. This light has no need for shade. He has no need, nor want for titles or the respect of others as he happily undertakes menial labour to pay his way. With no respect for authority – the law, judicial system and the establishment are mere pretenders in fancy dress of which he makes a mockery – he condescends professors with an ‘at ease gentlemen’. Will Hunting bows only to the authority of Truth, and like the truth, Will is harsh and often hurts. As such, despite a small, loyal group of friends, Will is alone. An outsider looking in on a dishonest, conventional world. Drifting along, not quite sure how he fits into a world that doesn’t put a value on truth, his only outlet for his c̶u̶r̶s̶e̶ gift is secretly solving near-impossible mathematical equations at the prestigious MIT whose floors society has deemed him fit only to clean. Lonely Like Will, Gerald Lambeau (Stellan Skarsgard) is also alone. Esteemed Professor at the MIT, Fields Medal winner, surrounded by an ever-present group of sycophants eager to take his place, he’s a man lonely at the top. He has reached the heights of academic success yet something is missing which he yearns to fulfill. He flirts with his doe-eyed students but only half-heartedly as if he can’t be bothered, merely going through the motions. But it’s not physical stimulation a great mind like Gerald’s needs – it’s glory – and when he discovers Will Hunting, the mathematical genius, he discovers the perfect vehicle through which to attain this glory. With Will, Gerald has found what he is looking for – a partner or companion with whom he can conquer the world. Equation-solving sessions end with Gerald gently cuddling Will and playfully tussling his hair as his side-lined assistant jealously looks on but there is consternation in Will’s face. Perhaps Gerald has been here before. Psychiatrist, Sean McGuire (Robin Williams) is the last person Gerald comes to when looking for someone to counsel Will as part of his release from jail deal. All previous psychiatrists having given up on Will, Gerald has no choice but to consult one more. When asked by his assistant who he is, Gerald hesitates. ‘He used to be my um…………my roommate in college.’ It is never explained what caused the rift between Sean and Gerald but what is clear is that these two were more than just roommates. Trust We first meet Sean Maguire lecturing his disinterested students about trust and relationships. When Gerald enters the room the look Sean gives Gerald wouldn’t have looked out of place in a romance. There is a visible tension between the two and Sean is visibly flustered. Sean and Gerald then go on what looks like a date. Table for two, romantic music, dinner and wine. The dialogue is reminiscent of two old lovers as Sean makes cutting references to Lambeau’s absence at his wife’s funeral. He seems disappointed, almost hurt when Gerald starts talking about Will and even asks ‘ How many psychiatrists did you go to before me?’ as one might ask a partner about their previous lovers. Although he tries to make light of the situation Sean appears hurt that Gerald came to see him only because he wants to use him to get through to Will. We know Sean had a wife, the now dead Nancy. Was she the cause of the rift between the two men? Later, towards the end of the film Gerald taunts Sean suggesting he’s angry at him because of what he could have done to which Sean replies, ‘I didn’t ** up. It was a conscious decision.’ Again it is never explained what the conscious decision was. Was marrying Nancy what they were referring to? Will certainly hits a nerve during his very first meeting with Sean, provoking Sean to violence by suggesting he married the wrong woman. Did Sean have to make a choice between a conventional life with Nancy and an unconventional one with Gerald? Games Like Will and Gerald, Sean too is alone. His wife and soul-mate dead, he has only memories and a bottle of liquor for company. Sean is intrigued by the boy who has caught the attention of the great Professor Gerald Lambeau, perhaps even jealous. He attempts to mask his sentiments and gain Will’s favour by humouring him but as we know, Will is not stupid. Knowing a liar when he sees one, Will toys with Sean twisting and contorting the conversation in the direction he wants it to go, taunting and provoking him until in a rage, Sean forgets himself and drops the mask. Giving in to his rage, Sean threatens to ‘end’ Will if he ever disrespects his wife again but both he and Will know that he has lost this round. But where the others gave up and wrote Will off, Sean continues, rising to Will’s challenge. It is this refusal to give up on him and walk away that now intrigues Will. Sean wins the next round, pointing out Will’s encyclopedic knowledge for what it is – an intellectual facade behind which hides a ‘scared kid’ – and so their relationship begins. Stimulation Like Will, Gerald and Sean, Skylar (Minnie Driver) is also alone. A Briton studying abroad and, like Will, an orphan. She provides Will with physical stimulation but does she provide him with the intellectual stimulation that he so needs? The first time Will calls her is from jail to ask if she is ‘pre-law’. The next time he calls her he decides to hang up without saying a word. Skylar is seen reading a book called ‘Sexual Dysfunction In Neurological Disorders’. On their first date Will confesses he doesn’t date much suggesting sexual intimacy doesn’t interest or stimulate him. A bedroom scene consists of Will and Skylar talking rather than love-making. Twice Skylar tells Will she loves him and both times he rejects her – the first time explicitly telling her he doesn’t love her and the second time evading the gesture entirely instead choosing to reply ‘take care’. Choices When Will asks Sean about any regrets meeting his wife, could it be he is talking about himself and Skylar? He knows his relationship with Skylar is merely physical, lacking the intellectual stimulation he gets from Sean. Where Sean challenges, Skylar ingratiates. Where Sean pushes, Skylar panders. But his relationship with Skylar is conventional and acceptable whereas a personal relationship with Sean, almost thirty years his senior would not be. Will’s peers and macho environment would never accept nor understand it. At some point a choice will have to be made – an unstimulating yet conventional life with Skylar or a stimulating yet unconventional life with Sean. At first Will rejects the conventional option. When Skylar asks him to move to California with him, he gets angry. Like a trapped animal he pushes Skylar away citing his past abuse as an excuse before walking out on her. He sends his best friend Chuckie (Ben Affleck) to sabotage job interviews set up by Gerald and rejects a lucrative job offer from the NSA on the grounds that it would be morally wrong. But when Sean asks if he has a soul mate, someone who challenges him he evades the question even though he knows it is Sean who is his soul mate. When Sean asks Will what it is he wants to do, Will again evades the question. Forcing his hand, Sean throws Will out prompting an angry outburst from Will. Again Sean asks him what he wants to do and again Will cannot or will not answer. Dismissed by Sean, Skylar gone, Will at least has his friends to rely on or so he thinks. On a building site, alone with best friend Chuckie and a can of beer Will thinks he can continue drifting through life without having to worry about someone trying to save him so it comes as quite a shock to him when Chuckie threatens to kill him if he doesn’t make use of his intellectual gift. At this point Will knows he must make his choice even though it’s not a choice at all. Decisions When Will walks back into Sean’s office Sean already know what choice Will has to make because he already made that choice before. By marrying Nancy he chose convention over an unconventional life with Gerald and he knows Will will do the same. Not because Will is a coward but because it is the world they live in. It is life. They can try to fight convention and ignorance but they cannot win. He knows it and Will knows it. Theirs is a love that cannot be realised. Referring to Will’s file and the abuse that he suffered at the hands of his foster father, Sean tells Will it’s not his fault. He continues to repeat the mantra ‘It’s not your fault’ but by now it is not Will’s case file he is talking about. It is the choice convention is forcing him to make. Will is confused at first by this repetition, then angry as he realises Sean’s implication that their relationship is at an end. Finally Will simultaneously let’s go, releasing years of pent-up emotion and at the same time clings on to Sean wrapping his arms around him in a flood of tears. Again nothing is explicitly said about what is really happening here nor does it need to be. Will’s tears and sobs say it all. The closest he gets to saying anything is ‘I’m so sorry,’ but what is it he’s so sorry about? For showing emotion? Possibly. Or because of the choice he has to make? ‘F* them,’ Sean says, consoling him – ‘them’ being convention, the ignorant and the blind – those incapable of perceiving true love with their hearts because they are blinded by what they see with their eyes. Diplomacy Sean and Will’s final meeting wraps up the story and their relationship. Still never explicitly touching on what just happened it is merely referred to in verbal exchanges such as: ‘Time’s up’, ‘So that’s it. So we’re done?’, ‘You’re done. You’re a free man.’ Again Will comes close to verbalising something when he says ‘I just want you to know…’ but Sean cuts him off with a diplomatic ‘You’re welcome’. Sean would later repeat this diplomacy when Gerald also on the verge of verbalising something is cut off once again by Sean who replies ‘Me too, Gerry.’ Sean and Gerald then put their past differences behind them and ‘go for a drink’, walking up the stairs playfully arguing like an old couple. Bittersweet The final shot is dedicated to watching Will drive off on the freeway to California having once again rejected a conventional job offer in favour of ‘seeing about a girl’ or Skylar. Will deciding if he has to follow convention at least he’s going to follow a convention that is fun. There is something sad about that car driving off in the distance accompanied by Elliott Smith’s meditative ‘Miss Misery’. It looks like the conventional happy ending we all wanted to see but it is this very convention that makes it unconventional because we know that Will is just pretending, going along with convention for convention’s sake. He’s conforming because convention wouldn’t have it any other way. Smith’s lyrics now explicitly stating what the characters wouldn’t say: ‘I’ll fake it through the day,’ ‘Its about taking a fall’, ‘A man in the park,’ ‘You had plans for both of us,’ ‘I don’t have you around.’ The mood then changes gear as the uptempo ‘Afternoon Delight’ by the Starland Vocal Band starts playing ending the movie on a bittersweet note. Great Minds Van Sant was right to never explicitly declare that this was a love story between men, because it wasn’t. It was a love story between great minds that transcended the bodies that they happened to inhabit. AdvertisementsSpeaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) criticized the tone of U.S. politics and warned of the dangers of identity politics at a news conference on March 23. (Reuters) Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) criticized the tone of U.S. politics and warned of the dangers of identity politics at a news conference on March 23. (Reuters) House Speaker Paul D. Ryan attempted to lift the horizons of his party with a speech last week in which he called for a competition of ideas rather than insults, and constructive political debate rather than the politics of demonization. Ryan’s speech was aimed at pulling the Republican Party away from Donald Trump’s embrace — though he never actually mentioned Trump by name. Events quickly showed what he is up against. The speaker was quickly drowned out by a snarling argument between Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas over their wives that almost eclipsed the terrorist attacks in Brussels in the U.S. media. By week’s end, the Republican race had gone into the gutter over tabloid charges of infidelity, which the senator vehemently denied and for which he blamed the New York billionaire, who called it unfounded. A race that seemed already at the bottom managed to find another low. Ryan’s speech was a relatively high-minded moment in the middle of this mud fight of a Republican nominating contest. His effort to rescue the party from a coming crisis is laudable, but the root causes of the condition go far beyond Trump. [Ryan seeks a more positive tone to political debate] Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz is blasting rival Donald Trump for a National Enquirer story accusing Cruz of having five mistresses. Here's a breakdown of how a week of fighting got us here. (Sarah Parnass/The Washington Post) The front-runner for the nomination of the Republican Party is as much a reflection of the condition as a cause, a reality that Ryan (R-Wis.) touched on only lightly in calling for a more positive and uplifting approach to politics by all sides. Which means stopping Trump alone won’t necessarily solve all of the party’s problems. Four years ago, scholars Thomas Mann, then with the Brookings Institution, and Norman Ornstein, then and now with the American Enterprise Institute, published a book examining the breakdown in American politics. It was titled “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks.” The authors took aim at the gridlocked and dysfunctional politics of Washington and the broader issue of political polarization that has become endemic in recent years. They were unsparing but not even-handed in their critique. They were ahead of others in describing the underlying causes of polarization as asymmetrical, with the Republican Party — in particular its most hard-line faction — as deserving of far more of the blame for the breakdown in governing. Mann and Ornstein are back again with a second and updated paperback edition, called “It’s Even Worse Than It Was.” The paperback arrives in the middle of the most raucous presidential campaign in memory, one that has exposed even more the fissures, fractures and divisions within the Republican Party coalition. What played out primarily in the party’s congressional wing has come to consume the presidential nominating contest. In their own ways, Trump and Cruz have brought to the surface the economic and cultural anger among many of those in the party’s base as well as the distrust of the party leadership — the same motivating forces behind the Freedom Caucus rebels in the House Republican conference. [Cruz, Trump trade more charges in heated GOP argument] The current campaign only adds fuel to the Mann-Ornstein thesis of a Republican Party at war with itself in ways that have helped cripple the governing process. Trump and Cruz reflect the yearning within the Republican base for anti-establishment outsiders to topple the insiders in Washington. Donald and Melania Trump and Heidi and Ted Cruz. (FROM LEFT TO RIGHT: AP Photo/Carlos OsorioJim Watson/AFP/Getty Images) Ohio Gov. John Kasich, the third remaining candidate for the nomination, is a dissenting voice, calling for cooperation and compromise. At this point, he is not just a dissenting voice; he is a minority voice in the presidential competition, unless he can start winning more primaries. Trump and Ryan represent bookends in a political debate that has considerable consequences for the Republican Party and for the country. Trump’s position as front-runner not only highlights the degree to which the party is being taken over by anti-establishment forces but also foreshadows the possibility of a significant defeat in November if, as the GOP nominee, Trump is unable to reverse his standing among women, Hispanics, African Americans and other voting groups. Ryan represents something far different, politics grounded in ideas and policies and an attitude of goodwill toward the opposition that he inherited from his mentor, Jack Kemp, the former House member from Buffalo who prodded his party to be more open and inclusive. Yet Ryan’s speech left unanswered key questions about his capacity to change the behavior of his party’s conference in the House and in particular the degree to which he is willing to find a governing coalition apart from the hard-liners in the Freedom Caucus. As the country’s highest-ranking Republican elected official, Ryan symbolizes the establishment’s backlash to Trump’s candidacy, a backlash that has so far failed to stop the New York businessman’s march to the nomination. The resistance might yet succeed. Whether it does or doesn’t, it raises the question of whether this presidential campaign ultimately will produce a true course change for the party or merely end up intensifying the forces that have brought it to this moment. I put that question to Ornstein in an email exchange Friday: “This really is, I believe, an existential crisis for the Republican Party,” he wrote. “Will it be a Ryan-style conservative, problem-solving party, or will it be either a Trump-style, authoritarian, nativist and protectionist party, or a Cruz-style radical anti-government party content with blowing things up as they now stand? Or, just as possible, will the party break apart, with no clue as to what will replace it or how the pieces will fit into the broader political system?” [Transcript of Trump’s interview with Post editorial board] The prospects for a crackup are real, given what Trump’s candidacy has revealed about the party’s fractured coalition. Trump’s views on issues, outlined on the campaign trail and in a recent interview with The Washington Post editorial board, represent a fundamental break with many of the conservative ideas that have been at the party’s core for years. Trump’s constituency finds his support for protecting rather than transforming Social Security and Medicare appealing. His words of praise for the work of Planned Parenthood, apart from performing abortions, are anathema to many religious conservatives. His views on trade run counter to the free-trade philosophy of the GOP elites. His comments about reevaluating the U.S. role in NATO shocked many in the Republican foreign-policy establishment. That’s the threat Ryan and others in the party see as they watch the nominating contest move into the next rounds of primaries. But it isn’t clear that what the speaker advocated in his speech would be enough to put the Republican Party in a better place, even absent Trump. House Republicans are still an unruly group and, with some exceptions, the GOP still prefers to try to do business with itself. The Republican Party remains a party of protest. It continues to struggle to demonstrate that, on the national level, it can be a true governing party.Just yesterday, the RBI released the facts of the results of the demonetisation of Rs. 500 and 1000 notes that was undertaken in November 2016. Soon after, the hashtag #DemonetisationSuccess became trending in India, led by some BJP ministers and supporters. However, a close inspection of the hashtag by watchdog handles and eagle-eyed Twitterati exposed the trend as nothing more than a sham perpetrated by the BJP to shift the narrative, an act that they have been accused of several times when the demonetisation seemingly failed to achieve a goal publicly said by Modi or anyone in the Central government. The first set of tweets was put up by some BJP leaders, and it seemed innocuous enough, given that they were BJP leaders and it makes sense to glorify a move brought about by the same party. With the return of Rs.15.28 lakh crore in the banking system, almost entire cash holdings now has an address. #DemonetisationSuccess — Arjun Ram Meghwal (@arjunrammeghwal) August 31, 2017 Demonetisation has led to widening of tax base and bringing back undisclosed income into the formal economy. #DemonetisationSuccess — Birender Singh (@ChBirenderSingh) August 31, 2017 However, soon after, a number of Twitter handles started coming out of the woodworks, all Tweeting the same general message of how Demonetisation is a massive success for India and the Modi government, right down to the punctuation and, quite literally, the words. Entire Government machinery seems to be pushing #demonetisationSuccess! Corporates can learn from BJP on concerted social media campaigns :) pic.twitter.com/3RUU5Grt4h — Karthik (@beastoftraal) August 31, 2017 LOL, BJP IT Cell and @malviyamit are at it again. Paid twitter trend to make a disaster look like a success. #DemonetisationSuccess pic.twitter.com/rCK0gBUIHA — Dhruv Rathee (@dhruv_rathee) August 31, 2017 All the tweets had the same general content of how the move increased the tax base, reduced black money, crippled terror funding and a host of other things the BJP used to shift the narrative on the demonetisation plan. One user on Reddit shared a Google doc with a set of pre-written tweets to be used. It is currently unconfirmed if it was issued by the IT cell of the BJP or if the list was painstakingly compiled by the user. The document can be read here.Story highlights Trials aboard a Navy warship in May did not prove the F-35B is ready for combat, a Pentagon report says The F-35B Lightning II is designed to replace several existing Marine Corps aircraft Marines say the May testing verified several F-35B capabilities (CNN) After nearly 15 years of schedule delays and highly criticized cost increases, U.S. military officials and defense contractors confidently proclaimed the much maligned Joint Strike Fighter program back on track when the Marine Corps declared its version of the F-35 fighter jet combat-ready last month. However, the fifth generation stealth fighter jet may still have a number of maintenance and reliability problems that "are likely to present significant near-term challenges for the Marine Corps," according to a complete copy of a recent memo from the Pentagon's Director of Operational Test and Evaluation (DOT&E), released in a report by the nonpartisan government watchdog group Project on Government Oversight (POGO). While military officials promoted the F-35's performance during Marine Corps operational test trials aboard the amphibious assault ship USS Wasp in May as a success and proof that the $400 billion fighter is ready for real-world combat deployment, the POGO report tells a very different story. Photos: F-35 testing Sailors and distinguished visitors watch an F-35B Lightning II aircraft conduct vertical takeoff and landing flight operations aboard the amphibious assault ship USS Wasp in May 2015. Click through the gallery to see more images from the testing. Hide Caption 1 of 7 Photos: F-35 testing Two F-35B Lightning II fighters complete vertical landings aboard the amphibious assault ship USS Wasp during the opening day of the first session of operational testing in May 2015. As the future of Marine Corps aviation, the F-35B is designed to eventually replace all aircraft from three legacy Marine Corps platforms; the AV-8B Harrier, the F/A-18 Hornet, and the EA-6B Prowler. Hide Caption 2 of 7 Photos: F-35 testing An F-35 B Lightning II fighter lands on the flight deck of the amphibious assault ship USS Wasp during short take-off, vertical landing operations in May. A new Pentagon report says the testing did not adequately reflect conditions the aircraft would face in real operations. Hide Caption 3 of 7 Photos: F-35 testing Marines and sailors aboard the amphibious assault ship USS Wasp secure and refuel an F-35B Lightning II fighter after its arrival for the first session of operational testing. Hide Caption 4 of 7 Photos: F-35 testing Vice Adm. William Hilrides, commander of Naval Sea Systems Command, holds up two fingers to indicate to the F-35B Lightning II pilot to power up for takeoff aboard the amphibious assault ship the amphibious assault ship USS Wasp in May. Hide Caption 5 of 7 Photos: F-35 testing An F-35B Lightning II takes off from the flight deck of the amphibious assault ship USS Wasp during test operations in May. Hide Caption 6 of 7 Photos: F-35 testing Sailors and Marines remove a generator for the F-35B Lightning II aircraft from an MV-22 Osprey assault support aircraft aboard the amphibious assault ship USS Wasp during operational testing in May. A new Pentagon report says the testing highlighted maintenance challenges for the F-35. Hide Caption 7 of 7 Not only did the six F-35Bs used in the demonstration, referred to by the Marines as Operational Test 1, fail to achieve the number of required flight hours necessary to be declared combat-ready, but, in fact, the DOT&E found the trials, "did not -- and could not —demonstrate that Block 2B F-35B is operationally effective or suitable for use in any type of limited combat operation, or that it was ready for real-world operational deployments, given the way the event was structured," the report says. To qualify as a true operational test with results that would allow the Department of Defense to determine whether or not the F-35B is operationally effective and ready to be deployed, testing would have to be conducted under conditions more representative of real-world operations, the report says. Read MoreGuild Wars 2 is the best MMO I’ve played in years. It’s not perfect, and it doesn’t turn genre convention on its ear as much as the pre-release rhetoric from NCsoft and ArenaNet might have led you to believe, but this ambitious and well-executed MMORPG artfully marries the twin design tenets of rewarding same-faction cooperation and providing hardcore, skill-based PvP competition. [Editor's Note: Game Informer does not assign traditional review scores to MMOs given their constantly updating and changing nature. This column examines the game with a critical eye, and takes the place of a standard review.] This is cast in the mold of the EverQuest/World of Warcraft lineage of MMORPGs, but with several key innovations. Some parts of the game, like the big-ticket World vs. World combat, are leagues beyond anything available in competing titles. Others, like the leveling process, are familiar but so dramatically improved over genre standards that you’ll have a hard time going back. ArenaNet’s unusual take on players’ personal storylines, on the other hand, is a half-baked shell of a feature that functions poorly. On balance, though, Guild Wars 2 is an exceptional game worth every penny of its sticker price and more, despite its lack of an ongoing subscription fee (see sidebar). The incredible scale of the world is striking. Capital cities stretch out to the horizon. Handcrafted adventuring zones are packed full of content, and are as gigantic as they are numerous. ArenaNet has almost entirely avoided the cut-and-paste trap that some MMOs fall into; every corner you turn brings an arresting new vista full of unique visuals. From the overall art direction to the tiniest animation, Guild Wars 2 is one of the best-looking games I’ve ever played. After the initial buzz from the presentation fades, a deeper and more permanent love affair with the mechanics is clear to take root. Combat is still a matter of pressing hotbar buttons, but the need to aim most attacks instead of having them automatically seek their targets lends battle a dynamic edge lacking in similar MMOs, even newer ones like Rift and Star Wars: The Old Republic. All but the most basic fights ask more of players than other MMORPGs do, from dodging out of nasty charge-up attacks to adapting tactics and skill priorities to each encounter. The limited skill bar is the other key to the combat system. Unlike World of Warcraft and its brethren, where a high-level character often has upwards of three dozen skills and items that need to be fired off in particular sequences or situations to coax optimal output from your hero, you’re limited to 10 total skills plus a unique class feature or three. As in the original Guild Wars, you’re largely free to fill those 10 slots with the skills you like or need to fulfill your role in a group. Every one of the dozens of combinations I’ve tried across several classes is suited to a unique playstyle, and the design of each individual skill and overall class has thus far prevented anything approaching a “cookie-cutter” build from becoming dominant in any sphere. The most impressive accomplishment of the combat and skill design is how it obviates the very idea of a “skill rotation” that is endemic to most other hotbar-combat MMOs. Picking the right time to hit your buttons is what makes a player skillful, rather than finding the “correct” build in an online guide and burning the optimal ability rotation into your muscle memory. Along with the ever-present emphasis on ground-targeted effects, positioning, and dodging, the combat and skill design invites players to keep their eyes on the battle instead of playing the interface. I wasn’t sold on the idea of removing the traditional tanking and healing roles, especially as someone whose favorite content is difficult group dungeons and raids, but so far my earlier skepticism is proving unfounded. The concept of giving every player a heal skill and making everyone responsible for their own health bar is working out brilliantly. Having a decent mix of damage- and support-focused characters in a PvE or PvP group is still helpful, but the line is pleasantly blurry. I’m not convinced that dungeon-style content is plentiful or good enough to hold my interest in the long-term, but Guild Wars 2 makes up for that in many other ways. How content is structured is as important to an MMO as good fundamental mechanics are. Guild Wars 2 follows the same blueprint in this regard: Determine the core goal that this style of MMORPGs have been chasing since their inception, and come up with a new, better approach. The results are excellent. Guild Wars 2’s leveling experience is unparalleled. The dynamic event system takes the place of questing, and holds several advantages over traditional designs. The window dressing of a quasi-living world falls apart about halfway to level cap as you realize that the game effectively trades static spawns for longer, more scripted spawn cycles, but it’s still a superior system. More importantly, combining the dynamic missions with the ability to meaningfully engage in content without having to find a quest-giver is a wonderful change. The content is good enough and so intertwined that it’s not uncommon to wander into an event (which the interface makes dead simple to do), be pulled into a series of further encounters and scenarios, and not notice until an hour later that you’ve trekked across most of the zone and gained a level and a half. The generous cooperation mechanics – you always get full credit for killing an enemy or completing a task, no matter if you started, finished, or helped a bit in the middle of other players also participating – mean that you’re always glad to see and work with other players. Larger events are basically pick-up raids, though like most leveling content they are tuned such that any old group of players can complete it without any meaningful communication. Crafting, exploring, questing, and plain old fighting are all rewarded with copious amounts of loot and experience. Whatever activity strikes your mood or playstyle, you can make meaningful progress by engaging in it. Taken all together, leveling is a silky-smooth, enjoyable experience full of opportunities to scratch most MMO player itches from fighting tough one-on-one battles to exploring treacherous jumping puzzles. The one black mark on Guild Wars 2 is the poorly written, shoddily executed, badly conceived personal story solo-instance adventures that sprinkle your journey from level 1 to 80. Having some control over the course of the tale is neat, but ultimately pointless when the story itself is this bad. I could forgive the middle-school D&D campaign dialogue and narrative if the missions were cool. Rather than helping storied heroes save the world, though, I have thus far found myself either cursing buggy scripting that makes it difficult or impossible to complete objectives, or bored to tears slogging through generic waves of enemies. In every case, I’ve done a lot of eye-rolling while fast-forwarding painful dialogue. The decision to include terrible single-player RPG bits in this otherwise brilliant MMO is a baffling one. PvP is the final piece of the Guild Wars 2 puzzle, and it’s a big one. The ambitious World vs. World design is amazing. Servers battle each other on gigantic, persistent, open-world zones built specifically for large group combat complete with towering fortifications and powerful siege engines. WvW can be a bit of a crapshoot, as hooking up with a group doing something interesting is dependent on your server, the day of the week, and even time of day. When you do find a group (or even better, organize a crew of your own), the excellent combat mechanics make it some of the best PvP in the genre. Like everything else, engaging in WvW is amply rewarded with loot, experience (though everyone’s base stats are boosted to level-cap values in WvW), and achievements. Structured PvP is a separate, e-sports flavored option where everyone has every skill unlocked and wears gear with equivalent stats on it. Matches are objective-based and take place on servers akin to the way a competitive shooter like Battlefield works. The progression hook is much weaker here, though, as the only rewards are cosmetic items for use in more structured PvP. And, of course, the all-important achievements and bragging rights that dedicated PvPers do it for. Guild Wars 2 is a shining, impressive achievement that will shape the MMORPG space for years to come. The personal story is bad, yes, but that’s a tiny sliver of the overall package. The execution of the rest of the game is nearly flawless on a level that only a handful of studios have ever achieved, much less in a massively multiplayer setting. The ambitious and unique retooling of genre conventions reveals a level of thoughtfulness on ArenaNet’s behalf that only the top tier of game developers can aspire to. We’re going to be playing and talking about this one for a long time.PASADENA, Calif. - NASA's Mars rover Curiosity continues to move forward with assessment and recovery from a memory glitch that affected the rover's A-side computer. Curiosity has two computers that are redundant of one another. The rover is currently operating using the B-side computer, which is operating as expected. Over the weekend, Curiosity's mission operations team continued testing and assessing the A-side computer's memory. "These tests have provided us with a great deal of information about the rover's A-side memory," said Jim Erickson, deputy project manager for the Mars Science Laboratory/Curiosity mission at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "We have been able to store new data in many of the memory locations previously affected and believe more runs will demonstrate more memory is available." Two software patches, targeting onboard memory allocation and vehicle safing procedures, are likely to be uplinked later this week. After the software patches are installed, the mission team will reassess when to resume full mission operations. Controllers switched the rover to a redundant onboard computer, the rover's "B-side" computer, on Feb. 28 when the "A-side" computer that the rover had been using demonstrated symptoms of a corrupted memory location. The intentional side swap put the rover, as anticipated, into minimal-activity safe mode. Curiosity exited safe mode on Saturday, March 2, and resumed using its high-gain antenna the following day. The cause for the A-side's memory symptoms remains to be determined. NASA's Mars Science Laboratory Project is using Curiosity to assess whether areas inside Gale Crater ever offered a habitable environment for microbes. JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. More information about Curiosity is online at http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/msl, http://www.nasa.gov/msl and http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/. You can follow the mission on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/marscuriosity and on Twitter at: http://www.twitter.com/marscuriosity. News Media Contact DC Agle 818-393-9011Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.agle@jpl.nasa.gov2013-091An unemployed couple will stand trial in Shanghai for allegedly selling their baby and using the proceeds to bankroll an online shopping spree, including the purchase of an iPhone. The couple, named only as Mr Teng and Ms Zhang, began posting online adverts for the child in June this year, Shanghai’s Jiefang Daily newspaper reported on Friday. The adverts suggested they would be willing to part with their unborn baby in exchange for up to 50,000 yuan (£5,070). After a home birth, designed to cover-up the crime, they handed over the baby girl and received a large cash payment into their bank account on the very same day. Mr Teng and Ms Zhang reportedly told prosecutors they were acting in their daughter’s best interests, claiming they had hoped to place her with a financially stable family who could provide an education. “We did not give the baby away for money but in order to give it more security,” they were quoted as saying. However, prosecutors believe the couple’s bank records clearly show they had in fact hatched a “sinister conspiracy” to profit from the child’s sale. One credit card bill shows that immediately after “trading”
�* = 14.2 ± 1.5. Details of the fitting are presented in the Supplementary Materials. ( A ) Results of the present study and of Ohtani et al. ( 12 ) based on IXS and shock compression experiments as reported by Brown and McQueen ( 19 ). Isothermal ρ-V P fitting lines are expressed as V P = [1.160ρ − 3.43] + [7.2 × 10 −5 × (T − 300) × (ρ – 14.2)]. ( B ) Comparison of obtained isothermal ρ-V P fitting lines with previous studies of NIS reported by Mao et al. ( 10 ), diamonds; IXS reported by Antonangeli et al. ( 6 ), inverted triangles; ab initio calculation reported by Vočadlo et al. ( 20 ), open crosses; and report of Sha and Cohen ( 21 ), crosses. We fit our data by allowing the coefficients in the linear ρ-V P relation to vary with temperature, which preserves Birch’s law at any fixed temperature ( Fig. 2A ). A good fit to the data is possible by taking a first-order, linear, temperature dependence of the coefficients. The preferred orientation of the sample in the DAC is estimated using x-ray diffraction (XRD) pattern, and the velocity variation is less than 1.5% at 163 GPa and 3000 K (see also the discussion in the Supplementary Materials). We then parameterize the dependence as (1) The values of hcp-Fe and each Fe–light element compound [hcp-Fe 92 Ni 8 ( 14, 24 ), purple; dhcp-FeH ( 11, 25 ), blue; hcp-Fe 85 Si 15 ( 10, 26 ), aqua; Fe 3 S ( 13, 27 ), green; FeO (B1/rhombohedral phase) ( 7, 28 ), yellow-green; Fe 3 C ( 9, 29 ), pink; Fe 7 C 3 ( 30 ), yellow] show distributions from the ICB to the COE. The obtained ρ-V P of hcp-Fe at 5500 K is indicated by orange, and the star is at the expected ICB conditions. The other stars denote ρ-V P of Fe–light element compounds under ICB conditions assuming that the temperature effects of these compounds are the same as those of hcp-Fe (the dashed lines are the temperature effect). Triangles connecting three stars (hcp-Fe–hcp-Fe 92 Ni 8 –Fe–light element compound) indicate the potential ρ-V P region given by mixing three components. Several sound velocity and density measurements of pure iron and iron alloys demonstrate the effect of light elements on the properties of iron. The ρ-V P plots of hcp-Fe ( 3, 12 ), hcp-Fe 92 Ni 8 ( 14, 24 ), dhcp-Fe ( 11, 25 ), hcp-Fe 85 Si 15 ( 10, 26 ), Fe 3 S ( 13, 27 ), FeO (B1/rhombohedral phase) ( 7, 28 ), Fe 3 C ( 9, 29 ), and Fe 7 C 3 ( 30 ) are summarized in Fig. 4. The ρ-V P plots of hcp-Fe at 4200 and 5500 K are also plotted in this diagram, and a star symbol indicates the ICB condition. Each ρ-V P plot of iron alloys and iron–light element compounds is shown from the center of Earth (COE) to the ICB. The stars indicate the extrapolation to the ICB conditions (T ICB = 5500 K) assuming that the temperature effect on these compounds is the same as that on hcp-Fe. This assumption is made on the basis of the few studies that show the temperature effects on iron alloys based on Birch’s law. To account for the composition of Earth’s inner core, the triangles (hcp-Fe–hcp-Fe 92 Ni 8 –Fe–light element compounds) need to overlap with PREM. In this discussion, we assumed Fe alloy to be an ideal mixture among various Fe-rich compounds, such as hcp-Fe, hcp-Fe-Ni, and Fe–light element alloys to estimate the average ρ-V P of Fe alloy with light elements. Oxygen and carbon may not be suitable as major light elements in the core. On the other hand, silicon, sulfur, and hydrogen decrease both density and V P and are thus potential candidates. Hydrogen is a good candidate because the mixing of hcp-Fe, hcp-Fe 92 Ni 8, and dhcp-FeH can be accountable for the ρ-V P plot of PREM. Thus, the inner core may be a hidden hydrogen reservoir in Earth. Silicon and sulfur can also meet an important requirement if their temperature effects on V P are larger than that of hcp-Fe. In addition, the presence of melt in the inner core ( 31, 32 ), anelasticity ( 32 ), and/or a premelting effect ( 33 ), which causes the decrease in sound velocities, can support a silicon- or sulfur-rich inner core. Stars indicate V P and ρ of hcp-Fe and PREM at 330 GPa. The difference in the ρ-V P plot between PREM and hcp-Fe at 5500 K (orange) shows a 4 to 5% core density deficit and a 4 to 10% core velocity deficit and that of 4200 K (blue) shows a 5 to 6% core density deficit and a 7 to 13% core velocity deficit. To demonstrate the impact of this work for understanding core composition, we focus on ρ and V P at the inner core boundary (ICB), where the pressure has been determined to be 330 GPa by a seismological study ( 2 ). The recent discussion of the thermal state of the outer core based on the melting experiments of iron–light element systems suggests that the temperature at ICB is around 5500 K ( 22 ). The density of hcp-Fe can be calculated using the equation of state ( 3 ). The density-velocity relation from the present work extrapolated to this temperature is shown in Fig. 3. Also shown are the results of the PREM ( 2 ). The phenomenological Eq. 1 may be used for extrapolation to the inner core conditions (see also the discussion in the Supplementary Materials). As is apparent from Fig. 3, both the density and V P of hcp-Fe are higher than PREM values: Earth’s inner core has a 4 to 5% smaller density and a 4 to 10% smaller V P than hcp-Fe at 5500 K. Thus, on the basis of the present sound velocity results, we conclude that light elements, or a combination of light elements and nickel, in the inner core decreases not only density but also simultaneously the V P of hcp-Fe under inner core conditions. Assuming the lower core temperature model (T ICB = 4200 K) proposed on the basis of the melting temperature of pyrolite ( 23 ), Earth’s inner core has a 5 to 6% smaller density and a 7 to 13% smaller V P than hcp-Fe at 4200 K. MATERIALS AND METHODS Samples and cells The IXS experiments and XRD experiments were conducted up to 163 GPa and 3000 K at the same beamline, BL35XU. High-pressure and high-temperature conditions were generated using a double-sided LHDAC with 150-and 250-μm culets. The used laser heating system is COMPAT (17), which has been developed for an LHDAC in a limited experimental space, such as the beamline of a synchrotron radiation facility. Rhenium gaskets were preindented to 35 to 70 μm in thickness, and a hole 50 to 100 μm in diameter was drilled in the gasket as the sample chamber. The iron sample (99.99% purity) was compacted from a powder into a foil 45 to 90 μm in diameter and 10 to 30 μm in thickness. The sample was sandwiched between two NaCl layers that are 10 μm in thickness, which were used as a pressure medium and a thermal insulator. Laser heating The average temperature of the heating spot obtained at 118 GPa and 3000 K is shown in fig. S1. The typical temperature uncertainty is 200 K due to fluctuation. The experimental duration at one pressure-temperature condition was about 4 to 6 hours. The temperature was monitored and controlled for 4 to 6 hours and recorded every 15 min during the heating experiments. Sample temperature under laser heating was determined by fitting Planck’s formula to a spectrum of thermal radiation from a sample between 600 and 800 nm. The optics used to collect thermal radiation was calibrated with an intensity standard lamp. The hot spot is greater than the x-ray beam size at full width at half maximum (FWHM). We calculated the sample temperature by averaging the variation in the heating area probed by x-rays during the IXS measurements that lasted 4 to 6 hours. IXS and XRD The IXS and XRD experiments were performed at BL35XU of SPring-8 in Japan (18). We used the Si (9 9 9) backscattering optics, which provides an incident photon energy of 17.794 keV with an energy resolution of 2.8 meV at FWHM. The beam size was focused to 16 × 16 μm by a Kirkpatrick-Baez mirror pair for this work (34). The scattered x-rays were analyzed by 12 crystals, which are arranged in a two-dimensional (3 × 4) array. The momentum transfer Q = 2k 0 sin(2θ/2), where k 0 is the wave vector of the incident photons and 2θ is the scattering angle, was selected by rotating the spectrometer arm in the horizontal plane. Here, we collected IXS spectra in the range of Q = 6.0 to 10.0 nm−1 at each experimental pressure. The momentum resolution was set to about 0.4 nm−1 full width. IXS spectra of hcp-Fe at 163 GPa and 3000 K are shown in fig. S2. The XRD patterns were obtained under the same experimental conditions as IXS using a flat panel area detector installed at BL35XU. An example of XRD pattern is shown in fig. S3. Rediffraction peaks may come from tails of x-ray beams. Pressure was calculated on the basis of XRD patterns using the equation of state of hcp-Fe (3). The lattice preferred orientation of this compressed sample was estimated using this diffraction pattern and discussed below. The experimental conditions are summarized in table S1. Fits to the dispersion Figure 1 shows the IXS spectra collected at 163 GPa and 3000 K. The spectra are characterized by an elastic contribution centered at zero energy and inelastic contributions from hcp-iron and diamond. The peak of the TA phonons of diamond appears at higher energies compared to hcp-iron because of the much higher sound velocity of diamond. The zero energy was well determined by the elastic peak. The energy positions of photons were extracted by fitting the data with a set of Lorentzian functions. The compressional sound velocity (V P ) was determined by fitting the phonon dispersion with a sine function (S1)where E and Q are the energy and the momentum of the acoustic mode, and Q MAX is the first Brillouin zone edge (35). The expression can be derived from the solution of the dynamical matrix limited to the nearest-neighbor interaction within the framework of the Born–von Karman lattice dynamics theory (36). Here, Q MAX was taken to be a free parameter in the fit, as in previous studies (9). V P can change when Q MAX is fixed to be Qa/2π = 0.6, but it remains within the error range for the fits to V P when Q MAX is free (fig. S4). Because our sample was polycrystalline, the determined velocity is an aggregate sound velocity, averaging over crystal orientations. We made critical assessments of texture effects and deviation from ideal average velocity as shown below. Figure S5 shows the dispersion curve at each experimental condition and the fits using eq. S1. The phonon energy of inelastic scattering increases with pressure, which indicates an increase of the compressional sound velocity with pressure. The results are summarized in table S2. Our 12 independent data points (albeit at mainly four different momentum transfers) provide a good constraint on the sound velocity. In addition, we conducted extra experiments to check the Q dependence of the obtained sound velocity. The difference in velocity at higher (IXS101) and lower (IXS102) Q in the same conditions is ~0.35%, as shown in fig. S6. Birch’s law Birch’s law is a linear relation of the compressional sound velocity V P with density ρ as V P = aρ + b (4, 5), which arises in the physics of solids as a linearization of a power law (37). No regard is given to the temperature effect on the equation. To cover ρ-V P data under a wide range of temperature conditions, the temperature effect on Birch’s law should be considered. A recent ab initio calculation study (33) reports the premelting effect on sound velocities of hcp-Fe. Their results indicate that the temperature dependence of the velocity is linear below melting temperature (T/T m < 0.9). Assuming the linear temperature effect on the slope, a, and intercept, b, we modify Birch’s law as (S2) Equation S2 can be rewritten in the following form (S3) Here, we replaced a 0 with M, b 0 with B, and a 1 with A, and we refined –b 1 /a 1 as ρ* (S4) Equation S4 can be divided into a temperature-independent term, [Mρ + B 0 ], and a temperature-dependent term, [A(T − 300)(ρ − ρ)]. The first term shows typical Birch’s law at 300 K. The second one exhibits the temperature effect on V P at each density (pressure). At the same density, V P decreases with temperature. In addition, the decrease in V P at the same temperature becomes smaller with an increase in density. However, the linear temperature dependence implies that these relations should only be applied below a density, given by ρ in eq. S4: at ρ, V P becomes independent of temperature, and above ρ, the temperature dependence becomes unphysical, with velocity increasing as temperature increases. ρ* corresponds to a pressure of about 500 GPa, far beyond the center pressure of Earth. To approximate our results and extrapolate them to different conditions, we used the linear form discussed above and simultaneously fit the IXS results at high temperatures reported here and at room temperature (12) and the shockwave data (19). The error bars of the shockwave data are not given precisely; hence, we consider a velocity error of 1 or 2%. Table S3 gives the resulting parameters. To check the validation of fitting parameters, we compared fit results with experimental data. Figure S7 shows that the fit results are within error bars of each experimental data; thus, the fitting parameters are reasonable. Notably, as is often the case for linear fits, the normalized covariance matrix of the fit parameters tends to be highly correlated, with diagonal values that approach unity magnitude. To estimate the error in the value at the core-mantle boundary (CMB), we therefore used the error propagation equation (38) with the full covariance matrix of the fit parameters, which, in this case, is (S5)where σ AB is the covariance of A and B and the error in the velocity V(ρ,T) is given by. The results given in table S3 suggest that the velocity determination is fairly robust to small changes in the errors of the shockwave data. Fitting using our high-temperature data (2300 and 3000 K) and shock compression data provided the parameters of eq. S4 in table S3. However, in the case of the combination of ambient temperature data (300 K) and shock compression data, fitting was not completed successfully. The fitting curves in Fig. 2 were obtained from the data at 2300, 3000 (this study), and 300 K (12) and from shock data (19). We checked the fitting by a power law as suggested by Mao et al. (10). Our analyses revealed that the fitting by the power law shows almost no curvature and is very close to the linear extrapolation, suggesting that our linear extrapolation is valid. Equation 1 gives the isothermal ρ-V P relation by plugging the temperature. To compare with PREM, we assumed that the CMB temperature is 5500 K (22). The density at 330 GPa and 5500 K was calculated to be 13.42 ± 0.08 g/cm3 using the equation of state of hcp-Fe (2). Thus, the velocity of hcp-Fe at 330 GPa and 5500 K is 11.85 ± 0.40 km/s. In the case of 5000 K, ρ 330GPa, 5000K = 13.49 ± 0.08 g/cm3 and V P, 330GPa, 5000K = 11.98 ± 0.40 km/s, whereas at 6000 K, ρ 330GPa, 6000K = 13.34 ± 0.08 g/cm3, that is, V P, 330GPa, 6000K =11.69 ± 0.40 km/s. The ρ and V P of PREM are 12.764 cm3 and 11.028 km/s, respectively (2). In the temperature region between 5000 and 6000 K, the hcp-Fe indicates larger density and compressional sound velocity than PREM at 330 GPa. Therefore, the density and velocity deficits in Earth’s inner core compared to hcp-Fe are [Δρ (hcp-Fe – PREM) /ρ hcp-Fe ] 5500K = 4 to 5% and [ΔV P(hcp-Fe – PREM) /V Phcp-Fe ] 5500K = 4 to 10%, respectively. In an analysis for the conclusion, we assumed that the temperature effect on Birch’s law for all iron–light element compounds is the same as that for hcp-Fe. The present conclusion on the light elements in the inner core does not change without unusual reduction of the sound velocity of FeO and Fe 3 C with increasing temperature, which is not likely (39–41). Ab initio calculation To evaluate the effect of the preferred orientation on the sound velocity measured in this work, we calculated the anisotropy of the elastic constants of hcp-Fe under the conditions of the present work. We calculated the elastic constants of hcp-Fe at 163 GPa and 3000 K based on an ab initio calculation: 1321.5 GPa for C 11, 661.3 GPa for C 12, 620.4 GPa for C 13, 1419.7 GPa for C 33, and 211.7 GPa for C 44. The C ij calculated here at 163 GPa and 3000 K is consistent with previous work under similar conditions. Details of the ab initio calculation are given by Tsuchiya and Fujibuchi (42). The difference between C 11 and C 33 of hcp-Fe becomes smaller with temperature because C 11 is 1552.8 GPa and C 33 is 1767.0 GPa at 180 GPa and 0 K. The difference will become much smaller at higher temperatures and hcp-Fe will become isotropic, as reported by Sha and Cohen (21).Getty Images James Harden said they got their swagger back. What remains unclear even though their season isn't over yet: Do the Houston Rockets actually have swagger, or is it all Harden's? The Rockets had enough effort to deliver the predictable pushback Tuesday on their first night at death's door in the NBA playoffs, beating a visiting Los Angeles Clippers team due for a letdown, 124-103, to avoid Game 5 elimination. But the feel of the series did not change: The Clippers have more ways to win games, and they should eliminate the Rockets in Game 6 Thursday back at Staples Center. Harden was fantastic in Game 5, posting his first playoff triple-double despite fighting the flu. It was a deserved occasion to celebrate him perhaps for the last time this season because he has carried an inordinate amount of the Rockets' load. That's sort of the problem, though. The Rockets look like the consummate lose-in-the-second-round team because they are so reliant on Harden. And his magic is the sort that is more bewildering to opponents in the regular season than in the playoffs. It's not unlike how the first incarnation of Mike D'Antoni's Phoenix Suns was overwhelming to face in regular-season games because no opponent could be prepared for the pace and attack the Suns brought that was so totally different from other teams. There's no one quite like Harden in the league, and when you're only facing him during a packed schedule filled with all sorts of other opponents, no one is truly ready to stop him. Scott Halleran/Getty Images Harden is flat-out brilliant at sensing when any defender's arms are out of position for him to move into for contact for a foul—and that's beyond the simple lazy reaching that often passes for regular-season-level help defense. So he makes his crafty lefty moves, the whistles follow, and so do a lot of regular-season victories. In a playoff series, though, players truly study scouting reports and actually listen to what coaches tell them. And if you have a paint protector of DeAndre Jordan's caliber, then you can preach to your perimeter defenders just to be solid and do their best to keep their hands away from Harden's body. You can force him to settle for jumpers with Jordan lying in wait. That's how the Clippers can get away with using J.J. Redick as the primary defender on Harden. Whereas high-intensity Matt Barnes can't resist doing whatever he can, however he can, Redick has largely stayed solid and just been in the way. Harden can still create and make shots—watching him drill step-back jumpers in King of the Hill one-on-one games against Kevin Durant and Paul George after USA Basketball practices in Las Vegas last summer was captivating—but the easier path to victory for him is the free-throw parade. It is also the root of the Rockets' aggressiveness as a team. To Harden's credit, he committed to that approach in Game 5, and it worked. Jordan got in early foul trouble, with Clippers coach Doc Rivers explaining to reporters postgame: "He was just trying to cover up for a lot of our mistakes. To me, we did a poor job of protecting DeAndre." The Clippers basically offered up their regular-season level of defense Tuesday night—not far from the Dallas Mavericks' deplorable first-round level of defense that Harden shredded. The Clippers were inconsistent with both help and rotations Tuesday; Chris Paul and Barnes repeatedly got out of position with mindless double-teams, leaving Jason Terry and Trevor Ariza to nail open threes even when Harden wasn't the one creating. Troy Taormina-USA TODAY Sports It was Harden's swagger, though, that the Rockets rode to a win, much in the same way they were able to in the regular season despite Dwight Howard's frequent absences as he struggled with a right knee problem. As for Howard, he has been active in the playoffs, but it's impossible to rank him as one of the league's top 10 players the way Houston general manager Daryl Morey promotes when Howard doesn't give his team a clear way to win—or specific swagger. The best that Howard gives the Rockets is excellent defense that can trigger transition offense, but that is hardly dominance. Without injured perimeter pest Patrick Beverley, the Rockets defense isn't the same—and obviously, it isn't as good as when the group can get set behind countless Harden free-throw attempts. Behind Howard, the likes of Josh Smith, Ariza and Terry sometimes make plays and sometimes don't. The Rockets aren't a consistent enough three-point shooting team to make opponents pay for selling out with traps of Harden, which is why Kevin McHale resorted to moving Harden off the ball some to no avail in Game 4. Harden is averaging 5.4 turnovers in the series. McHale was so desperate for more offensive playmaking in Game 5 that he moved Smith into the starting lineup because Smith is a decent passer—sometimes. David J. Phillip/Associated Press Things could have been different had Morey been able to secure one signature last July, when the Rockets were so close to adding Chris Bosh to their locker room—not only to offer a poised, multifaceted weapon, but to give the team a swagger other than Harden's. Bosh proved on Miami's title teams that he is a uniquely powerful connector, someone who understands the importance of sacrifice and teamwork. That is its own kind of confidence, and it's definitely one the Rockets lack. People can criticize Morey for dumping guys such as Omer Asik and Jeremy Lin, both of whom would've helped a lot in this series, to bid for Bosh—and letting Chandler Parsons become a free agent and then go. They can try to pigeonhole Morey as an analytics guy misunderstanding the importance of human character by investing in Harden and Howard, two suspect team leaders. But Morey completely comprehended how much more Bosh would've offered this team in sheer talent and as a uniting force. And it was looking awfully good for Houston to have Bosh and Parsons with Harden and Howard until Pat Riley sold Bosh on anchoring the Heat's post-LeBron James rebuild (and threw more money at Bosh than Morey could offer). Bill Baptist/Getty Images Without Bosh and Parsons, Morey still saw the Rockets as a top-four team in the Western Conference—and Harden made good on that. Houston even managed the No. 2 seed, which is why there's still the semblance of possibility the Rockets could advance if they steal Game 6 from the Clippers to set up a Game 7 in Houston. It hardly looks likely, but Morey foresaw that way back in July in taking a big swing that resulted in a home run until Riley leaped over the fence to bring Bosh back. It has still been a nice season for Houston fans. Yet that was the real day the Rockets lost their swagger. Kevin Ding covers the NBA for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter @KevinDing.I experienced sleep paralysis twice in college. I can vouch for the sheer terror that attends the experience. I saw -- no, felt -- an evil presence to my left. I can't tell you what was evil about it or how I knew it was so nasty. But I did. As the experience progressed, it came closer. It didn't feel like my life was at risk. That was, in fact, too small. It felt like the presence was after something else, probably what you'd call my soul or my being, even though intellectually I'm a straight materialist. I woke up more scared than I've ever been in my life. Overwhelming fear. Overwhelming dread. Overwhelming fear and dread. When I read about sleep paralysis, I immediately identified that presence (which remained just to the left of my visual field) as the Old Hag. But there is a one big difference between sleep paralysis, which impacts a substantial percentage of the global population at least once, and what the Hmong immigrants experienced in the 1980s. The Old Hag was terrifying but harmless; whatever happened in the night to the Hmong killed them. * * * Adler studied the Hmong and their relationship to what they call tsog tsuam for years and years. That research forms the core of her book. Adler went out into the field. She collected dozens of experiences of sleep paralysis among the Hmong both from her own interviews and other researchers. One 49-year old Adler interviewed provided this typical experience: I remember a few months after I first came here -- I was asleep. I turned out the light and everything, but I kind of think... and then -- all of a sudden, I felt that -- I cannot move. I just feel it, but I don't see anything, but I -- then I tried to move my hand, but I cannot move my hand. I keep trying, but I cannot move myself. I know it is tsog tsuam. I am so scared. I can hardly breathe. I think, "Who will help? What if I die?" She brought her background in exploring traditional belief systems to bear on attacks like the one above. She found that the nighttime attacks were part of a matrix of beliefs held by both animist and Christian Hmong. A powerful folklore had built up around tsog tsuam that included both causes and cures for the attacks. "When the Hmong don't worship properly, do not perform the religious ritual properly or forget to sacrifice or whatever, then the ancestor spirits or the village spirits do not want to guard them," one man explained to Adler. "That's why the evil spirit is able to come and get them." And for a lot of reasons, the Hmong in the late 1970s and early 1980s were not able to worship properly. The ethnic group fought a guerrilla war against the government of Laos with U.S. backing during the Vietnam War. When the Laotian communists won, many Hmong struck out for America to avoid reprisals. The U.S. government decided to scatter the Hmong randomly across the U.S. to 53 different cities, breaking up the immigration patterns we generally see. In short order, the Hmong organized and made a "secondary migration" to California, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. The immigrants ran into all kinds of problems making their way in the States. Highland Laos, where farming and hunting were the norm, was not Minneapolis-St. Paul or Fresno. Unemployment was obscenely high and the sense of community that many had enjoyed in the old country was gone.Mr. Praline: ‘E’s not pinin’! ‘E’s passed on! This parrot is no more! He has ceased to be! ‘E’s expired and gone to meet ‘is maker! ‘E’s a stiff! Bereft of life, ‘e rests in peace! If you hadn’t nailed ‘im to the perch ‘e’d be pushing up the daisies! ‘Is metabolic processes are now ‘istory! ‘E’s off the twig! ‘E’s kicked the bucket, ‘e’s shuffled off ‘is mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisible!! This is an ex-parrot!!! In a way, it was hard not to think of Monty Pythons’ dead parrot sketch when it comes to my favorite player, David Wright, and the reaction of Mets’ personnel to the latest news. Pay no attention to Lenny Dykstra or Don Mattingly because another week of rest and he’ll be ready to resume baseball activities. To be fair, spinal stenosis is not a one diagnosis fits all disease. Just because it ended Dyskstra’s career does not mean it’ll do the same thing to Wright. It’s entirely possible that extended rest will be the cure and Wright will be back after the All-Star break. It just feels like the medical staff is reverting back to pre-Sandy Alderson days, where nothing is ever serious until the player has been gone for months. We should be getting Carlos Delgado back annnny day now. Meanwhile, it’s okay for fans to be hysterical and depressed now over the latest Wright news. But Alderson and his staff have to come up with a plan of what to do in both the short-term and long-term if Wright is not coming back. MetsBlog announced that with Eric Campbell – Wright’s current replacement – in an 0-19 slump, that the Mets would bench him and play Ruben Tejada at third base. Earlier this season, Tejada made his first-ever start at third and played pretty well, making a couple of nice plays in the field. And Tejada homered Saturday, so why not get him in there again? In the short-term, playing Tejada is likely the most-reasonable option the team has. Campbell has yet to display the ability to perform well for more than a week at a time, Daniel Muno looked overmatched in his brief callup earlier this season, Matt Reynolds has a.755 OPS in Las Vegas, where the team as a whole has an.835 mark. And that includes pitchers. But why on earth would you play Tejada at third base? That is, unless you subscribe to the theory that anytime you can play three guys out of position on the infield, you’ve got to do it. Wouldn’t a more pitcher-friendly alignment be Wilmer Flores at 2B, Tejada at SS and Daniel Murphy at 3B? Is Flores’ confidence so low that he’ll view any move off SS as a threat? Flores doesn’t have much of a major league track record to examine. But it may be worth noting that at his limited time at 2B, he has an.868 OPS with 10 extra-base hits in 72 PA. Compare that to his.641 OPS while playing SS. It may not mean anything. But it’s certainly not a ringing endorsement to play him at SS when the team could easily make a spot available for him at 2B. Murphy came up as a third baseman and while he’s no threat to win the Gold Glove Award at the position, he’s better suited to play the hot corner than he is to play in the middle infield. If nothing else, at least he’s supposed to charge bunts while playing third. And while perhaps falling in the category of damning with faint praise, Tejada is the best shortstop on the roster. It seems clear to me that this is the best short-term option. And it gives the Mets a chance to see that if in a worst-case scenario where Wright’s career is over that Murphy can be his replacement. It’s no fun to consider such a thing. The dream has always been for Wright to finish his career with the Mets like John Elway in Denver, with a couple of championships at the end of the road as a reward for all he did for the franchise earlier in his career. Shoot, I’m still clinging to that vision. But at the very least, Alderson has to consider life for the Mets without Wright. Murphy got off to a horrible start this year and for the season, he has a.690 OPS, a mark which can only be described as un-Murphy like. But in his last 26 games, he has a.333/.373/.469 slash mark. That might be a little above where we would expect him to be but certainly that is closer to his expected output than what he did the first three weeks of the season. Right now, 22 third basemen in the game qualify for the FanGraphs leaderboards. In the middle of the pack is Pablo Sandoval and his.753 OPS, which ranks 11. You may have heard that Sandoval signed a big free agent contract in the offseason. Yes, Sandoval is underperforming. Still the point is that it’s not going to be easy to bring in a guy to give league offense at the position and the Mets have one sitting under their nose. Or two, considering that Dilson Herrera should be back at some point to play second and Flores could slide over and play third. The Mets should use this period while Wright is going to be out to play someone at the position who could be his eventual replacement, should that need exist for next season. Flores would definitely be cheaper in 2016. Murphy likely would be better. There’s just no way to justify playing Tejada at third base. And for his sake, this shouldn’t be a one-game spot start and then back to the bench. Campbell has a lifetime.655 OPS (and sinking) in the majors and it’s painful to watch him throw across the diamond. Tejada has a lifetime.645 OPS and is the team’s best shortstop. Let him play that position until/unless the club pulls the trigger on a deal for a better option. And give Flores or Murphy a tryout at third for the remainder of time that Wright is shelved. Share this: Email Facebook Print Reddit Twitter More Pinterest LinkedIn Tumblr GoogleThe Battle And Future Of Bitcoin In Jeopardy I went on We Are Change recently to talk about the future of bitcoin with Luke Rudkowski. There is so much going on in the cryptocurrency space. One of the biggest things being talked about is the highjacking of Blockstream and Bitcoin Core by globalist influence. Many believe Blockstream is working to purposely make bitcoin slower with more expensive transaction fees. They openly advocate this and claim it is ok to have these changes because they prefer to look at bitcoin as a “value layer” in the market, rather than a pragmatic payment system for smaller transactions. That, in and of itself, is a dramatic change from what bitcoin was designed to be by its creator, Satoshi Nakamoto. And, a dramatic change from what everyone I am aware of who has been in bitcoin since 2009 thought it was supposed to be. In this sense, bitcoin, or Bitcoin Core, has been a hard fork of bitcoin! The Bitcoin Core/Blockstream group has essentially censored the discussion so that the other side of the argument can’t be heard on Reddit which is an immediate red flag. Not to mention, seemingly employing an army of trolls to attack those who stand up to this fork of the vision of bitcoin. Because of pressure from honest users and developers in the community, Bitcoin Core stated a while ago that they would wind up increasing the blocksize - something they said would happen as a result of the Segwit2x fork, which as everyone now knows, did not end up happening. Many people from the get-go stated that Blockstream would never allow the blocksize to be increased. I gave them the benefit of the doubt. As we now know it was scrapped and those people turned out to be absolutely correct. It is for this
intend to find a best solution, but it terminates in a reasonable number of steps; finding an optimal solution to such a complex problem typically requires unreasonably many steps. In mathematical optimization, greedy algorithms optimally solve combinatorial problems having the properties of matroids, and give constant-factor approximations to optimization problems with submodular structure. Specifics [ edit ] In general, greedy algorithms have five components: A candidate set, from which a solution is created A selection function, which chooses the best candidate to be added to the solution A feasibility function, that is used to determine if a candidate can be used to contribute to a solution An objective function, which assigns a value to a solution, or a partial solution, and A solution function, which will indicate when we have discovered a complete solution Greedy algorithms produce good solutions on some mathematical problems, but not on others. Most problems for which they work will have two properties: Greedy choice property We can make whatever choice seems best at the moment and then solve the subproblems that arise later. The choice made by a greedy algorithm may depend on choices made so far, but not on future choices or all the solutions to the subproblem. It iteratively makes one greedy choice after another, reducing each given problem into a smaller one. In other words, a greedy algorithm never reconsiders its choices. This is the main difference from dynamic programming, which is exhaustive and is guaranteed to find the solution. After every stage, dynamic programming makes decisions based on all the decisions made in the previous stage, and may reconsider the previous stage's algorithmic path to solution. Optimal substructure "A problem exhibits optimal substructure if an optimal solution to the problem contains optimal solutions to the sub-problems."[2] Cases of failure [ edit ] Examples on how a greedy algorithm may fail to achieve the optimal solution. Starting at A, a greedy algorithm will find the local maximum at "m", oblivious to the global maximum at "M". With a goal of reaching the largest-sum, at each step, the greedy algorithm will choose what appears to be the optimal immediate choice, so it will choose 12 instead of 3 at the second step, and will not reach the best solution, which contains 99. For many other problems, greedy algorithms fail to produce the optimal solution, and may even produce the unique worst possible solution. One example is the traveling salesman problem mentioned above: for each number of cities, there is an assignment of distances between the cities for which the nearest-neighbor heuristic produces the unique worst possible tour.[3] Types [ edit ] Greedy algorithms can be characterized as being'short sighted', and also as 'non-recoverable'. They are ideal only for problems which have 'optimal substructure'. Despite this, for many simple problems, the best suited algorithms are greedy algorithms. It is important, however, to note that the greedy algorithm can be used as a selection algorithm to prioritize options within a search, or branch-and-bound algorithm. There are a few variations to the greedy algorithm: Pure greedy algorithms Orthogonal greedy algorithms Relaxed greedy algorithms Theory [ edit ] Greedy algorithms have a long history of study in combinatorial optimization and theoretical computer science. Greedy heuristics are known to produce suboptimal results on many problems,[4] and so natural questions are: For which problems do greedy algorithms perform optimally? For which problems do greedy algorithms guarantee an approximately optimal solution? For which problems is the greedy algorithm guaranteed not to produce an optimal solution? A large body of literature exists answering these questions for general classes of problems, such as matroids, as well as for specific problems, such as set cover. Matroids [ edit ] A matroid is a mathematical structure that generalizes the notion of linear independence from vector spaces to arbitrary sets. If an optimization problem has the structure of a matroid, then the appropriate greedy algorithm will solve it optimally.[5] Submodular functions [ edit ] A function f {\displaystyle f} defined on subsets of a set Ω {\displaystyle \Omega } is called submodular if for every S, T ⊆ Ω {\displaystyle S,T\subseteq \Omega } we have that f ( S ) + f ( T ) ≥ f ( S ∪ T ) + f ( S ∩ T ) {\displaystyle f(S)+f(T)\geq f(S\cup T)+f(S\cap T)}. Suppose one wants to find a set S {\displaystyle S} which maximizes f {\displaystyle f}. The greedy algorithm, which builds up a set S {\displaystyle S} by incrementally adding the element which increases f {\displaystyle f} the most at each step, produces as output a set that is at least ( 1 − 1 / e ) max X ⊆ Ω f ( X ) {\displaystyle (1-1/e)\max _{X\subseteq \Omega }f(X)}.[6] That is, greedy performs within a constant factor of ( 1 − 1 / e ) ≈ 0.63 {\displaystyle (1-1/e)\approx 0.63} as good as the optimal solution. Similar guarantees are provable when additional constraints, such as cardinality constraints,[7] are imposed on the output, though often slight variations on the greedy algorithm are required. See [8] for an overview. Other problems with guarantees [ edit ] Other problems for which the greedy algorithm gives a strong guarantee, but not an optimal solution, include Many of these problems have matching lower bounds; i.e., the greedy algorithm does not perform better, in the worst case, than the guarantee. Applications [ edit ] Greedy algorithms mostly (but not always) fail to find the globally optimal solution because they usually do not operate exhaustively on all the data. They can make commitments to certain choices too early which prevent them from finding the best overall solution later. For example, all known greedy coloring algorithms for the graph coloring problem and all other NP-complete problems do not consistently find optimum solutions. Nevertheless, they are useful because they are quick to think up and often give good approximations to the optimum. If a greedy algorithm can be proven to yield the global optimum for a given problem class, it typically becomes the method of choice because it is faster than other optimization methods like dynamic programming. Examples of such greedy algorithms are Kruskal's algorithm and Prim's algorithm for finding minimum spanning trees, and the algorithm for finding optimum Huffman trees. Greedy algorithms appear in network routing as well. Using greedy routing, a message is forwarded to the neighboring node which is "closest" to the destination. The notion of a node's location (and hence "closeness") may be determined by its physical location, as in geographic routing used by ad hoc networks. Location may also be an entirely artificial construct as in small world routing and distributed hash table. Examples [ edit ] See also [ edit ] Notes [ edit ] References [ edit ]Mayors of Santa Fe and Philadelphia said in a SXSW panel that the president’s orders represent a threat to the safety and prosperity of US cities Donald Trump is a bully whose immigration policies represent a threat to the safety and prosperity of American cities, according to the mayors of sanctuary cities Santa Fe and Philadelphia. “Just being able to have a city people can feel proud of,” said Santa Fe mayor Javier Gonzales, “that is under threat because of the president’s efforts to expand the role of Ice and disrupt and demonize many immigrants and their families in a way that’s very harmful to our cities.” How liberal leaders in cities and states across US are planning to thwart Trump Read more Speaking in a panel at SXSW, he added: “We know that having welcoming, inclusive societies in our communities is the key formula for having a higher quality of life and more productivity when it comes to the economy.” Philadelphia mayor James Kenney agreed. He was concerned about Trump’s attempt to force local police and sheriffs to enforce federal immigration law. “We don’t allow our police officers to act as an arm of federal government and ask people about status or documentation or ethnicity. That’s not their jobs,” he said. The local judicial system does, however, turn people over to federal agents when there’s a warrant, he noted. “But if they want to go on a fishing expedition, we are not participating.” Kenney said that the Trump administration’s policies could violate the constitution’s fourth amendment protection against unreasonable searches and seizures. He added that he believes the orders are inhumane and also leave cities vulnerable to being sued. Both Kenney and Gonzales described Trump as a bully. “We cannot submit to the will of a bully. When you do it once, you agree to be bullied every step of the way,” Gonzales said. “If you participate in enabling the bully and give them support to be a bigger bully than they already are, then you are a bully too,” Kenney said. “I’m not going to throw any of our immigrant community under the bus because we have a president who is a demagogue.” I’m not going to throw any of our immigrant community under the bus because we have a president who is a demagogue Philadelphia mayor James Kenney Both were concerned that there will be more attacks on their cities’ autonomy in the future, including on LGBT rights, but felt confident that threats to withdraw federal funding from sanctuary cities would fail. “I don’t believe president has any lawful way of making that happen,” said Gonzales. Both mayors outlined some of the ways they encourage inclusivity in their communities. Santa Fe adopted a resolution to ensure that neither law enforcement nor employment services would ask for status or documentation. “We don’t want to be in the business of having a database of our citizenry,” Gonzales said. He also said that during visits to schools and community centers, he had met students who are “terrified about what will happen to their families”. Gonzales said that officials are “reassuring the community that we will hold strong on policies and not bend even with the threat of losing federal dollars”. Philadelphia places an emphasis on language access for immigrant communities to “respect other people’s culture”, Kenney said. He encourages immigrants to learn English but not to lose their native tongues, either. The city also held a Soccer World Cup to bring immigrant communities together to play at Citizen Bank Park, home of the Philadelphia Phillies baseball team. “It wasn’t that complicated or expensive but it had a great impact,” Kenney said. “Let’s celebrate immigration. Let’s not be fearful of it,” he added.INDIANAPOLIS - A 14-year old girl has been arrested and charged with murder in the stabbing death of her four-year-old cousin. Police were called to the 2700 block of North Graham Avenue, Beechwood Gardens Apartments, at about 11:00pm with a report that a young child had been stabbed. When police arrived, they found four-year-old Leon Thomas III suffering from multiple stab wounds. Officers immediately began administering CPR until EMS crews arrived. EMS crews took the boy to IU Riley Hospital in critical condition, where he later was pronounced dead. Police were told that Thomas' 14-year-old female cousin may be responsible for his injuries. A description of the cousin was broadcast to police. Officers located the girl, covered in blood, walking in the 2300 block of Ritter Avenue. Police put her in custody and took her to IMPD Headquarters for questioning by IMPD homicide detectives. She was formally arrested later in the morning. Since the suspect is a juvenile, police have not released her name. The suspect is being held in the Marion County Juvenile Detention Center.#FergusonToGeneva: Michael Brown's parents testify at UN Advocates turn to international community to pressure US government. Storified by The Stream· Wed, Nov 12 2014 17:32:31 Advocates sent live updates from Geneva on Twitter: I need answers and now so does the UN. Let's get free! #FergusontoGeneva http://t.co/U3TYpVvAGWChatty Antisocialite Rapporteur asks hard questions about militarization of police, accountability, excessive force and taser use #UNCAT #FergusonToGenevaMeena Jagannath #MikeBrown Sr. w/ @meenajag and @chattyantisoc. @Blackstarjus w/ #LesleyMcSpadden & @ThenjiweTM of @USHRN #Ferguson http://t.co/q4G4xS28xyCharles Wade The UN just asked the US Gov 'Why do black people not enjoy the same rights as everyone else' @USHRN http://t.co/LBS5jub0NCThenjiwe McHarris Supporters also chimed in with the hashtag #FergusonToGeneva, which has been used more than 6000 times. The sad thing is the #MikeBrown conversation should be with @BarackObama first and not with the #UN. #FergusonToGeneva #racism2014LeRon L. Barton How does #US intend to live up to international standards they set for others? Myself, @UN, and the World needs answers! #FergusonToGenevaChatty Antisocialite Thank you to the delegates in the UN fighting for my freedom right now. I won't forget. #FergusonToGeneva #WCGtoUNKrystle Wheeler Police violence in America is a human rights issue. Ferguson is an example. #FergusontoGeneva is part of the solution http://t.co/7CNT6kPSm6newyorkist Several people disagreed with the decision to take Brown's case to the UN Committee on Torture. After watching #MikeBrown's parents and their attorney #DarylParks in #Geneva I've decide this: Yup, it's a game and a joke. #Fergusoncoreshift #FergusonToGeneva says: If a cop uses force to stop a violent criminal its torture. Got it. #UNCAT #FergusonTorture #Fergusoncoreshift @coreshift If they feel so oppressed in US they should consider moving-maybe Pakistan?Jane Citizen For more on this topic, watch our show on the militarisation of law-enforcement in the US. The Stream - Taking up arms: The militarisation of US policealjazeeraenglish(UPDATED FRIDAY MORNING with full Seattle Channel video at end of story) (3:10 pm: Short WSB clip added, still awaiting full archived city video) 12:32 PM: Mayor Ed Murray is making his first major West Seattle appearance since taking office – but it’s a matter of citywide interest; he’s at century-old Hiawatha Community Center for a news conference about parks funding. (Photos by WSB’s Patrick Sand) The event just started – click “play” in the window above to see and hear the live video; if you have any trouble with the feed, you should also be able to see it via the mayor’s webpage. We’ll publish notes as well as the archived video, and photos, later. 12:38 PM UPDATE: Just one topline so far – the mayor has confirmed his proposal is for a park district, “an independent taxing authority,” which he says would guarantee a sustainable funding source, though he also pledges to protect Parks’ basic funding source in the regular city budget. He acknowledges there are concerns, but, “I believe we can address” them. He described it initially as a $54 million proposal which he says would cost the average homeowner $14/month. (With the mayor, Steve Daschle of Delridge-headquartered SW Youth and Family Services at left, West Seattleite Bruce Bentley at right) 1:15 PM UPDATE: The Hiawatha event is over – we’ll re-add archived video when Seattle Channel makes it available. In the meantime, you can read the official news release on the city website, which in turn links to a webpage devoted to more info about the proposal, including the projects proposed for initial funding. (We will put together a West Seattle breakout soon as we can.) 3:27 PM UPDATE: We’ve added a video clip shot by our crew at the event, and two photos. Here’s a background document showing how the initial funding is proposed to be spent. ADDED FRIDAY MORNING: Here’s the full Seattle Channel video of the event: ADDED FRIDAY MIDDAY: Here’s the map showing the projects proposed for funding. If you use the buttons at left to zoom way in, you can find out more about each one.Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Video of'referendum assault' emerges A video has emerged which appears to show a supporter of the United Kingdom kicking out at a female protestor. The footage is claimed to have been taken during a confrontation in Glasgow's Argyle Street on Saturday. It is said to show a group of "Yes" supporters confronting members of a right wing organisation who were speaking in favour of the Union. A man can be seen kicking out at a woman who had apparently tried to grab his megaphone. She can later be seen lying on the ground as members of the public crouch over her. An eyewitness told the Sunday Herald newspaper that an ambulance was called for the woman, but was later cancelled. Police Scotland initially said the event passed off peacefully, but subsequently revealed that a man had been arrested in connection with an allegation of assault. They said a report had been sent to prosecutors.A Black and White City: How Race Continues to Define Real Estate in Chicago by James F. McClister March 21, 2016 In 1955, Albert and Sallie Bolton, an African American couple living in Chicago’s “Black Belt” on the South Side, purchased their first home for $13,900. A single-family property in the city’s Hyde Park neighborhood, the home seemed like an opportunity – the couple had four children, and the area’s schools were among the city’s best – but the Boltons were, in fact, victims of contract buying, one of the many methods of housing discrimination that would come to define the Chicago of today. Little did the Boltons know that the white real estate agent representing the home, Jay Goran, had purchased the home himself for only $4,300 a week before. Or that additional fees and costs would be added to the home’s monthly payments after the purchase. Or that after they fell behind on a payment, Goran would immediately start the eviction process, and they would stand to lose the $3,000 they had invested in the house. Their troubles are told in detail in “Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America” by historian and Rutgers professor Beryl Satter. The Chicagoland region’s problems with race are well documented. What is less known is how closely racism and housing policy are intertwined, and how things like restrictive covenants, redlining and contract buying were the city’s (and the North’s at large) answer to the Great Migration. And while interventions at various levels and various times have helped disavow the practices once called “prudent planning,” their effects remain as real as they are stark. In order to even begin to heal the decades-old racial boundaries carved deeply into this city and its suburbs, every agent must understand their historical context. Past policies and prejudices, both local and federal, have influenced housing and real estate in Chicago at every level, and as you will read in our cover story, effective solutions require a sobering look at the causes of the outcomes we live with now.Homebrew gains popularity in Roanoke Copyright 2019 Nexstar Broadcasting, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Video ROANOKE, Va. - What was once considered a hidden underground hobby is now quickly growing in popularity in Virginia. According to the American Homebrewers Association, there are an estimated 1.2 million homebrewers in the U.S. Two-thirds of those people began this hobby in 2005 or later. Southern Hills Homebrew Supply opened their doors in Roanoke only seven months ago, but their products are already a big hit locally. A few weeks ago at the Blacksburg Brew Do homebrew competition, half of the winning beers were created with ingredients purchased at the store. "People keep pushing the envelope," said Robb Burden, Owner of Southern Hills Homebrew Supply. "You just get more varied beers and experiences." Homebrewers can purchase the supplies, ingredients, and equipment needed to make their own beer or wine from scratch. Learn to Homebrew Day will be celebrated Saturday, Nov. 7 at Southern Hills Homebrew Supply with a number of demonstrations and beer tastings from local brewers. For more information on this event, visit Facebook.com/SouthernHillsHomebrew. Southern Hills made a new brew for WFXR called the Morning Weather Report Breakfast Stout. Here is the recipe:Surgery to correct'man-boobs' is increasingly popular Breast reduction for men is the fastest-growing part of the cosmetic surgery industry for the second year running, plastic surgeons have said. The number of such operations rose from 323 in 2008 to 581 last year - an 80% increase - the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons said. Pressure created by men's magazines was partly to blame, one surgeon said. Cosmetic surgery appears to be defying the recession, with an overall increase in the number of procedures. Nine out of 10 cosmetic procedures carried out by members of the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons (Baaps) in 2009 were performed on women, with breast enlargement the most popular operation. The public's interest in aesthetic surgery appears to remain strong and indeed growing quite considerably among UK males despite the the economic downturn Nigel Mercer, Baaps But the most dramatic rises were seen in the world of male surgery - an overall increase of more than a fifth over the year. Surgeons carried out 581 breast reductions, compared to 323 the previous year. The top two operations for men were rhinoplasty - or "nose-job", and blepharoplasty - surgery on the skin around the eyes. Consultant plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover said that while the problem of so-called "man-boobs" - or "gynaecomastia" in official language - was not a new one, it had been thrust into prominence by media coverage. He said: "Many men are feeling the pressure from men's magazines that weren't even being published five or six years ago. "In addition, they are just realising that they can get something done about it." Lifestyle not scalpel However, he said that in many cases, surgery could be avoided by simple changes to lifestyle. "Quite a few cases are caused by obesity, and we often say to men to look at their lifestyles before thinking about the scalpel." A total of more than 36,000 surgical procedures were carried out by Baaps members, a 6.7% increase over last year. Women had 5.4% more procedures than in 2008. Baaps president Nigel Mercer said: "The public's interest in aesthetic surgery appears to remain strong and indeed growing quite considerably among UK males despite the economic downturn." Bookmark with: Delicious Digg reddit Facebook StumbleUpon What are these? E-mail this to a friend Printable versionPascal Reid, a Local Bitcoins user, will serve just 54 days in jail. He will also teach bitcoin usage to local police officers and stay five, possibly ten years under strict surveillance. A year and a half after his arrest, the Florida bitcoin trader who used to find clients through the Local Bitcoins site, pleaded guilty of operating as an unlicensed money transmitter. The details of his plea agreement have been published by the court of Miami-Dade county in Florida. Pascal Reid, 31, is sentenced to serve 90 days in county jail, receiving credit for 36 days that he already served in February-March 2014, pay $500 in compensation for the prosecution expenses, and forfeit all his bitcoins seized by the authorities (more than 400 BTC). He is also obliged to give twenty lessons of digital currency and/or cybercrime to Miami policemen. Finally, he is to stay under strict surveillance for ten years (or only five if he will obey to all the terms of the plea agreement). During this term, Reid is required to submit to warrantless searches at the request of his surveillance officer. He is also obliged to stay in contact with his surveillance officer, notify the officer before any change of employment or residence and obtain a permission before leaving the Miami area. Reid was seized in February 2014 together with a fellow Local Bitcoins user, Michell Abner Espinoza, as a result of a law enforcement operation. A police agent contacted them, claiming to be a victim of a credit card theft, and asked to exchange $30,000 for bitcoin to redeem his stolen property. In agreeing to his request, Reid and Espinoza transgressed two Florida laws, the first prohibiting private transactions exceeding $10,000, and the second prohibiting regular private transactions exceeding $20,000 annually. The bitcoiners were accused of money laundering which, according to the plea agreement, could have put Reid in prison for twenty years. Alexey TereshchenkoThe hallucinogenic drink ayahuasca stimulates the brain, helping it fight Alzheimer’s and Down syndrome, according to a new study. Ayahuasca has been studied before for its ability to fight depression, but in the latest research, published in PeerJ, one of the main substances present in the drink, harmine, was exposed to human neural cells. Re AYAHUASCA: Spectacular and highly significant finding:https://t.co/bEC9I9qHxG More here:https://t.co/evC7bMe8gZ — Graham Hancock (@Graham__Hancock) December 8, 2016 "It has been shown in rodents that antidepressant medication acts by inducing neurogenesis. So we decided to test if harmine, an alkaloid with the highest concentration in the psychotropic plant decoction ayahuasca, would trigger neurogenesis in human neural cells," one of the study's authors, Vanja Dakic, told Science Daily. The results found that the protein encoding gene DYRK1A, which is over-activated in patients suffering from Alzheimer’s and Down syndrome, was prevented from working when exposed to the substance. Stevens Rehen, also involved in the study, said the results opened up speculation about future studies into its “potential therapeutic role over cognitive deficits observed in Down syndrome and neurodegenerative diseases.” Harmine also produced the same effect as antidepressant drugs but without the side-effects, according to Rehen. Ayahuasca has been used by Amazonians for centuries in ceremonies to contact spirits and spread good and bad wishes to friends and enemies. In some areas of Brazil, it is also used for its medicinal purposes. Made from the leaves of Psychotria viridis, which contains the hallucinogen dimethyltryptamine, combined with the vine Banisteriopsis caapi, the drink can elicit a psychedelic experience lasting for up to six hours. READ MORE: Briton stabbed to death during ‘bad hallucinogenic trip’ in PeruBERLIN — A small German furniture store chain says it inadvertently ordered 5,000 coffee cups bearing a portrait of Adolf Hitler from China. Christian Zurbrueggen, co-owner of the Zurbrueggen chain, told German news agency dpa on Thursday that 175 of the offending cups were sold before customers reported the problem. Zurbrueggen said he wants to take the cups “out of circulation.” The 4,825 unsold cups have been destroyed and Zurbrueggen says he’s offering a 20-euro ($28) voucher for the return of the others, which were sold for 1.99 euros each. The cups have a faint feature of a Nazi-era stamp bearing Hitler’s portrait and a postmark with a swastika in the background overlaid with another layer of decoration. They were ordered from a trade fair in China and delivered last month.No industry enjoys the array of tax breaks and subsidies that the oil and gas industry does. No industry needs them less. For all the damage it has caused, the disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico may provide the political momentum to end this special treatment. President Obama ’s 2011 budget, proposed before the spill, would eliminate $4 billion in annual tax breaks for oil and gas companies. Bills in both houses introduced after the spill would achieve many of the same results. Industry has spent $340 million on lobbying over the last two years to block these sorts of initiatives, and until recently Congress has been eager to do its bidding. This year could be different. The White House has proposed eliminating nine tax breaks. Some are modest, all are complicated, but in toto they provide a range of cushy benefits — fast write-offs for upfront drilling expenses, generous depletion allowances, and the like — that are available at virtually every stage of the exploration and production process. The net result, as The Times reported recently, is an effective tax rate on investment far lower than that paid by other industries. That, the Treasury Department argues, has encouraged overinvestment in oil and gas drilling at the expense of other parts of the economy. Advertisement Continue reading the main storyEDMONTON — A two-year-old child was abducted and a single father killed early Monday morning in a small southwestern Alberta mountain town. UPDATE: Remains of two-year-old Hailey Dunbar-Blanchette found; Amber Alert dropped RCMP issued an Amber Alert on Monday across Alberta, which later expanded to British Columbia, Saskatchewan and Montana for Hailey Dunbar-Blanchette. Hours later, RCMP confirmed they’d found the body of her 27-year-old father, Terry Blanchette, in the family home in Blairmore, Alta. His death is being treated as a homicide. WATCH: Few details available but suspect Derek Saretzky and Hailey’s mother knew each other “Terry was a good person. He was a great father,” said Terry’s sister Amanda Blanchette. “He changed his life. Yes, he had a sketchy past, but he turned his life around for that baby. He became a great father. His life was all about her when she was born. “We just want the safe return of baby Hailey.” “Bring her back. Because if you honestly love that little girl and you took away her father, you don’t love her,” Amanda added. READ MORE: ‘Her dad was the highlight of her life’ – Godmother pleads for missing Alberta girl’s return Blanchette had a minor criminal history, including assault and theft, according to Calgary court records. Most recently, he pleaded guilty to assault and theft under $5,000 in July 2013. He was fined $500 with a $75 victim surcharge. He was also found guilty and fined for a February 2013 theft and assault. WATCH: Suspect linked to Blanchette’s murder allegedly told police where Hailey’s body was “I know there’s been lots of different speculations, a lot of stuff is being said about my brother by people that don’t know him,” said his sister. “You know what? Terry was a good person. He became a good father. He was a great father.” TIMELINE: Abduction of 2-year-old Hailey Dunbar-Blanchette Hailey’s grandfather, Kevin Dunbar, said Monday Hailey’s mother was in a state of shock as the family hoped for her safe return. “Angry, sad. I don’t know what to feel. I have no idea how to take this – mad at a few people about some things and worried about my granddaughter,” Dunbar said. READ MORE: Amber Alert: Father of abducted Alberta girl dead, child still missing Police believe the toddler was taken from the home around 3:30 a.m. by a suspect or suspects in a newer model white van with a large rear antenna and a flag flying from it. Mounties have not been able to give a more detailed vehicle description. They haven’t revealed what happened inside the family home where Blanchette was killed, but were called the home just after 11:15 a.m. Monday by a family member who had discovered his body. Blanchette worked as a cook at Pure Country Bar and Grill in Frank, a town two kilometres down Highway 3 in the Crowsnest Pass. Manager Tammy Tracey said Monday was his day off. “He was a good worker and a good father. “He did anything for his daughter, he loved her dearly. He was a good dad. He lived for her.” Tracey said Blanchette had worked at the bar for the last three years, never skipping a day of work. “He had to support a daughter. He was a good kid. He had responsibilities, right?” Family friend Corette Harrington confirmed that, calling Blanchette an exemplary single father. “He loved Hailey very much and everything he did, he did for Hailey. He was an incredible dad. He worked hard for her.” On Monday Hailey’s mother Cheyenne Dunbar rushed from her home in Edmonton to be with relatives in the Crowsnest Pass. Harrington says Blanchette and Dunbar, his former girlfriend, amicably shared custody of their little girl. READ MORE: ‘She was my baby’: Hailey Dunbar-Blanchette’s mother Cheyenne breaks down “She lived with her dad full-time, and every few weeks would visit her mom in Edmonton,” she explained, adding that the little girl would often stay with Blanchette’s father in Elkford while he was at work. She said Blanchette and her oldest daughter, Rebecca, were good friends. “She’s just always been a part of our lives since Hailey was born,” Harrington told Global News. “She’s like a little sister to our kids. She has this incredible little nose-scrunch thing she does when she’s happy. She loves to play and to laugh and every time she would see her dad she would light right up.” READ MORE: Technology making Amber Alert system more effective Harrington said she hopes everyone can stay focused on what’s important — finding Hailey — and is thankful for the support from the community members. “They always come together in the face of tragedy,” she said. “We’re very thankful to be a part of these areas and know that they always have your back no matter what.” “I just want her to come home and come over to my house and scrunch Goldfish (crackers) all over my floor. I swear she used to do it just to irritate me. I’d give anything to be sweeping up Goldfish right now.” “It’s heartbreaking to know that when she comes back, her dad’s not going to be there.” Blairmore is about 220 kilometres southwest of Calgary in the Crowsnest Pass area near the B.C.-Alberta boundary. RAW VIDEO: RCMP update Amber Alert and homicide in Alberta (Monday evening) With files from Mary Jo Laforest, The Canadian Press; Erika Tucker and Emily Mertz, Global NewsIllinois Passes Legislation Requiring Lead Testing In Schools By Peak Johnson The Illinois House of Representatives recently passed legislation requiring that lead testing take place in both schools and daycare centers. Attorney General Lisa Madigan passed the legislation after the Illinois Environmental Council located staggering levels of lead in many Chicago and suburban school districts. The Chicago Sun Times reported that within the last year, “some Illinois schools have voluntarily tested drinking water for lead but state law does not require it, according to the attorney general.” Madigan added that the tests will come to about $15 per drinking water sample and would provide information to schools “needed to quickly protect children from lead exposure.” “Lead exposure can lead to serious and lifelong developmental problems for young children and infants,” Madigan told the Sun Times. “Many school districts in Illinois are already testing for lead in drinking water and have discovered alarmingly high rates of lead contamination. Testing drinking water in all Illinois schools and daycares is an inexpensive way to immediately identify and stop lead exposure in young children that would otherwise cost families, schools and government much more.” The bill will require that all daycare centers and schools constructed before 2000 with pre-kindergarten through fifth grade classes test all water sources used for drinking or food preparation. According to Madigan, it will also require “that inventory must be taken of all lead service lines in the state and public notification must be given of water main construction projects.” This is not the only example of Illinois making strides with the countrywide issue of lead contamination. In Chicago, work finally started to clean up yards that have been contaminated for years by toxic lead emissions from a factory in the Pilsen neighborhood, well after activists tested soil and located high levels of the metal. To read more about the nation’s lead issues visit Water Online’s Drinking Water Contaminant Removal Solutions Center. Image credit: "Lockers At School, September 2011" Brett Levin © 2011 used under an Attribution 2.0 Generic license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/South Africa paceman Morne Morkel has spoken about the "tough" conditions which will be there in the upcoming three-Test series against India. He also praised "strong" Dale Steyn as a warning to rival batsmen. The opening match between the sides will be played in Cape Town from January 5, 2018 and Morkel warmed up nicely with a five-wicket haul against Zimbabwe in the four-day day-night Test in Port Elizabeth. Also read: Ashwin's leg-spin will not suit Tests, says Indian legend According to the 33-year-old fast bowler, the last session in a Test will be "tough" in India series. "For me, in the series coming up (against India), it's going to be that last session in the day when the ball is soft and conditions are tough. In Cape Town the wind is going to blow, we know that, so for us the best preparation today as a bowling unit was to enforce the follow-on and get the 10 wickets," Morkel said after South Africa crushed Zimbabwe by an innings and 120 runs. Morkel, who has taken 281 Test wickets from 80 matches, praised team-mate Steyn, who is set to return to red ball cricket after an injury lay-off. "(Dale) has been bowling exceptionally well in the nets. He looks strong, he is very fit, and I reckon he would have been a handful on this wicket. It's another week for him to freshen up. It's a big time ahead now. For me, it was nice to get wickets under my name so when it comes to selection, for guys to maybe think about me," he said. Virat Kohli-led India are aiming to create history in the "Rainbow Nation" as they have never won a Test series in the country. They have reached Cape Town.Taylor Walker has signed on with the Club until 2021 Captain Taylor Walker is set to finish his career at Adelaide after signing a three-year contract extension. Walker, who was already contracted for next season, is now committed to the Club until 2021
extremism as 'beliefs, attitudes, feelings, actions, or strategies of a character far removed from the "ordinary."' It concedes that 'ordinary' is a subjective term, but condemns religious Americans 'who believe that their beliefs, customs and traditions are the only "right way" and that all others are practicing their faith the "wrong way," seeing and believing that their faith/religion [is] superior to all others.' SPOT THE RELIGIOUS EXTREMIST: The ultra-orthodox Lubavitch jew (R) or the late Osama bin Laden? Trick question: the Army Reserve includes both men's religious movements Many Christians and Jews, the presentation suggests, fit into that category, making them as objectionable as Muslim terrorists. The U.S. Army Office of the Chief of Chaplains did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But the Catholic Archdiocese for the Military Services said it 'is astounded that Catholics were listed alongside groups that are, by their very mission and nature, violent and extremist.'Instead, Baker is spending his retirement age of 65 in an active yet restless state away from the game of his soul. I'm sorry, but Dusty Baker has no business in his Sacramento hometown doing anything right now other than preparing to leave for Spring Training in Arizona or Florida as somebody's manager. If nothing else, he should be just a phone call away from joining the front office of a Major League team, which brings me to the bottom line: He's a gifted baseball lifer. I'm sorry, but Dusty Baker has no business in his Sacramento hometown doing anything right now other than preparing to leave for Spring Training in Arizona or Florida as somebody's manager. If nothing else, he should be just a phone call away from joining the front office of a Major League team, which brings me to the bottom line: He's a gifted baseball lifer. Instead, Baker is spending his retirement age of 65 in an active yet restless state away from the game of his soul. In 2014, Baker wasn't involved in a Major League season as a player, coach or manager for just his second time since 1968. The two-time All-Star outfielder with the Dodgers and three-time Manager of the Year with the Giants was dismissed as Reds manager following the 2013 season. He was fresh from leading Cincinnati to a third trip to the playoffs during his six years in town. Within days, Baker said he was urged by baseball folks to take a lengthy sabbatical from the game or to stay retired. He said they were worried about his history of heart-related issues. In September 2012, he missed several Reds games after he was hospitalized with an irregular heartbeat. So much for old news. As for the new, Baker said over the phone the other day from his Northern California home that he never has felt better. That's why, after managing the Giants for a decade through the 2002 World Series, and after leading the Cubs for four years that nearly included their first National League pennant since 1945, and after making the Reds a consistent force in the NL Central, you've guessed it: Baker said he wants another chance making decisions for a Major League team. "But, hey, it's all good, man. Life's good," said Baker, who, among other things, has more time these days to bond with his son, Darren. Yep, I'm talking about the instantly famous Giants bat boy who isn't 3 years old anymore. He's 16. During that 2002 World Series, he nearly was trampled at home plate for his father's team until he was yanked away at the last second by J.T. Snow. Anyway, the older Baker and the younger Baker went to the national championship game of college football last month, and they journeyed to the Final Four last year. "This [free time] is giving me a chance to do things that I wanted to do but couldn't do if I was still involved with baseball," said Baker, who refused broadcasting offers after his Reds dismissal from ESPN, MLB Network and the Dodgers' TV team. "Really, it was just too soon for me to do any of those things, and I'm looking at it as a blessing." Consider this: In addition to joining Darren at more sporting events, Baker has been able to see his son play in them, including a trip to Vancouver for Darren's youth baseball team in Vancouver. They've gone fishing together in Montana, and back in Sacramento, Baker is a long ways from the wide-eyed slugger who was in the on-deck circle for the Braves when Hank Aaron became baseball's all-time home run champion in April 1974. Baker is sprinting deeper into the wine business, and he has vineyards throughout his massive property to prove it. Not only is he the president of "Baker Family Wines," but of "Baker Energy Team," which promotes the storage of solar energy. After he attended a slew of conferences on the subject, he decided to start the solar-energy business with several of his old elementary, high school and college friends. And, yes, his home is solar powered, complete with a solar well, solar pool and solar hot-water facility. Then there is Baker's garden. It's huge. The same goes for the leaves from the mustard greens that grow freely around his property, along with everything from grapes to onions to beets. "Really, at this point, I just have to slow it down, because things are going at such a fast pace," said Baker, adding that he also had the opportunity to join his wife, Melissa, in watching their daughter, Natosha, get married in the backyard of their Sacramento home. "Even though things are going at a fast pace, they are all things that are fulfilling. I mean, a lot of the things I'm doing, like solar energy, are helping people have a better life." That said, Baker is a baseball guy. He'll always be a baseball guy. "No question, I'd like to have another chance to manage, because the only thing lacking in my career is [a World Series championship]," said Baker, who nevertheless won 53 percent of the time during his 20 years of calling the shots in Major League dugouts. "There are a lot of very good managers and football coaches who never won that big one, and it eats at you. That's why I'd love to come back, but you can't hire yourself. "Ideally, I'd love to land somewhere where people would listen to me and use the knowledge I've acquired over 47 years to help build a team. Somebody who wants an independent thinker. I know how to put together the necessary ingredients of a winning team. I've got a pretty good idea of what you need to win: balance-wise, speed, power and defense." What if Baker doesn't get another chance in baseball? What if this manager who was known for smiling as well as for dangling a toothpick from his mouth has to settle on functioning as just a husband and a father -- you know, between operating as a superstar of wine, solar and gardening? Without pausing, Baker said, "Even though I had to make myself not miss baseball, I have a higher yearning. I have a yearning for life."The German Foreign Intelligence Agency Bundesnachrichtendienst taps internet traffic directly at the Internet Exchange Point DE-CIX in Frankfurt since 2009, replacing predecessor operation „Eikonal“ at Deutsche Telekom. This was stated by the operator of DE-CIX at the German Parliamentary Committee investigating Intelligence Agency mass surveillance operations. The German Federal Chancellery intervened several times and prevented both a Parliamentary Commission and the Federal Network Agency from investigating this mass spying operation. This is an English translation of the summary of Klaus Landefeld’s statements as a witness in front of the German Parliamentary Committee investigating the NSA spying scandal. First Eikonal, then DE-CIX Klaus Landfeld is head of industry group eco, which operates the Internet Exchange Point ( IXP ) DE-CIX in Frankfurt, Germany. News magazine „Der Spiegel“ reported in October 2013 that the German Foreign Intelligence Agency Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) is allowed to wiretap 25 Internet Service Providers at DE-CIX, including five German IXP and the traffic of multiple vendors, ideally within a single step.“ The „BND wanted access to the IXP and be able to say: today we want this cable, tomorrow maybe different ones.“ DE-CIX assumed the spies hat „to name individual, specific cables“. But BND wanted „everything“, „full access“. DE-CIX analyzed the legal situation and concluded, that this is „not permitted in this way“. Their criticism involved, among other things, the implementation of the 20-percent rule from the G-10-law, the Federal wiretap law described by Wikipedia as „similar to Britain’s Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 and is comparable to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of the United States“. This G-10-law includes a limit that „strategic“ mass intercepts must be limited to a fifth of the „available bandwidth“. DE-CIX legal opinion was, that the BND should only be allowed to intercept 20% of the actual occurring traffic per line, but the BND wanted everything. On top of that, in „2009 there were different ideas of filtering systems“ to filter out traffic from German citizens who are protected by law. DE-CIX came to the conclusion: „We did not want to implement that“. Legal concerns ignored But in the „preparatory talk“ in August 2008, the BND ignored the concerns of DE-CIX: „If we are ignored as the operator, because we do not think this is permitted by law, this is only one-sided information access.“ Topics of the meeting were IXP works. The BND did not want access to specific fiber optic cables, but to all traffic of certain „Autonomous Systems ( AS ), which concerned several cables“. Despite DE-CIX‘ criticism, the BND pushed for a implementation. After the meeting, DE-CIX contacted members of the Federal Parliament’s G-10 commission, which decides about wiretaps, similar to the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. „No one of the members wanted to talk to us“, including the subsequent witness at Thursday’s inquiry hearing. Only since deceased Liberal politician Max Stadler agreed to a meeting, but said: „he can’t do anything.“ Intimidation by the Chancellery „That led to an appointment with the Chancellery, who told us that we were not allowed to talk to the G-10 commission, because the operation was not yet ordered“. This was a „very unusual approach“, „we were out under pressure“. „If I am summoned by the Chancellery, this is not the rule of law, but power play.“ This meeting at the Chancellery took place on February 27, 2009. Afterwards, „nothing happened“ for a long time. The BND experienced „technical difficulties in implementation“, it „was new for them, too“. Foreign intelligence agency monitors domestic service providers „Then we received a G-10 order“, an order obliging a telecommunications provider to comply with surveillance requests, „which affected some providers, but not all of them“. It was „significantly less than what was discussed back in 2008“. This first order „also contained German providers“ and „German domestic cables“, for example a „cable from Frankfurt to Berlin with 95 % German traffic“. „German domestic Internet Access Providers, whose sole business is connecting cables in the region, therefore having at least one side of every communication always in Germany. I fail to see where the foreign traffic is here.“ The BND wanted to access traffic from German providers at DE-CIX, whose traffic they could have also received directly. „But right from the start, we thought that BND should contact the owners of the respective cables directly.“ Afterwards, DE-CIX „had discussions with companies that were affected by our order. They also asked themselves, why they were not contacted by the BND.“ In addition, the BND also wanted internet traffic from „other European countries and providers.“ International „transit traffic“ is considered as „beyond law“ anyways. BND wiretaps DE-CIX since 2009 DE-CIX continued to ask „why this is possible“ and „if all of this makes sense,“ but nevertheless followed the order in early 2009. Since 2009, the BND wiretaps DE-CIX in Frankfurt, and receives approximately „two percent“ of the bandwidth sold and theoretically available. The German government thinks, that this information is irrelevant to the investigation committee, because it does not happen in direct cooperation with the Five Eyes. Usually „the entire cable traffic is mirrored. What happens afterwards is out-of-reach for the providers, we cannot check they comply with the rules and laws“. DE-CIX has „a formal auditing duty, but we cannot put that into practice.“ Landefeld wants a technical guideline for these „strategic“ mass interception measures, analogous to the monitoring regulations in classical telecommunication surveillance. There, „everything is documented down to the last bit. For G-10 there is nothing.“ Landefeld thinks „that the law as it is written does not meet the requirements of modern communication networks any more“. 20-percent limit sabotaged To monitor internet telephony, one „has to record all VoIP -connections and save them, for technical reasons“. Only afterwards, they can be analyzed. It is undefined „how long these recordings can be retained“. „Can you listen to 100 percent of the telephone traffic because that’s within the 20 percent? My definition is different.“ The Federal Network Agency „Bundesnetzagentur“ proposed a solution: to apply the 20-percent rule „at the application layer, so that, for instance, the number of e-mails, web pages, etc. […] is reduced by randomized automatic deletion.“ Landefeld appreciates this idea: „These are the kinds of technical solutions I am looking for.“ Currently, „there are no checks and balances outside of the secret agencies“. „At the moment“, these questions are only defined by the „internal lawyers of the BND“: „This can’t be!“, Landfeld said. Other communication exchange points wiretapped, too „Previously“, other communication exchange points in Düsseldorf and Hamburg had been wiretapped by the BND, too. The entire foreign telephony communication was running through these old switching points of the former federal post office, now Deutsche Telekom. Although DE-CIX had „doubts about the legality of the G-10 orders“, Landefeld would not say whether they „took legal action“. Eco has „several lawyers dealing with this topic. Also external ones. We have ongoing debates since mid-2014.“ But „well-established case law is very thin, the number of decisions vanishingly small. You cannot claim, that there is an established constitutional opinion about this topic“. Intelligence agencies „trade data“ The BND claims that so called „transit traffic“ between two foreign states „can be passed on“ to foreign intelligence services, like the NSA, the „Google of intelligence agencies“. Intelligence agencies „engage in a flourishing trade of data“, a „business like any other.“ „In technical circles it has been talked about repeatedly“, that intelligence agencies „trade entire traffic streams“. „Everyone in the scene has heard that intelligence agencies exchange traffic“, it’s an „open secret“. „Germany also does what they accuse the USA of“ On June 14, 2013 Landefeld was invited to the Ministry of Economic Affairs by the former Minister of Justice Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger and Minister of Economics Philipp Roesler, who wanted to receive „initial information“ after the PRISM-revelations: „The whole problem was unknown inside of the ministries. They had absolutely no knowledge of what is happening in Germany and what the usual practices are. We were very surprised. After all, what the US has been accused of, is also happening in Germany in one way or another“. In early July 2013, Landefeld called the Intelligence Coordinator at the Federal Chancellery and asked what he should answer in response to media inquiries, because „by saying ’no comment‘ I would also admit it.“ The intelligence coordinator „said I wouldn’t have to invent anything and wouldn’t have to lie“. He still wants more rights to speak publicly, because „if a measure is within the law, you should also be allowed to talk about it in a general form, obviously not about details.“ In other countries, this is possible: „In the UK, I can talk about it openly. They are obviously not disturbed by that.“ In Germany you „cannot even say that you had contact with BND. The self-understanding of the agencies is strange.“ German authorities wanted their own PRISM On July 16 and 24, 2013, there had been „discussions with the Federal Network Agency, with a lot of stake holders and the Attorney General“. „On July 24, some stakeholders wanted to know, why they do not have [the revealed] access [of the the NSA] at their disposal and why they do not have access to German domestic traffic. The demand for their own PRISM appeared rapidly.“ At that time, the DE-CIX wiretap was not discussed, „in 2013 it was still held under a lid“. Chancellery stops Network Agency On August 9, 2013 the Federal Network Agency „Bundesnetzagentur“ held a hearing with telecommunications companies. In preparation, they sent out a questionnaire to the companies, including the questions, „Does your business run monitoring devices […] to implement so-called strategic restrictions under […] G-10 law?“ and „Do you adhere to the rules for logging the use of this equipment and the control of these logs?“ In response, Landefeld called the Chancellery again and asked, „how to answer these questions.“ Afterwards, the Chancellery called the Federal Network Agency Vice President and said: „the companies must not answer these questions“ and the „Network Agency was not allowed to ask these questions“. International Companies in a „two-sided war“ Foreign intelligence agencies did not openly approach DE-CIX: „There was no contact attempt. If there had been, we would have rejected them immediately.“ The DE-CIX IXP in New York is operated by DE-CIX North America Inc., a subsidiary of the German company DE-CIX which is subject to US law. „If there are mass surveillance orders, the involved parties are not allowed to talk about it.“ However, there haven’t been any FISA orders at DE-CIX North America yet: „I can talk about that, because there were no orders.“ However, if there are, they would have to remain secret. Even DE-CIX IXP UAE-IX in Dubai has to „comply with the legal provisions of the country“. Foreign companies in Germany, including German subsidiaries, are also obliged by their home country laws to pass Internet traffic to their secret services. The companies are fighting a „two-sided war: according to German law you are not allowed to ex-filtrate data from Germany, according to US law you are obliged. In result, the providers have to choose the lesser of two evils“. Landefeld pointed out, that „routers in Germany are often not operated domestically, but from a Network Operations Center (NOC) in the USA. As a consequence, employees in Germany have „limited influence“ on their configuration. Secret Access technically possible Technically, it would be possible for intelligence agencies to get undiscovered back-door access, if the switch or operating system is compromised. But this „requires a cable to ex-filtrate the data“. This could theoretically be done with a „cable under a cover-up“. It has been implied by the head of the committee that this could be implemented in the future. As an advisor, Landefeld has seen intelligence agencies ex-filtrating mass traffic both with and without co-operation of the network operators. „Every major switch supports [ex-filtrating data] and has lawful interception functionalities,“ because of laws like the American Communications Assistance for Law US Law Enforcement Act (CALEA). In the US, the „implementation of surveillance measures“ happens „fully automated“, triggered by the authorities. This is technically integrated into the systems. In Germany, such measures are currently „only prevented by the legal need for individual evidence for surveillance measures. Therefore, German providers still confirm surveillance taps by ‚clicking a check-box‘.“ Industrial espionage with a swapped switch DE-CIX employs a four-person security team that analyzes hardware and software. In addition, DE-CIX is IT certified and evaluated annually by the Federal Office for Information Security. Since the Snowden revelations, DE-CIX also tries to mitigate the uncovered scenarios. Currently, they are implementing „traffic counters on individual ports“, to make sure that the amount of incoming and outgoing traffic match. Asked about his personal experiences as an expert in the field of industrial security, Landfeld reported a concrete example of „industrial espionage against a mechanical engineering company“: I „learned of occurrences, where people showed up at business customers premises, claiming to be from a communication provider. This is real, I went through this scenario with several customers“. They „even interrupted fibre optic cables to produce interruptions. Then someone showed up who ‚fixed‘ the situation by exchanging regular routers with compromised routers“. [As always, we also published an almost complete live transcript of the inquiry hearing, including another witness.]Diagram of the OODA loop The OODA loop is the cycle observe–orient–decide–act, developed by military strategist and United States Air Force Colonel John Boyd. Boyd applied the concept to the combat operations process, often at the operational level during military campaigns. It is now also often applied to understand commercial operations and learning processes. The approach explains how agility can overcome raw power in dealing with human opponents. It is especially applicable to cyber security and cyberwarfare[citation needed]. Overview [ edit ] The OODA loop has become an important concept in litigation,[1] business,[2] law enforcement,[3] and military strategy. According to Boyd, decision-making occurs in a recurring cycle of observe–orient–decide–act. An entity (whether an individual or an organization) that can process this cycle quickly, observing and reacting to unfolding events more rapidly than an opponent can thereby "get inside" the opponent's decision cycle and gain the advantage. Frans Osinga has argued that Boyd's own views on the OODA loop are much deeper, richer, and more comprehensive than the common interpretation of the "rapid OODA loop" idea.[4] Boyd developed the concept to explain how to direct one's energies to defeat an adversary and survive. Boyd emphasized that "the loop" is actually a set of interacting loops that are to be kept in continuous operation during combat. He also indicated that the phase of the battle has an important bearing on the ideal allocation of one's energies. Boyd's diagram shows that all decisions are based on observations of the evolving situation tempered with implicit filtering of the problem being addressed. The observations are the raw information on which decisions and actions are based. The observed information must be processed to orient it for decision making. In notes from his talk "Organic Design for Command and Control", Boyd said: The second O, orientation—as the repository of our genetic heritage, cultural tradition, and previous experiences—is the most important part of the O-O-D-A loop since it shapes the way we observe, the way we decide, the way we act. As stated by Boyd and shown in the "Orient" box, there is much filtering of the information through our culture, genetics, ability to analyze and synthesize, and previous experience. Since the OODA loop was designed to describe a single decision maker, the situation is usually much more complex than shown, as most business and technical decisions have a team of people observing and orienting, each bringing their own cultural traditions, genetics, experience and other information. It is here that decisions often get stuck, which does not lead to winning, because: In order to win, we should operate at a faster tempo or rhythm than our adversaries—or, better yet, get inside [the] adversary's Observation-Orientation-Decision-Action time cycle or loop... Such activity will make us appear ambiguous (unpredictable) thereby generate confusion and disorder among our adversaries—since our adversaries will be unable to generate mental images or pictures that agree with the menacing, as well as faster transient rhythm or patterns, they are competing against. The OODA loop, which focuses on strategic military requirements, was adapted for business and public sector operational continuity planning. Compare it to the plan–do–check–act (PDCA) cycle or Shewhart cycle. As one of Boyd's colleagues, Harry Hillaker, put it in "John Boyd, USAF Retired, Father of the F16": The key is to obscure your intentions and make them unpredictable to your opponent while you simultaneously clarify his intentions. That is, operate at a faster tempo to generate rapidly changing conditions that inhibit your opponent from adapting or reacting to those changes and that suppress or destroy his awareness. Thus, a hodgepodge of confusion and disorder occur to cause him to over- or under-react to conditions or activities that appear to be uncertain, ambiguous, or incomprehensible. The OODA loop also serves to explain the nature of surprise and shaping operations in a way that unifies Gestalt psychology, cognitive science and game theory in a comprehensive theory of strategy. Utility theory (the basis of game theory) describes how decisions are made based on the perceived value of taking an action. The OODA loop shows that prior to making a decision (the decide phase), the person will first have to get information (observe) and determine what it means to him and what he can do about it (orient). In this way, the utility sought at the decide phase can be altered by affecting the information the opponent receives and the cognitive model he applies when orienting upon it.[5] Writer Robert Greene wrote in an article called OODA and You that ... the proper mindset is to let go a little, to allow some of the chaos to become part of his mental system, and to use it to his advantage by simply creating more chaos and confusion for the opponent. He funnels the inevitable chaos of the battlefield in the direction of the enemy. Applicability [ edit ] Consider a fighter pilot being scrambled to shoot down an enemy aircraft. Before the enemy airplane is even within visual range, the pilot will consider any available information about the likely identity of the enemy pilot—the nationality, level of training, and cultural traditions that may come into play. When the enemy aircraft comes into radar contact, more direct information about the speed, size, and maneuverability of the enemy plane becomes available; unfolding circumstances take priority over radio chatter. A first decision is made based on the available information so far: The pilot decides to "get into the sun" above his opponent, and acts by applying control inputs to climb. Back to observation—is the attacker reacting to the change of altitude? Then comes orient: Is the enemy reacting characteristically, or perhaps acting like a noncombatant? Is his plane exhibiting better-than-expected performance? As the dogfight begins, little time is devoted to orienting unless some new information pertaining to the actual identity or intent of the attacker comes into play. Information cascades in real time, and the pilot does not have time to process it consciously; the pilot reacts as he is trained to, and conscious thought is directed to supervising the flow of action and reaction, continuously repeating the OODA cycle. Simultaneously, the opponent is going through the same cycle. One of John Boyd's primary insights in fighter combat was that it is vital to change speed and direction faster than the opponent. This may interfere with an opponent's OODA cycle. It is not necessarily a function of the plane's ability to maneuver, but the pilot must think and act faster than the opponent can think and act. Getting "inside" the cycle, short-circuiting the opponent's thinking processes, produces opportunities for the opponent to react inappropriately. Another tactical-level example can be found on the basketball court, where a player takes possession of the ball and must get past an opponent who is taller or faster. A straight dribble or pass is unlikely to succeed. Instead, the player may engage in a rapid and elaborate series of body movements designed to befuddle the opponent and deny him the ability to take advantage of his superior size or speed. At a basic level of play, this may be merely a series of fakes, with the hope that the opponent will make a mistake or an opening will occur, but practice and mental focus may allow one to accelerate tempo, get inside the opponent's OODA loop, and take control of the situation, causing the opponent to move in a particular way and generating an advantage rather than merely reacting to an accident. Taking control of the situation is key. It is not enough to speed through OODA faster, which results in flailing. The same cycle operates over a longer timescale in a competitive business landscape, and the same logic applies. Decision makers gather information (observe), form hypotheses about customer activity and the intentions of competitors (orient), make decisions, and act on them. The cycle is repeated continuously. The aggressive and conscious application of the process gives a business advantage over a competitor who is merely reacting to conditions as they occur or has poor awareness of the situation. Especially in business, in which teams of people are working the OODA Loop, it often gets stuck at the "D" (see Ullman) and no action is taken allowing the competition to gain the upper hand or resources to be wasted. The approach favors agility over raw power in dealing with human opponents in any endeavor. Boyd put the ethos into practice with his work for the United States Air Force. He was an advocate of maneuverable fighter aircraft, in contrast to the heavy, powerful jet fighters (such as the McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom II) that were prevalent in the 1960s. Boyd inspired the Lightweight Fighter program (LWF) that produced the successful General Dynamics F-16 Fighting Falcon and McDonnell Douglas F/A-18 Hornet, which are still in use by the United States and several other military powers into the 21st century. See also [ edit ] Notes [ edit ]TINY FEET ARE TOO TINY. Note: Full-res version HERE because you're a pervert. This is a picture by artist Dimitris Samaras of Jessica Rabbit performing her lounge act while cosplaying as Princess Leia circa The Skirmish on Carkoon in 4 ABY (I'm not a dork you're a dork). As you can see, her feet are so small she can't even stand anymore and her titties look like two ripe cantaloupes. Me being more of a honeydew man aside, I'm not sure she could digest a corndog without it getting lodged above her waistline. Cheeseburgers: you should really drink some. Dimitris' DeviantART Page via Gulp... Slave Leia Jessica Rabbit Sings for Jabba the Hut [obviouswinner] Thanks to Charlie, who actually went to see her lounge act but got kicked out by security for bringing an air horn.Los Angeles may soon be home to a lot more vegan dogs. Not at barbecues, though one imagines that meat-free franks are popular in a fitness mecca where vegan meals are easy to come by. No, the dogs in question are the 33,000 pooches that each year enter the city’s six animal shelters and are fed – for now, at least – traditional kibble composed mostly of turkey, chicken and lamb byproducts. Those dogs’ dinners could be swapped out for a plant-based food under a proposal before the Los Angeles City Board of Animal Services Commissioners. The change, which commissioners could decide Tuesday, would make the city’s shelter system the first in the nation to feed its canine residents a vegan diet, according to its chief veterinarian. Supporters, who include musician and animal rights activist Moby and the feminist lawyer Lisa Bloom, say that is one of the selling points: To make L.A. shelter dogs the vanguard of a meat-free movement. “If we adopt this, it’s one more thing that proves to the world that Los Angeles really is the progressive capital,” Moby, whose real name is Richard Hall, testified at the board’s meeting last month. The idea was proposed by Commissioner Roger Wolfson, a Hollywood screenwriter who cited research that he contended shows vegan diets “eliminate” many health problems in dogs, which are omnivores. But he said rethinking the dogs’ meals is about far more sweeping matters – the environmental effect of a meat industry that produces the main ingredients in lots of dog food and the ethics of feeding animals to animals. “We have to embrace the fact that the raising and killing of animals for food purposes must only be done if we have absolutely no other choice,” Wolfson said at the meeting, according to a recording published on a county website. “This is about the long-term survival of every man, woman and child in this room, and all of the people in our lives.” The city’s chief veterinarian, Jeremy Prupas, was not convinced. In a report to the commission, he recommended rejecting the proposal, saying that it could deprive dogs of sufficient protein, calcium and phosphorus and that it could be inadequate for injured, pregnant or lactating pups. Prupas said he’d consulted three clinical nutritionists at veterinary medical schools, one shelter medicine specialist and a veterinary toxicologist who works with a pet food company. None endorsed vegan dog diets, he testified. “We recognize that individual, privately owned dogs can do well on a wide variety of diets (Commercial, Vegetarian, Organic, Grain-free, Gluten-free, Raw, and Vegan),” Prupas wrote in his report. “However, that is quite a different population than the group of dogs we encounter daily in our animal shelters.” It would be easy to dismiss all this as a particularly Los Angeles debate. But confusion about the best food for dogs is real, in part because of a booming specialty pet food market. Dog foods have long been rooted in meat byproduct, which is a euphemism for the castoff animal body parts that slaughterhouses cannot or do not sell to humans. Many of those contain substantial amounts of grain, too. Nowadays, more companies are pushing grain-free or “all-meat” products, with some suggesting that they’re more suitable for animals that descended from wolves. Many veterinarians dismiss this as a marketing ploy that’s not supported by science, noting that dogs have evolved to digest starch better than their wild cousins. But many veterinary nutritionists also say that while dogs – whose protein needs are lower than those of cats – can do well on vegetarian or vegan diets, commercial options haven’t been widely tested. “We know a lot about dog nutrition, but there are unknowns as well,” Lisa M. Freeman, a board-certified veterinary nutritionist and a professor at Tufts University, told the New York Times recently. “We want them to be eating a diet that is nutritionally balanced. That means it has all the proteins, vitamins and minerals that they need in the correct ratios and with the best quality control. It isn’t easy to formulate a high-quality diet for dogs, and it’s particularly difficult with a vegan diet.” Prupas’ report cited two other reasons for keeping L.A. shelter dogs on their current food: Price and poop. The city pays $0.87 per pound for Canidae Life Stages, and the only vendor contracted to the city charges four times as much for a vegan product, it said. What’s more, Prupas wrote, a vegan diet higher in fiber could “lead to increased fecal bulk and frequency of bowel movements,” leading to more cleanup work for shelter staffers. That argument precipitated several diarrhea-related comments in nearly two hours of testimony at the commission’s Nov. 28 meeting, where pro-vegan voices dominated. Several pet owners, including Bloom, insisted that their vegan dogs had never suffered from digestive problems. Wolfson said the same of his dogs, and he said he’d secured commitments from two plant-based dog food companies to match the price of the city’s current kibble.Item posted by Ole Tange <tange> on Thu 02 Dec 2010 09:22:20 PM UTC. GNU Parallel 20101202 has been released. It is available for download at: http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/parallel/ New in this release: Implemented {/} for the input line with the path removed (basename). Implemented {/.} for the input line with extension and path removed (basename). Output from --progress is now sent to standard error instead of standard output. --eta was broken and counted down from 0. Now fixed. Standard output and standard error are flushed after every job so if standard output does not end with a newline it will still be grouped with the rest of standard output. --command, -c, --file, and -f are now removed as options. They were never used in practice. GetOptionsFromArray rewritten to work with old Perl libraries. The file COPYING now contains the GNU General Public License 3 Major rewrite to make the code more object oriented and easier to maintain in the future. About GNU Parallel GNU Parallel is a shell tool for executing jobs in parallel using one or more machines. A job is typically a single command or a small script that has to be run for each of the lines in the input. The typical input is a list of files, a list of hosts, a list of users, a list of URLs, or a list of tables. If you use xargs today you will find GNU Parallel very easy to use as GNU Parallel is written to have the same options as xargs. If you write loops in shell, you will find GNU Parallel may be able to replace most of the loops and make them run faster by running several jobs in parallel. If you use ppss or pexec you will find GNU Parallel will often make the command easier to read. GNU Parallel makes sure output from the commands is the same output as you would get had you run the commands sequentially. This makes it possible to use output from GNU Parallel as input for other programs. You can find more about GNU Parallel at: http://www.gnu.org/software/parallel/ Watch the intro video on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpaiGYxkSuQ or at http://tinyogg.com/watch/TORaR/ and http://tinyogg.com/watch/hfxKj/Starting Tuesday at Braemar Arena in Edina and lasting every Tuesday and Thursday night until the August 9-10 playoffs, a new 4-on-4 summer hockey league featuring NHL players and premier amateurs will take place. The championship will be played August 10 as players vie for the John Scott Cup. Not kidding. Dubbed the Da Beauty League, the league includes three games consecutively each night with the first game starting on most nights at 6 p.m. and the third game ending around 9:45. The games will consist of two 30-minute running halves. Entry to the each night
This election will have done nothing to diminish that impression. Against this shabbiness the Scots struck a blow for democracy, with an unprecedented 97% voter registration for an election the establishment wearily declared nobody wanted. It turns out that it was the only one people wanted. Whether this Scottish assertiveness kickstarts an unlikely UK-wide reform (unwanted in most of the English regions); or wearies southerners and precipitates a reaction to get rid of them; or the Scots, through the ballot box at general elections, decide to go the whole hog of their own accord; the old imperialist-based union is bust. The Scots, so often a regarded as a thrawn tribe with their best years behind them, have shown the western world that the corporate-led, neo-liberal model for the development of this planet, through G7'sphere of influence' states on bloated military budgets, has a limited appeal. This country, when it was ever known on the global stage under the union, was associated with tragedy, in terrible events like Lockerbie and Dunblane; it's now synonymous with real people power. Forget Bannockburn or the Scottish Enlightenment, the Scots have just reinvented and re-established the idea of true democracy. This – one more – glorious failure might also, paradoxically, be their finest hour.Hollywood mega-producer Harvey Weinstein is reportedly planning a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton at his New York City home on Monday with help from some of his celebrity friends. According to the New York Post‘s Page Six, Weinstein and his wife Georgina Chapman will host Clinton for dinner and conversation Monday night in Manhattan, with proceeds going to the Hillary Victory Fund joint fundraising committee. Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lopez, Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker will reportedly co-host the event. A source told the Post that the dinner will be intimate, with around 50 guests set to attend. The dinner is not listed on Clinton’s official event page. A representative for Weinstein did not immediately return Breitbart News’s request for comment. With just six months to go until the general election in November, Clinton has dominated in Hollywood fundraising over her Democrat primary rival Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Clinton has raked in more than $11 million from the entertainment industry in this election cycle. Sanders, who counts support among Hollywood’s more progressive celebrities including Mark Ruffalo and Susan Sarandon, lags far behind with just $1.2 million in entertainment industry contributions. Weinstein is a part of the entertainment elite who have made up the core of Clinton’s campaign contributions from Hollywood thus far. Other power players who are with her include Steven Spielberg and J.J. Abrams, who each contributed $1 million to her campaign, plus actors George Clooney, Robert De Niro, Tom Hanks and Morgan Freeman. Billionaire media mogul Haim Saban announced in February that he had contributed $6.4 million to Clinton’s campaign, making him her biggest Hollywood contributor thus far. Meanwhile, Sanders has relied on online fundraising from grassroots Democrats. Clinton clinched the Democrat presidential nomination earlier in June, with support from Democratic Party superdelegates. Follow Daniel Nussbaum on Twitter: @dznussbaumArchive Posts April (1) March (1) February (2) January (3) December (3) November (4) October (2) September (5) August (3) July (2) June (5) May (4) April (4) March (5) February (4) January (5) December (3) November (6) October (8) September (8) August (5) July (8) June (8) May (19) April (11) March (9) February (10) January (10) December (5) November (22) October (13) September (8) August (8) July (10) June (12) May (23) April (22) March (18) February (21) January (11) December (10) November (10) October (21) September (18) August (8) July (19) June (21) May (20) April (18) March (19) February (15) January (19) December (40) November (24) October (26) September (26) August (9) July (16) June (16) May (31) April (19) March (24) February (9) January (11) December (19) November (34) October (38) September (34) August (22) July (27) June (27) May (37) April (41) March (26) February (32) January (21) December (25) November (31) October (19) September (15) August (36) July (51) June (23) May (31) April (35) March (29) February (24) January (7) December (8) November (10) October (12) August (5) July (23) June (24) May (48) April (24)Attendance at the Toronto Zoo has jumped dramatically this year, thanks in part to a trifecta of cute, furry creatures — and with giant pandas entering the mix in 2013, zoo staff believe the trend will hold. In the first five months of this year, 429,742 people visited the zoo, beating last year’s total by 46% and surpassing the budgeted target by 27%. The surge in visitors has translated into a significant revenue boost for the zoo, which has pulled in $1.68-million more than budgeted so far this year. [np-related] “A good part of it is a combination of having new, exciting baby animals such as Hudson, our polar bear,” Toronto Zoo chief executive John Tracogna said, referring to a baby bear that captured headlines for both his unlikely survival story and the subsequent online contest to name him. “We also had births of penguin chicks that were exciting for a lot of people. The precursor was announcing that white lions were coming in May,” Mr. Tracogna said. The zoo’s latest attendance and revenue report, which the board received at a Thursday meeting, also attributes the attendance uptick to warmer weather, with the average temperature in May more than two degrees higher than in the previous year. “We remain cautiously optimistic that as we approach mid-year the positive results experienced to date in 2012 will continue,” the report notes. The zoo, which has been mired in controversy in recent months, can certainly use some good news. The fate of the facility’s three African elephants has been a flashpoint since city council voted last year to overturn a board decision and send the pachyderms to a California sanctuary. In April, the zoo lost its prestigious accreditation from the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, primarily because of city council’s intervention on the elephant file. But on Thursday, the focus remained squarely on the positive. Along with lauding its attendance, the zoo board voted to establish a Giant Panda Outreach Task Force, including politicians and citizens, to market the zoo’s five-year loan of two giant pandas from China, beginning in 2013. Councillor and board member Raymond Cho, who showed his colleagues a recent photograph of him cuddling a baby panda in China, will co-chair the outreach task force. “It’s to highlight the importance of the giant pandas, highlight that we have them here at the zoo … Pandas are just a great way to really engage the public and get out the message of conservation, education and research,” board chairman Joe Torzsok said. Zoo board members hope the panda exhibit will drive revenues even higher, with Councillor Glenn De Baeremaeker suggesting sales for the exhibit should be “sold out before the pandas even show up.” “It’s not just that, ‘Aren’t they cute and cuddly,’ ” Mr. De Baeremaeker said. “It’s ‘They’re cute and cuddly, and their species may go extinct unless we protect habitat,’ and that’s a very valuable lesson.” National Post • Email: motoole@nationalpost.com \| Twitter: megan_otooleAugust 27, 1999: Apple replaces the striped, multicolored logo it used since 1977 with a new single-color version. The replacement of the iconic logo shocks many long-time Apple fans. However, it is part of a sustained, company-wide overhaul on the part of Steve Jobs. The makeover includes new products, the “Think Different” ad campaign, and eventually the removal of the word “Computer” from the company’s name. The birth of the ‘bitten apple’ logo Apple’s first corporate logo was actually not the memorable “bitten apple” logo at all. A riff on a Victorian woodcut, it portrayed Sir Isaac Newton sitting beneath a tree with a solitary apple dangling over his head. A quotation from William Wordsworth’s The Prelude ran around the image’s border: “A mind forever wandering through strange seas of thought, alone.” (Apple’s third co-founder, Ron Wayne — who sold his stake in the company for just $800 — designed the original logo.) After less than a year, Apple replaced that logo with the outline we know today. Designed by 29-year-old Rob Janoff, it coincided with the debut of the Apple II at the West Coast Computer Faire, which marked Apple’s graduation from a small startup to a serious business. Janoff was a junior art designer at Regis McKenna, a firm that handled a lot of Apple’s early marketing and publicity. Steve Jobs and the Apple logo Jobs gave Janoff — who does not receive any royalties for his design — two directions for the Apple logo. 1) Don’t make it cute. And 2) Find some way to visually incorporate the Apple II’s revolutionary 16-color display. Janoff added the bite in the apple to give it a sense of scale when reproduced at different sizes. (It was also a play on the word “byte.”) The colorful stripes showed off the Apple II’s big feature, while embracing the countercultural tenor of the times. “I had a big hippie influence myself, having grown up in North California in the late ’60s,’ Janoff told me for my book The Apple Revolution. “I’d dabbled in all the psychedelic stuff, as well as the music and the visuals. To me, it was more interesting to draw it like that than, say, a red apple. The idea was to make it appealing, and to differentiate it from everything else that was out there.” For anyone paying attention after Jobs’ return to Apple in the late 1990s, the new logo should not have been a total surprise. The earlier iMac G3 featured a single color logo as part of its case design, although the striped logo continued to show up in Apple’s software — for example, in the “Apple menu.” On August 27, Apple officially scrapped the rainbow logo, telling vendors they shouldn’t use it anymore. Cupertino replaced it with single-color versions of the logo in different colors. Vendors could choose between either black or red versions of the flat logo. New logo reflects a new kind of Apple “Like our products and our customers, the Apple brand continues to evolve,” Apple wrote in its marketing guidelines. “To reflect this, we’ve made some important changes to the Apple logo and how we use it, and how we expect our channel to use it, too. Don’t worry: We haven’t replaced the logo, just updated it. We’ll continue to reflect who we are and what we stand for as a company in the same timeless symbol: an apple with a bite taken out of it. We’ve reduced some of the clutter in the original design, however, and updated the way we use color and light. In other words, we’ve taken the same standards of style and innovation that make our products and our design unmistakable and applied them to the company logo. Instead of rainbow stripes, solid colors. Instead of just one solid color, a palette of logo colors to suit a variety of uses. Solid colors emphasize the timeless shape of the Apple logo.” Apple later upgraded the single-color logo. The new polished-metal look reflected materials used by design chief Jony Ive. Which version of the Apple logo do you prefer? Leave your comments below.Search in Yosemite for missing man who asked to be alone to read Bible A search is under way at Yosemite National Park for a 22-year-old man who disappeared Sunday after telling friends he wanted to be alone for half an hour to read his Bible. More than 100 rescuers from Tuolomne, Mono, Marin and Santa Clara counties resumed their search this morning for Esmyn Garmendia-Barrios, a native of Honduras who is believed to be living in Fresno. "It is very difficult terrain," said Adrienne Freeman, a Yosemite spokeswoman. Garmendia-Barrios drove to the park with friends Sunday afternoon to see the waterfalls, she said. They stopped at Washburn Point, a popular lookout on Glacier Point Road, and Garmendia-Barrios asked for a brief period of solitude, Freeman said. When his companions returned 30 minutes later, he was gone. Park rangers were soon notified and a search began. An expanded search Monday failed to locate signs of the missing man. "We are concentrating right now in the area around Washburn," Freeman said. "Our goal is to do a detailed ground search from there." Weather conditions at the 6,000-foot spot have been moderate, she said. Garmendia-Barrios is 5-foot-7 with brown hair and brown eyes. He was wearing blue jeans, a blue T-shirt and black shoes. He speaks Spanish fluently, as well as some English, and was carrying a Bible, Freeman said. "He's a muscular guy," she said. "He's a soccer player and is in good shape. He probably has a high survivability because he's fit. But it's also a negative for us because it means he could have traveled a far distance." Park officials are asking any visitors who were in the Glacier Point, Washburn Point or Sentinel Dome areas after 2 p.m. Sunday to contact investigators. "We want to hear from everybody who may have been in the area," Freeman said. "Even if they did not see the missing man, it helps us if we can rule out places." Investigators can be reached at (209) 372-0311.WASHINGTON -- As people in the South and East readied themselves for a nor'easter that might bring heavy snowfall by week's end, snow fell on much of Kentucky and Tennessee and contributed to at least one traffic-related death Wednesday. The National Weather Service's Weather Prediction Center warns of heavy, "perhaps crippling" snow across the northern mid-Atlantic region, including Baltimore, Washington and Philadelphia, probably beginning Friday. Monster winter storm on its way CBS Boston chief meteorologist Eric Fisher winter storm warnings had been issued from Arkansas to New Jersey. The Washington D.C. and Baltimore area, the expected epicenter of the storm, was under a blizzard watch. The watches start as early as Thursday and stretch into Saturday. Fisher said the storm was expected to build into a "textbook nor'easter" as it moved up the East Coast from the Carolinas to southern New England and could drop 1-2 feet of snow. The District of Columbia was preparing for blizzard conditions, Mayor Muriel Bowser said Wednesday. The city has requested Humvees from the National Guard to reach isolated people and places if necessary. "If this is a blizzard and we have sustained winds and people lose power, that would be my biggest concern," Bowser said at a news conference. "We can move the snow. We will move the snow." In a statement Wednesday night, Bowser told District residents to avoid the roads. CBS affiliate WUSA in D.C. reported Wednesday night that Virginia State Police had responded to more than 160 accidents across the state by 8 p.m. While most of the crashes only involved damage to vehicles, police were investigating the cause of a fatal crash in Bedford County. Major snowstorm could strike Eastern U.S. Police said a state trooper suffered minor injuries when he was hit by a vehicle while investigating a crash on I-495 in Northern Virginia, WUSA reported. In the areas where blizzard conditions are possible, the weather service warns that travel will be limited if not impossible. The strongest winds and potentially life threatening conditions are expected Friday night through Saturday night. The storm will bring ice and freezing rain to Arkansas, Tennessee and Kentucky starting Thursday, prediction center Meteorologist Rich Otto said Wednesday. "There's a lot of details that are yet to be seen," Otto said. "Subtle changes can make a big difference. We've seen that in storms in the past." THE FIRST FLAKES Snow in much of Kentucky and Tennessee led school districts and some universities to cancel classes Wednesday and contributed to at least one traffic death, and officials warned motorists to be cautious of slick roads. The Knox County, Tennessee, Sheriff's Department says a car slid off the roadway due to speed and slick conditions, killing the driver and injuring a passenger. CBS affiliate WVLT reported the driver was identified as 20-year-old Jacob Raley. Neither man was wearing a seatbelt, ay Forecasters said another cold front will hit Thursday night and Friday and could dump more snow over the region before traveling eastward. STOCKING UP ON SUPPLIES Simon Martinez, 48, felt fortunate to find a new snow shovel at a True Value hardware store in northwest Washington. He tried a nearby Home Depot first, without success. Shoppers at Safeway in Bowie, Maryland, grab what is left of the snow shovels on January 20, 2016, as weather forecasters predict an incoming snow blizzard to the area. JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images "It's crazy there," he said, adding that they were also out of salt. In Baltimore, Director of Emergency Management Bob Maloney urged residents to make sure they have enough water to last for three days, along with a working flashlight and a battery-operated radio. For Mitchell Cohen, owner of Cohen & Co. Hardware in Center City Philadelphia, the snowy forecast is good news. He said he's been getting calls from people asking to hold shovels for pickup on Friday and Saturday. He was getting shovels and snow melt delivered Wednesday. "We live right around corner so it's no problem getting here, no matter how bad it gets," Cohen said. "We'll be open all weekend." GEARING UP IN PENNSYLVANIA, NEW JERSEY Road crews and hardware stores were gearing up Wednesday ahead of the potential winter storm that could dump as much as 16 inches in eastern Pennsylvania. The National Weather Service predicts that 12 to 16 inches of snow could come down between Friday night and Sunday morning around the Interstate 95 corridor. As much as a foot of snow is possible for Philadelphia's northern suburbs. More details on the upcoming #winterstorm for parts of the eastern U.S. pic.twitter.com/0bHZjs5rFq — NWS WPC (@NWSWPC) January 20, 2016 Mitchell Gaines, of the National Weather Service in Mount Holly, New Jersey said people should be prepared for strong winds, heavy, wet snow and power outages. Forecasters say most of New Jersey will likely see several inches of snow. SOUTHERN NEW ENGLAND PREPARES FOR WORST Although the storm's impact on southern New England remained uncertain Wednesday, officials are preparing for the worst. The National Weather Service said there's a potential for 6 inches of snow or more in the region. High winds and coastal flooding are possible. But meteorologist Matthew Belk said it depends on the storm's track. "You want to be prepared for the possibility for a significant weather storm, but there's a possibility it might not amount to much," Belk said. MAINE, NEW HAMPSHIRE, VERMONT The storm is expected to miss northern New England. Meteorologist Tom Hawley of the National Weather Service in Gray, Maine, says its path could shift, but right now "all indications are that it will not amount to much" in the region. If the storm says to the south, southern Maine and New Hampshire could see up to 1 to 2 inches of snow at the most. Little to no snow is in the forecast for Vermont. AIR TRAVEL All major airlines have issued waivers for travel over the weekend, allowing passengers to rebook onto earlier or later flights to avoid the storms, CBS News transportation correspondent Kris Van Cleave reported. The airports included vary by airline but include some cities in Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia all the way up the coast to New Hampshire and Massachusetts. ANTI-ABORTION MARCH STILL ON Organizers of the March for Life say their annual anti-abortion rally in Washington will be held Friday, as scheduled. The rally on the anniversary of the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision is one of the largest events on the National Mall. Thousands of abortion opponents gather to listen to speeches before marching to the Supreme Court. NOT EVEN SAFE FOR A SNOWBALL FIGHT? Even the organizers of a snowball fight are nervous about the storm that's expected to hit the nation's capital. The Washington D.C. Snowball Fight Association is taking a wait-and-see approach to its gathering in Dupont Circle, tentatively scheduled for Saturday. "If it is still blizzard conditions, that's not the optimal conditions. We might have to move it. Maybe to Sunday, maybe later on Saturday," snowball fight organizer Ami Greener said. "Once it stops snowing, anything is good. Two feet of snow is fine."Despite fears to the contrary, the head of the group pushing for final passage of the Energy Choice initiative said not just big business but residential customers and small businesses will benefit from an open and competitive retail electricity market. Jon Wellinghoff of Policy/DER (for Distributed Energy Resource technology) told a joint meeting of the Northern Nevada Development Authority and Carson Valley Chamber of Commerce even for small customers, "I think your overall total monthly bills will be less." Asked about what the initiative amending Nevada's constitution to end the monopoly held by NV Energy would do to kilowatt hour rates, he said that doesn't really matter. "Nobody has a real interest in how much you pay per kilowatt hour," Wellinghoff said. "They have an interest in how much you pay on your monthly bill." Wellinghoff, head of Policy/DER consulting, is a former member and chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, former general counsel of the Nevada's Public Utilities Commission and the state's first Consumer Advocate. He said large customers like the major resorts and mines already have the ability to opt out of NV Energy and buy electric power elsewhere. He said the ballot question before voters in 2018 gives all consumers that right. "People in Nevada will ultimately have choice for energy," he said. Recommended Stories For You Wellinghoff said at present NV Energy is the only provider in the state other than a few tiny co-ops and city systems. He said the initiative would end that monopoly and "direct the Legislature to come up with specifics to do things that will ultimately provide for a change in the way we can receive energy services." Voters approved the initiative in 2016 by a 73 percent margin. Passage next year would ensure the mandate to open the energy market in Nevada's constitution and Wellinghoff said he expects it to pass. He said other states have already opened their electric power markets to competitive providers. He said in Texas, which started that almost 20 years ago, residential, small business and other customers have up to 15-20 different providers to choose from. He said for example, some providers will give customers free power nights and weekends because the power is so much cheaper then. "Others will say we'll give you a flat rate of 10 cents a kilowatt hour for the next five years," he said. He said customers can pick which plan works best for them instead of having to take whatever a monopoly provider offers. One piece of the puzzle he said probably won't change is the service that brings the power to a home or business — the distribution system of wires, poles, transformers and other equipment. "All that will continue to be provided by a monopoly provider, I assume NV Energy," he said. He said the distribution charge for those services will be on the same bill the customer gets each month for all electric power services. That charge, he said, will pay to maintain, improve and expand the grid that brings power to people's homes. "The key is everything that can be competitive will be competitive," he said. He said the energy choice committee appointed by Gov. Brian Sandoval is already working on what the whole system should look like and will make recommendations to the 2019 Legislature when and if voters approve Energy Choice. He said it's important the initiative gives lawmakers the responsibility to work out how everything will work. As for the Public Utilities Commission, he said its role would change under the initiative from setting rates to a market regulator overseeing how retail electric power retailers provide service and to prevent fraud and abuse in those markets.There will be approximately 50 percent more vasectomies this week, according to the Cleveland Clinic, and the reason has to do with the start of March Madness. Dr. Stephen Jones, a urologist at the Cleveland Clinic, said men opt to get the surgery during the NCAA men’s basketball tournament so they can watch the games while recovering. “They need at least a day with ice, keeping the area cool,” Jones said. “Not so much because it hurts, it really doesn’t hurt much – but it’s an area that swells very easily. So, if they’re going to spend a whole day doing nothing – it’s not hard to figure out that they’d want to do it on a day they’d like to be sitting in front of the television. There’s nothing that makes guys want to be in front of a television more than March Madness.” Some urologists take advantage of the increase and offer incentives like coupons for free pizza delivery, sports magazines and “survival kits,” which are given to the men after surgery, USA Today reported. Dr. Richard Chopp at the Urology Team in Austin, Texas, gives his patients a t-shirt that says “I Got Chopped at the Urology Team.” There are approximately 600,000 vasectomies performed each year in the U.S. A vasectomy is elective form of male birth control that cuts the supply of sperm to the semen. Click here to read more about this story from USA Today. Jones said men can get back into their normal routine within a week after the procedure.National Airlines Flight 102 was a cargo flight operated by National Airlines between the British military base Camp Bastion in Afghanistan and Al Maktoum Airport in Dubai, with a refueling stop at Bagram Airfield, Afghanistan. On 29 April 2013, the Boeing 747-400 operating the flight crashed moments after taking off from Bagram, killing all seven people on board.[1][2] The subsequent investigation concluded that improperly secured cargo broke free during the take-off and shifted to the back of the cargo hold. The change in balance caused the aircraft to pitch up and stall. The shifted cargo also disabled the rear flight control systems, rendering the aircraft uncontrollable and making recovery from the stall impossible.[3] Accident [ edit ] Crash site Accident location shown within Afghanistan At the time of the crash the airline had been operating between Camp Bastion and Dubai for a month.[1] The accident flight had originated in Camp Bastion and had stopped at Bagram Airfield to refuel.[4][5] The aircraft then took off from Bagram's runway 03 at 15:30 local time and was climbing through 1,200 feet (370 m) when its nose rose sharply. The aircraft then stalled, crashed, and exploded into a large fireball.[1] The crash site was off the end of runway 03, within the perimeter of the airfield. All seven crew, all of whom were U.S. citizens,[6] died: four pilots, two mechanics, and a loadmaster.[1] A thunderstorm was also in the vicinity of Bagram at the time of the crash and the wind changed direction by 120° during a one-hour period commencing approximately 35 minutes before the crash.[7] A dashboard camera on a car in the vicinity of the runway end recorded the crash.[1][8] CNN stated that a government official speaking on the condition of anonymity said that the video was authentic.[5] Aircraft [ edit ] The aircraft involved was a Boeing 747-428BCF,[note 1] registration N949CA,[9] S/N 25630.[7] It was manufactured in 1993 as a passenger aircraft and was delivered to Air France (with registration F-GICE) the same year. Air France placed the aircraft into commercial passenger service and operated it until September 2010.[7] In 2011 the aircraft modified for service as a freighter before being sold to National Airlines. At the time of the crash, the aircraft was flying on behalf of the United States Air Force's Air Mobility Command.[1][6] Aftermath [ edit ] The crash interrupted the New Zealand Defence Force's (NZDF) withdrawal from Afghanistan, as it was only hours away from using another National Airlines aircraft to fly equipment out of the country; after the crash the NZDF indefinitely postponed using National Airlines for its airlift requirements.[10] Investigation [ edit ] The United States National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and the Afghanistan Civil Aviation Authority investigated the crash.[6] The NTSB reported in a 30 April 2013 press release that representatives of the Federal Aviation Administration and the Boeing Company would also provide technical expertise and aid in the investigation.[11] On 2 June 2013, investigators from the Ministry of Transport and Civil Aviation of Afghanistan confirmed the load shift hypothesis as the starting point: three armoured vehicles and two mine-sweeping vehicles, totalling 80 tons of weight, had not been properly secured. At least one armoured vehicle had come loose and rolled backwards against the airplane's rear bulkhead, damaging the bulkhead. This also crippled key hydraulic systems and damaged the horizontal stabilizer components - most notably the jackscrew, which rendered the airplane uncontrollable.[3] Control of the aircraft was therefore lost, with the abnormal pitch-up rotation, stall, and crash to the ground ensuing.[1] The damage made it impossible for the crew to regain control of the aircraft. The NTSB determined that the probable cause of this accident was "National Airlines’ inadequate procedures for restraining special cargo loads, which resulted in the loadmaster’s improper restraint of the cargo."[12] One of the key recommendations was to mandate training for all loadmasters. This has now been standardized across the cargo airlines under the Federal Aviation Administration. In media [ edit ] The Canadian TV series Mayday (also known as Air Crash Disaster and Air Emergency in the US and Air Crash Investigation in the UK and the rest of the world) covered Flight 102 in episode 10 of series 16, called "Afghan Nightmare", first broadcast in 2017.[13] See also [ edit ] Notes [ edit ] ^ Boeing Converted Freighter. The aircraft was a Boeing 747-400 model; Boeing assigns a unique code for each company that buys one of its aircraft, which is applied as an infix to the model number at the time the aircraft is built, hence "747-428". This aircraft was converted to freighter configuration as part of Boeing's conversion program of passenger 747-400s, hence "747-428BCF" forI guess I don't have to point out the obvious: That the same Catholic Church leaders who want to set themselves up as the moral referees of everyone else's private lives have quite a few planks sticking out of their own eyes and maybe it's time we pointed that out every time we have one of these "moral" arguments break out in the media: The bankruptcy hearings for the Archdiocese of Milwaukee have revealed more than 8,000 previously unreported instances of alleged sexual abuse of children, according to one attorney representing the victims. The charges cover a span of 60 years and implicate a group of 100 alleged offenders, including nuns, church workers and some 75 priests. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter Annysa Johnson writes that 570 “victim-survivors” have filed claims in the case, which is currently before U.S. bankruptcy judge Susan V. Kelley. At a press conference on the federal courthouse steps in Milwaukee, Peter Isley, director of the Survivors’ Network of Those Abused by Priests said, “This is a public safety crisis, a child safety crisis that needs to be investigated. We need to know who they are and where they are. How can there be 8,000 crimes committed by over 100 offenders and there be no accountability?” On Thursday, the court’s actions centered around three cases brought against church officials over instances of abuse from the late 70′s and early 80′s. Church lawyers argued that the statute of limitations has run out on the crimes. Judge Kelley dismissed one case on grounds that the victim had received a previous settlement from the church, but upheld the other two claims.This #SundaySupper challenge is all about Farmers Markets and local foods. I’m extremely lucky to live in California. Did you catch the Slate article about California produce? Yeah, “99 percent of artichokes, 99 percent of walnuts, 97 percent of kiwis, 97 percent of plums, 95 percent of celery, 95 percent of garlic, 89 percent of cauliflower, 71 percent of spinach, and 69 percent of carrots” and the list goes on. And I get all of these fine things at my local farmers markets! I have to say it was weird the first time I saw celery at a farmers market. People eat celery? Huh. Anyway, this year I’ve been on the hunt for cherries. Cherries aren’t a super crop here in California but we do grow some a bit northeast of my house. I was going to go cherry picking but all of the u-pick farms have been canceling each week. The crops just flopped. Boo. So what’s a girl to do? Well, pay out the nose for cherries instead of getting a pedicure. Cherries are way better anyway. The key to fresh fruit in desserts like bars and muffins is to not overload the batter with fruit. I know, I want a bit of fruit in each tiny bite just like you do but you really do mess with the moisture and sometimes the product won’t cook all the way through. This recipe only has about 10 cherries in the full 8×8 pan. Chopped small you can still get cherries in each piece but not enough to make it a gooey under-baked mess. If you want a full on fruit assault try a pie or something with a little bit of crust instead of something cake like. Coconut Cherry Bars Recipe Ingredients 1/2 cup margarine 3/4 cups granulated sugar 1 egg replacer (prepared) 1/2 tsp vanilla 1 1/4 cups flour 1/8 tsp salt 3/4 tsp baking powder 1/4 cup chopped nuts 1/3 cup fresh cherries, chopped 1/3 cup flaked coconut Instructions Preheat oven to 375º Cream margarine until fluffy. Add granulated sugar gradually. Mix in egg replacer and vanilla. Sift together flour, baking powder and salt. Stir into creamed mixture. Stir in nuts, cherries and coconut. Spread dough in a greased 8 inch pan. Bake for 25-30 minutes or until bars are firm in the center. Cool slightly. Cut. 3.1 http://www.killerbunniesinc.com/2013/07/coconut-cherry-bars-recipe-sundaysupper/ Join the #SundaySupper conversation on twitter today! We tweet throughout the day and share recipes from all over the world. Our weekly chat starts at 7:00 pm EST. Follow the #SundaySupper hashtag and remember to include it in your tweets to join in the chat. Check out our#SundaySupper Pinterest board for more fabulous recipes and food photos.MIAMI (CBSMiami) – Miami police are still tight-lipped about the man they shot and killed on the MacArthur Causeway Saturday afternoon, but new details back claims they had no choice: the naked man they shot was trying to chew the face off another naked man, and refused to obey police orders to stop his grisly meal, which one source now claims included his victim’s nose and eyeballs. Surveillance video taken from security cameras at the nearby Miami Herald building show a police officer arrive on the scene, appear to be startled by the spectacle of two naked men lying on the street, and draw his service weapon. It appears that the officer shot one of the men, but it was difficult to tell in the video. The bizarre shooting happened shortly after 2 p.m., when police responded to a 911 call about two naked men fighting on a bike path along the Causeway, which was packed with traffic on a busy holiday weekend. Miami police have not confirmed the details of what happened next, but sources close to the investigation told CBS4 News that officers found one man gnawing on the face of another, in what one police source called the most gruesome thing he’d ever seen. The fight was taking place at the causeway exit near the Miami Herald building, and amazed officers tried to stop it, ordering the man making a meal out of the other man to stop. SURVEILLANCE CAMERA VIDEO The head of the Miami Fraternal Order of Police, Armando Aguilar, said drugs are at the root of the attack. “We have seen, already, three or four cases that are exactly like this where some people have admitted taking LSD and it’s no different than cocaine psychosis,” Aguilar said. In the cases Aguilar mentioned, he said the people have all taken their clothing off, been extremely violent with what seemed to be super-human strength, even using their jaws as weapons. “Extremely strong, I took care of a 150 pound individual who you would have thought he was 250 pounds,” Aguilar said. “It took six security officers to restrain the individual. Emergency room Doctor Paul Adams agreed with Aguilar saying similar cases have showed up in the ER. “We noticed an increase, probably after Ultra Fest,” Dr. Adams said. Adams said the new LSD is commonly called “bath salts.” The drug, Adams said, can raise a persons body temperature to such a high degree that logic and the ability to feel pain are lost; then delirium sets in and that often leads to disaster. “We’ve had several deaths,” Dr. Adams said. “Earlier last year, we probably saw our first death from bath salts where people were running on the MacArthur Causeway, under the MacArthur Causeway being chased by the police and then all of the sudden just collapsing.” Aguilar, who heads the local chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police, said he has spoken with the officer who responded. Aguilar said the
to B according to A B:applyTorque(V) Applies torque to B according to the given local vector V, representing the torque axis, magnitude and direction B:isFrozen() Returns 1 if B is frozen, 0 otherwise Wirelink Description Wirelinks are an alternative to normal wires that offer a number of advantages. Any number of inputs or outputs on a component can be manipulated with one Wirelink, and you can also use it to retrieve the entity of a wirelinked component. Since all Wirelinks are capable of two-way communication, wirelinks are not clear-cut inputs or outputs. As such, to avoid ambiguity wirelinks which the expression should be able to manipulate are always declared in the @inputs of the expression. To connect this input to another component, you must use the Wirelink tool on the component to create a new output on it of the type Wirelink, then wire the input to the output as normal. Commands Equal and Not Equal operators are available. XWL here means the Wirelink input. Function Returns Description XWL:isHiSpeed() Returns true if the linked component is high-speed capable. XWL:entity() Returns the entity of the linked component. XWL:hasInput(S) Returns true if the linked component has an input of the specified name. XWL:hasOutput(S) Returns true if the linked component has an output of the specified name. XWL[S,<type>] <type> Retrieves the component's output of the specified name. XWL[S,<type>]=X Sets the component's input of the specified name equal to X. XWL:setNumber(S,N) Deprecated. Use XWL[S,number]=X instead. XWL:number(S) Deprecated. Use XWL[S,number] instead. XWL:setVector(S,V) Deprecated. Use XWL[S,vector]=X instead. XWL:vector(S) Deprecated. Use XWL[S,vector] instead. XWL:setString(S,S) Deprecated. Use XWL[S,string]=X instead. XWL:string(S) Deprecated. Use XWL[S,string] instead. XWL:setXyz(V) Sets the X/Y/Z to the corresponding values in the vector. XWL:xyz() Retrieves the X/Y/Z as the corresponding values in the vector. XWL:setEntity(S,E) Deprecated. Use XWL[S,entity]=X instead. XWL:entity(S) Deprecated. Use XWL[S,entity] instead. XWL:writeCell(N,N) Deprecated. Use XWL[N]=X instead. XWL:readCell(N) Deprecated. Use XWL[N] instead. XWL[N] Returns contents of the specified memory cell. XWL[N]=X Writes the value to the memory cell specified by the index. XWL:writeString(S,N,N) A helper function for using the Wired Console Screen. The string will be written to the screen in white text on black background. The number arguments specify the starting position - X/Horizontal (0-29 recommended) and Y/vertical (0-17). XWL:writeString(S,N,N,N) As above, with an extra argument for the text colour. This is in the form of a 3-digit RGB code. 0 is black, while 999 is white, 900 is pure red and so on. XWL:writeString(S,N,N,N,N) As above, with an extra argument for background colour. 3-digit RGB again. XWL:writeString(S,N,N,N,N,N) As above, with an extra argument for flashing text. 0 or 1 is recommended. XWL:writeString(N,S) Writes a null-terminated string to the given address. Returns the next free address or 0 on failure. XWL:readString(N) Reads a null-terminated string from the given address. Returns an empty string on failure. XWL:writeArray(N,R) Writes an array's elements into a piece of memory. Strings and sub-tables (angles, vectors, matrices) are written as pointers to the actual data. Strings are written null-terminated. XWL:writeTable(N,T) Same as writeArray, except it uses the numerically indexed variables of the table instead. XWL:inputs() Returns an array of all the inputs that XWL has without their types. Returns an empty array if it has none XWL:outputs() Returns an array of all the outputs that XWL has without their types. Returns an empty array if it has none XWL:inputType(S) Returns the type of input that S is in lowercase. ( "NORMAL" is changed to "number" ) XWL:outputType(S) Returns the type of output that S is in lowercase. ( "NORMAL" is changed to "number" ) Complex Developed by: Fizyk Description Complex numbers are an extension of real numbers to include roots of negative numbers as well. They support all basic operations, like addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and raising to a power. Also operations with real numbers are supported, like N+C etc. There are comparison operators == and!=, no < and > though, as those are undefined for complex numbers. Commands Function Returns Description comp() Returns complex zero comp(N) Converts a real number to complex (returns complex number with real part N and imaginary part 0) comp(N,N 2 ) Returns N+N 2 i i() Returns the imaginary unit i i(N) Returns Ni abs(C) Returns the absolute value of C arg(C) Returns the argument of C conj(C) Returns the conjugate of C real(C) Returns the real part of C imag(C) Returns the imaginary part of C exp(C) Raises Euler's constant e to the power of C log(C) Calculates the natural logarithm of C log(C,C 2 ) Calculates the logarithm of C 2 to a complex base C log(N,C) Calculates the logarithm of C to a real base N log2(C) Calculates the logarithm of C to base 2 log10(C) Calculates the logarithm of C to base 10 sqrt(C) Calculates the square root of C csqrt(N) Calculates the complex square root of the real number N sin(C) Calculates the sine of C cos(C) Calculates the cosine of C tan(C) Calculates the tangent of C cot(C) Calculates the cotangent of C sec(C) Calculates the secant of C csc(C) Calculates the cosecant of C asin(C) Calculates the inverse sine of C acos(C) Calculates the inverse cosine of C atan(C) Calculates the inverse tangent of C atan2(C) Calculates the principle value of C sinh(C) Calculates the hyperbolic sine of C cosh(C) Calculates the hyperbolic cosine of C tanh(C) Calculates the hyperbolic tangent of C coth(C) Calculates the hyperbolic cotangent of C sech(C) Calculates the hyperbolic secant of C csch(C) Calculates the hyperbolic cosecant of C toString(C) Formats C as a string. C:toString() The same as toString(C). Quaternion Developed by: Fizyk Description Quaternions are an extension of complex numbers. Instead of a+bi, they are of form a+bi+cj+dk, where a, b, c, d are real numbers, and i, j, k are imaginary units. The imaginary units can be used as a basis in a 3D space, allowing quaternions to represent rotations. Like on real and complex numbers, on quaternions you can perform addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. Operations that take a quaternion and a real/complex number are also supported (N+Q, QC, etc.). Beware: quaternion multiplication isn't commutative! Note: Because multiplication isn't commutative with quaternions, there are two ways of dividing them. Q1/Q2 is the same as Q1inv(Q2), the second way is inv(Q2)Q1. The extension also supports multiplying quaternions by vectors for the purpose of rotations. If you want to rotate vector V using quaternion Q, use this code: V2 = vec(QVinv(Q)) A short guide on quaternions can be found here: [1] Commands Function Returns Description quat() Creates a zero quaternion quat(N) Creates a quaternion with real part equal to N quat(C) Creates a quaternion with real and "i" parts equal to C quat(V) Converts a vector to a quaternion (returns V.xi + V.yj + V.zk) quat(N,N 2,N 3,N 4 ) Returns N+N 2 i+N 3 j+N 4 k quat(A) Converts A to a quaternion quat(V,V 2 ) Creates a quaternion given forward (V) and up (V 2 ) vectors quat(E) Converts angle of E to a quaternion qi() Returns quaternion i qi(N) Returns quaternion Ni qj() Returns j qj(N) Returns Nj qk() Returns k qk(N) Returns Nk abs(Q) Returns absolute value of Q conj(Q) Returns the conjugate of Q inv(Q) Returns the inverse of Q Q:real() Returns the real component of the quaternion Q:i() Returns the i component of the quaternion Q:j() Returns the j component of the quaternion Q:k() Returns the k component of the quaternion exp(Q) Raises Euler's constant e to the power Q log(Q) Calculates natural logarithm of Q qMod(Q) Changes quaternion Q so that the represented rotation is by an angle between 0 and 180 degrees (by coder0xff) slerp(Q,Q 2,N) Performs spherical linear interpolation between Q and Q 2. Returns Q for N=0, Q 2 for N=1 Q:forward() Returns vector pointing forward for Q Q:right() Returns vector pointing right for Q Q:up() Returns vector pointing up for Q qRotation(V,N) Returns quaternion for rotation about axis V by angle N qRotation(V) Construct a quaternion from the rotation vector V. Vector direction is axis of rotation, magnitude is angle in degress (by coder0xff) rotationAngle(Q) Returns the angle of rotation in degrees (by coder0xff) rotationAxis(Q) Returns the axis of rotation (by coder0xff) rotationVector(Q) Returns the rotation vector - rotation axis where magnitude is the angle of rotation in degress (by coder0xff) vec(Q) Converts Q to a vector by dropping the real component matrix(Q) Converts Q to a transformation matrix Q:toAngle() Returns angle represented by Q toString(Q) Formats Q as a string. Basic extensions Core Description This is where things directly related to E2 are kept Commands Function Returns Description first() Returns 1 if the expression was spawned or reset duped() Returns 1 if the expression was duplicated dupefinished() Returns 1 when the contraption has finished duping. (Only triggers on Adv Duplicator, not the normal duplicator) inputClk() Returns 1 if the expression was triggered by an input reset() Reset the expression itself as if it was just spawned, stops execution exit() Stops the execution of any code after it runOnLast(N) If <activate>!= 0, the chip will run once when it is removed, setting the last() flag when it does. last() Returns 1 if it is being called on the last execution of the expression gate before it is removed or reset. This execution must be requested with the runOnLast(1) command. removing() Returns 1 if this is the last() execution and caused by the entity being removed. ops() Returns how many ops are used every execution on average cpuUsage() Returns the average cpu usage in seconds. Multiply it by 1000000 to get the same number you see in E2's overlay text. opcounter() Returns how many ops have been used so far in this execution plus the amount of hard quota used minquota() The ops left before soft quota is used up maxquota() The ops left before hard quota is exceeded and the expression shuts down softQuota() Returns the size of the soft quota hardQuota() Returns the size of the hard quota perf() If used as a while loop condition, stabilizes the expression around <maxexceed> hardquota used. perf(N) Same as perf(), where N is the percentage of the soft quota the e2 will stabilise at. Self-Aware Description With entity() you can use Entity-Support to get all the data from the expression-entity. With concmd() you can execute console commands. Also, the chip has the ability to force itself. Forces aren't dispersed over a certain amount of time, all forces applied to an object within a tick are added up and then applied to the object. Force commands are best used with runOnTick(N) because you won't end up applying more than 1 force per tick and it is easier to do things like defy gravity. Commands Function Returns Description entity() Gets the entity of the expression concmd(S) Takes a string and executes it in console. Returns 1 if it succeeded and 0 if it failed. The client must enable this in the console with "wire_expression2_concmd 1". "wire_expression2_concmd_whitelist" allows you to choose which commands can be used.[2] applyForce(V) Applies force according to the vector given (Forces independently on each axis unlike a vector thruster) applyOffsetForce(V,V) Applies force to the expression according to the first vector from the location of the second applyAngForce(A) Applies torque to the expression according to the given local angle applyTorque(V) Applies torque to the expression according to the given local vector, representing the torque axis, magnitude and direction selfDestruct() Removes the expression selfDestructAll() Removes the expression and all constrained props ioOutputEntities(S) Returns an array of all entities wired to the output S. ioInputEntity(S) Returns the entity the input S is wired to. ioSetOutput(S,) - Trigger the output S of the E2 with the value . ioGetInput(S) * Get the value of the input S of the E2. E:getName() Returns the name of the E2 E. setName(S) - Sets the name of the E2. changed() Checks if the value or variable was changed. Accepts any type except table and array. It detects changes by checking whether it was called with a different parameter at the same point in the last execution. Multiple calls to changed() in the _same_ execution are independent of each other. Note: Put changed() first in an IF AND statement or keep it out of conditional statements all together as changed() will silently fail if it was not called the previous execution. select(N,,...) * Returns the Nth value given after the index, 's zero element otherwise. If you mix types, the behaviour is undefined. hash() N Returns a numerical hash using the code of the E2 itself (Including comments). hash(S) N Returns a numerical hash using the string specified. hashNoComments() N Returns a numerical hash using the code of the E2 itself (Excluding comments). Debug Description Contains various functions for displaying values to the user. print() and hint() allow you to display strings quickly on your screen. Keep in mind that chat messages can be faked using E:printColorDriver(...) and E:printColorDriver(R). The game will display a warning message when first used on someone by a specific chip. Commands Function Returns Description print(S) Posts S to the chat area. print(...) Prints all arguments to the chat area, seperated by a tab. Automatically does toString for you (Can print arrays but not tables). Works just like lua's print. E:printDriver(S) Posts a string to the chat of E's driver. Returns 1 if the text was printed, 0 if not. hint(S,N) Displays a hint popup with message S for N seconds (N being clamped between 0.7 and 7). E:hintDriver(S,N) Displays a hint popup to the driver of vehicle E, with message S for N seconds (N being clamped between 0.7 and 7). Same return value as printDriver. print(N,S) Same as print(S), but can make the text show up in different places. N can be one of the following: _HUD_PRINTCENTER, _HUD_PRINTCONSOLE, _HUD_PRINTNOTIFY, _HUD_PRINTTALK. E:printDriver(N,S) Same as EE:printDriver(S), but can make the text show up in different places. N can be one of the following: _HUD_PRINTCENTER, _HUD_PRINTCONSOLE, _HUD_PRINTNOTIFY, _HUD_PRINTTALK. printTable(T) Prints a table like the lua function PrintTable does, except to the chat area. printTable(R) Prints an array like the lua function PrintTable does, except to the chat area. printColor(...) Works like chat.AddText(...). Parameters can be any amount and combination of numbers, strings, player entities, color vectors (both 3D and 4D). printColor(R) Like printColor(...), except taking an array containing all the parameters. E:printColorDriver(...) Like printColor but prints to the driver of a specified vehicle. E:printColorDriver(R) Like printColorDriver but takes an array containing all the parameters. Timer Description Timer functions are a way to trigger the expression to be run at a given time. These functions let the expression be run continuously without needing triggering from inputs. Commands Function Returns Description runOnTick(N) If set to 1, the expression will execute once every game tick. See Admin#Tick and [[3]] For more information on how often this is run. tickClk() Returns 1 if the current execution was caused by "runOnTick" curtime() Returns the current game time since server-start in seconds realtime() Returns the current real time since server-start in seconds* interval(N) Sets a one-time timer with name "interval" and delay in milliseconds (minimum delay for timers is 10ms) timer(S,N) Sets a one-time timer with entered name and delay in milliseconds stoptimer(S) Stops a timer, can stop interval with stoptimer("interval") clk() Returns 1 if the current execution was caused by the interval timer clk(S) Returns 1 if the current execution was caused by the inserted name * Both curtime() and realtime() are given to 3 decimal places. Server lag will cause curtime() to slow down, but not realtime(). Other Here are a few other commands which aren't exactly timer functions, but they are related to time. Function Returns Description curtime() Returns the time in seconds since the server was started. This can slow down if the server lags. realtime() Returns the time in seconds since the server was started. This does not slow down if the server lags. systime() Returns a highly accurate time (also in seconds) since the server was started. Ideal for benchmarking. date() Returns the server's current time and date, formatted neatly in a table. date(N) Returns the specified unix time, formatted neatly in a table. dateUTC() Returns the server's current time and date, formatted neatly in a table, in UTC. dateUTC(N) Returns the specified unix time, formatted neatly in a table, in UTC. time() Returns the server's current unix time. time(T) Converts a table of data (with the same table structure as the date() function above returns; not all values are required) into unix time. Unit Conversion Description All conversions are precise so it is recommended to round the result if it is going to be displayed (round()). Commands Function Returns Description toUnit(S,N) Converts default garrysmod units to specified units fromUnit(S,N) Converts specified units to default garrysmod units convertUnit(S,S,N) Converts between two units Units Length Description u garrysmod units (default) mm millimeters cm centimeters dm decimeters m meters km kilometers in inches ft feet yd yards mi miles nmi nautical miles Speed Description u/s garrysmod units per second (default) u/x garrysmod units per time unit m/s meters per second km/h kilometers per hour in/s inches per second mi/h miles per hour mph miles per hour (more commonly used than mi/h) knots knots (correct term for nautical miles per hour) mach mach (times speed of sound) mm/x millimeters per time unit cm/x centimeters per time unit dm/x decimeters per time unit m/x meters per time unit km/x kilometers per time unit in/x inches per time unit ft/x feet per time unit yd/x yards per time unit mi/x miles per time unit nmi/x nautical miles per time unit substitute x for s (per second), m (per minute) or h (per hour) Weight Description g grams kg kilograms (default) t tons oz ounces lb pounds Server Information Developed by: Beer Description The following functions allow you to get various information about the server, such as the current map name, gamemode, etc. Commands Function Returns Description map() Returns the current map name hostname() Returns the Name of the server isLan() Returns 1 if lan mode is enabled gamemode() Returns the name of the current gamemode gravity() Returns gravity for players (in the negative z direction) propGravity() Returns gravity for props airDensity() Returns air density (affects how drag slows down props) maxFrictionMass() Returns how much friction influences props throughout the server minFrictionMass() Returns how much friction influences props throughout the server speedLimit() Returns the speed limit angSpeedLimit() Returns the angular speed limit tickInterval() Returns the time (in seconds) between each server tick. E:ping() Returns the latency for player E isSinglePlayer() Returns 1 if singleplayer, 0 if multiplayer isDedicated() Returns 1 if server is dedicated, 0 if it is not numPlayers() Returns the number of players currently in the server maxPlayers() Returns the max number of players allowed in the server maxOfType(S) Returns the maximum allowed of a certain type of entity, i.e. maxOfType("wire_thrusters"). Returns 0 if you enter an invalid parameter. playerDamage() Returns 1 if player vs player damage is enabled on the server convar(S) Returns a clientside convar's setting. convarnum(S) Returns a clientside convar's setting. time(S) Returns numerical time/date info from the server. Possible arguments: "year", "month", "day", "hour", "min", "sec", "wday" (weekday, Sunday is 1), "yday" (day of the year), and "isdst" (daylight saving flag 0/1) Tip: To get a list of all possible parameters for maxOfType(), open the console and type "find sbox_max". If you need "sbox_maxragdolls", you can simply pass "ragdolls" in the function. Constraint Developed by: ZeikJT Description The following functions get information about entities based on constraints Commands Function Returns Description E:getConstraints() Returns an array with all entities directly or indirectly constrained to E, except E itself. E:hasConstraints() Returns the number of the constraints E has E:hasConstraints(S) Returns the number of the constraints E has with the given constraint type (see the types list below) E:isConstrained() Returns 1 if E has constraints, 0 if not E:isWeldedTo() Returns the first entity E was welded to E:isWeldedTo(N) Returns the Nth entity E was welded to E:isConstrainedTo() Returns the first entity E was constrained to E:isConstrainedTo(N) Returns the Nth entity E was constrained to E:isConstrainedTo(S) Returns the first entity E was constrained to with the given constraint type (see the types list below) E:isConstrainedTo(S, N) Returns the Nth entity E was constrained to with the given constraint type (see the types list below) E:parent() Returns the entity E is parented to. E:parentBone() Returns the bone E is parented to. Constraint Types AdvBallsocket Axis Ballsocket Elastic Hydraulic Keepupright Motor Muscle NoCollide Pulley Rope Slider Weld Winch Chat Developed by: ZeikJT & Gwahir Description The following functions are for reading the chat log. This is similar to the text receiver. Commands Function Returns Description runOnChat(N) If N == 0, the chip will no longer run on chat events, otherwise it makes this chip execute when someone chats. Only needs to be called once, not in every execution. chatClk() Returns 1 if the chip is being executed because of a chat event. Returns 0 otherwise. chatClk(E) Returns 1 if the chip is being executed because of a chat event by player E. Returns 0 otherwise. hideChat(N) If N!= 0, hide the chat message that is currently being processed. lastSpoke() Returns the last player to speak. lastSaid() Returns the last message in the chat log. lastSaidWhen() Returns the time the last message was sent. lastSaidTeam() Returns 1 if the last message was sent in the team chat, 0 otherwise. E:lastSaid() Returns what the player E last said. E:lastSaidWhen() Returns when the given player last said something. E:lastSaidTeam() Returns 1 if the last message was sent in the team chat, 0 otherwise. Color Developed by: Jimlad Description These commands allow E2 to find the color of an entity and change it. Changing color only works on entities you own. Uses RGBA (Red, Green, Blue, Alpha) values, although when only RGB is specified, alpha will not be changed. Note that color values have a range of 0 - 255, where (0,0,0,255) is black, and (255,255,255,255) is white. Alpha is equivalent to opacity, where 0 is completely transparent and 255 is completely opaque. Commands Advanced extensions E2 Function System Developed by: Rusketh Description This allows the user to create functions in their E2 code. Functions must be defined before they are used, which means they are typically at the top of the code. Functions are created at runtime so they should only be declaired once, additionally this also allows you overwrite existing custom functions as long as the return type is not changed. Existing predefined functions may not be overwritten or changed. This example makes a function equivalent to the built-in entity(N) function. It takes one parameter, which is a number called EntityID, and returns an entity. Function names must start with a lowercase letter. function entity doSomething(EntityID) { return entity(EntityID) } You can call it like any other function: print(doSomething(1)) If a function doesn't return anything, the return type should be "void" or can be left blank. function void notReturningAnything() { print("hi") } If a parameter is not a number, then you need to specify it's type using "ID:type", as in @[email protected][email protected] directives. function vector doSomethingElse(Number, Vector:vector) { return Vector * Number } Functions can also be defined as methods of another type. While inside the function body, the variable This is used to refer to the object on which this method is being called. The This variable does not obey usual scoping rules (see below). function void entity:forceToward(Pos:vector, Mul) { This:applyForce(Mul(Pos-This:pos())) } Functions will also run inside there own environment. See the 'E2 Variable Scopes' section for more information. Callable strings Developed by: Divran Description This extension is a replacement for the idea of having functions as objects. Because making functions objects was such a massive undertaking, it was made possible to use strings instead. The idea is to allow users to store references to functions in a table, or for use with callbacks, or other similar things. Example use: function doSomething(Str:string) { print("hello, " + Str) } SomeString = "doSomething" SomeString("world") will print "hello, world" You can also retrieve returned values from functions. To do so, you must specify the type that the function returns. Example: function string doSomething() { return "hello, world" } Str = "doSomething" ReturnValue = Str()[string] print(ReturnValue) #Will print "hello, world" Notable features This extension does not act the way you'd expect in a few situations. For example, let's say you made this function function table:doSomething(Index) { print(This[Index,number]) } How would you call this function? The way you call it is slightly strange, but necessary due to the way this works. Here's how to call it: Str = "doSomething" Str(table(1,2,3),2)) # Will print '2' Now, there is a slight issue with this. If you make two similar functions, like so: function table:doSomething(Index) { print(This[Index,number]) } function doSomething(This:table,Index) { print(This[Index,number]) } If you do this, you will not be able to call the first of the two (table:doSomething(index)) because it will prioritize the second function. I hope you find this useful! Entity Discovery Developed by: Gwahir, TomyLobo Description Use these to find and filter entities. The basic find functions will return how many entities were found but the actual entities are stored on the chip until they are accessed using find(), findResult(N), or findClosest(V) There is a white list and a black list as well as functions for on the spot filtering and sorting. White and black lists are always in effect and will be used automatically when you request a new list of entities. Control of the lists is achieved through the find[Exclude, Allow, Include, Disallow][Player, Prop, Model, Class] functions. Exclude/Allow controls the blacklist while Include/Disallow controls the whitelist. If the same object is covered by both the whitelist and the blacklist, the blacklist takes priority. In the case of names, classes and models, partial strings are acceptable. Discovering entities is not cheap so suggested usage is to find what you're looking for and store it in a persitant variable to limit the number of queries you run. To prevent overuse of these features, two console variables have been included, wire_exp2_entFindRate and wire_exp2_playerFindRate. These are delays that control how often you can perform find queries. This means that you cannot run find functions every tick with runOnTick(1)! The ent variable is per chip, the player variable is for all chip owned by a specific player. Commands Function Returns Description findUpdateRate() Returns the minimum delay between entity find events on a chip findPlayerUpdateRate() Returns the minimum delay between entity find events per player findCanQuery() Returns 1 if find functions can be used, 0 otherwise. findInSphere(V,N) Finds entities in a sphere around V with a radius of N, returns the number found after filtering findInCone(V,V,N,N) Like findInSphere but with a [Spherical cone], arguments are for position, direction, length, and degrees. findInBox(V,V) Like findInSphere but with a globally aligned box, the arguments are the diagonal corners of the box findByName(S) Find all entities with the given name findByModel(S) Find all entities with the given model findByClass(S) Find all entities with the given class findPlayerByName(S) Returns the player with the given name, this is an exception to the rule findExcludeEntities(R) Exclude all entities from R from future finds findExcludeEntity(E) Exclude E from future finds findExcludePlayer(E) Exclude this player from future finds (put it on the entity blacklist) findExcludePlayer(S) Exclude this player from future finds (put it on the entity blacklist) findExcludePlayerProps(E) Exclude entities owned by this player from future finds findExcludePlayerProps(S) Exclude entities owned by this player from future finds findExcludeModel(S) Exclude entities with this model (or partial model name) from future finds findExcludeClass(S) Exclude entities with this class (or partial class name) from future finds findAllowEntities(R) Remove all entities from R from the blacklist findAllowEntity(E) Remove E from the blacklist findAllowPlayer(E) Remove this player from the entity blacklist findAllowPlayer(S) Remove this player from the entity blacklist findAllowPlayerProps(E) Remove entities owned by this player from the blacklist findAllowPlayerProps(S) Remove entities owned by this player from the blacklist findAllowModel(S) Remove entities with this model (or partial model name) from the blacklist findAllowClass(S) Remove entities with this class (or partial class name) from the blacklist findIncludeEntities(R) Include all entities from R in future finds, and remove others not in the whitelist findIncludeEntity(E) Include E in future finds, and remove others not in the whitelist findIncludePlayer(E) Include this player in future finds, and remove other entities not in the entity whitelist findIncludePlayer(S) Include this player in future finds, and remove other entities not in the entity whitelist findIncludePlayerProps(E) Include entities owned by this player from future finds, and remove others not in the whitelist findIncludePlayerProps(S) Include entities owned by this player from future finds, and remove others not in the whitelist findIncludeModel(S) Include entities with this model (or partial model name) in future finds, and remove others not in the whitelist findIncludeClass(S) Include entities with this class (or partial class name) in future finds, and remove others not in the whitelist findDisallowEntities(R) Remove all entities from R from the whitelist findDisallowEntity(E) Remove E from the whitelist findDisallowPlayer(E) Remove this player from the entity whitelist findDisallowPlayer(S) Remove this player from the entity whitelist findDisallowPlayerProps(E) Remove entities owned by this player from the whitelist findDisallowPlayerProps(S) Remove entities owned by this player from the whitelist findDisallowModel(S) Remove entities with this model (or partial model name) from the whitelist findDisallowClass(S) Remove entities with this class (or partial class name) from the whitelist findClearBlackList() Clear all entries from the entire blacklist findClearBlackEntityList() Clear all entries from the entity blacklist findClearBlackPlayerPropList() Clear all entries from the prop owner blacklist findClearBlackModelList() Clear all entries from the model blacklist findClearBlackClassList() Clear all entries from the class blacklist findClearWhiteList() Clear all entries from the entire whitelist findClearWhiteEntityList() Clear all entries from the player whitelist findClearWhitePlayerPropList() Clear all entries from the prop owner whitelist findClearWhiteModelList() Clear all entries from the model whitelist findClearWhiteClassList() Clear all entries from the class whitelist findResult(N) Returns the indexed entity from the previous find event (valid parameters are 1 to the number of entities found) findClosest(V) Returns the closest entity to the given point from the previous find event findToArray() Formats the query as an array, R[Index,entity] to get an entity. findToTable() Formats the query as a table, T[Index,entity] to get an entity. find() Equivalent to findResult(1) findSortByDistance(V) Sorts the entities from the last find event, index 1 is the closest to point V, returns the number of entities in the list findClipToClass(S) Filters the list of entities by removing all entities that are NOT of this class findClipFromClass(S) Filters the list of entities by removing all entities that are of this class findClipToModel(S) Filters the list of entities by removing all entities that do NOT have this model findClipFromModel(S) Filters the list of entities by removing all entities that do have this model findClipToName(S) Filters the list of entities by removing all entities that do NOT have this name findClipFromName(S) Filters the list of entities by removing all entities that do have this name findClipToSphere(V,N) Filters the list of entities by removing all entities NOT within the specified sphere (center, radius) findClipFromSphere(V,N) Filters the list of entities by removing all entities within the specified sphere (center, radius) findClipToRegion(V,V) Filters the list of entities by removing all entities NOT on the positive side of the defined plane. (Plane origin, vector perpendicular to the plane) You can define any convex hull using this. Global Variables Developed by: Divran (Original idea by ZeikJT) Description Global variables are a way to exchange data between two expression chips without the need for any wiring at all. All variables in a non-shared table will automatically be removed if you disconnect from the server. Remember that variables in a shared table will not automatically be removed, so don't spam too many of them. Shared means that any E2 can access the globals, not only your own. Non-shared allows only your own E2's to access your globals. Commands Function Returns Description 'New' syntax The new syntax. Supports any type. Getting the gtable Get the gtable with which you use the regular table get and set syntax: "G[index,type]" gTable(S) GT Returns a non-shared gtable with the group S gTable(S,N) GT Returns a gtable with the group S. N determines whether or not it is shared. Remember that there are two tables: one which is shared and one which is not; values do not transition between the two. gTableSafe(N) GT Returns a safe gtable which group is a numerical hash created from the code of the E2 itself. This is very useful in multiplayer games, as it makes it impossible to edit the code in order to cheat (by giving yourself infinite health or ammo etc) since the cheater will then be joining a different group (edited E2 means different hash). Note that the hash ignores comments, so editing the comments in your E2 won't change the group. Removing Remove variables & clear tables GT:remove(S) * Removes and returns the variable of the type * at the index S GT:clear() - Clears the table GT gRemoveAll() - Removes all variables of the type in your non-shared table. gRemoveAll(S) - Removes all variables of the type in your non-shared table in group S. gRemoveAll() - Resets the entire non-shared table (ie ALL your variables in every group) 'Old' syntax The old syntax. Only supports strings, numbers, vectors, angles and entities. Use the first three letters when specifying type. These functions are NOT recommended. Use the new syntax instead. Group control Change group & share or stop sharing your variables gSetGroup(S) - Sets the E2's current group. Does persist. gGetGroup() S Gets the E2's current group. gShare(N) - Sets wether or not
’s what we’re going to do next,” said Peter Kambitsis. PIX11 News was the first to obtain this surveillance video showing the pandemonium after a snow plow, according to the NYPD, hit a garbage pail sending it flying towards a Forrest Hills, Queens restaurant breaking glass and terrifying customers. Owner Peter Kambitsis got the call from his staff, and heard people screaming in the background. Now, four days later he claimed to us that he’s been left in the dark. “Me just paying my bills right now out of my pocket for windows for the locks etc is just unacceptable,” said Kambitsis. Around 10:55 Thursday night, patrons were sitting inside the Exo cafe on Austin Street when all of sudden, debris came rushing in. According to police, the city plow operator left the scene, but was located immediately. Police said the operator didn’t know he hit the pail. “We have to pay to take care of all of the damages, and people are a little bit nervous to sit next to the windows,” said Angela Maimon. Anglea Maimon was working that night. “First thing I wanted to do is make sure everyone is ok,” said Maimon Peter Kambitsis wants to wake up from his nightmare. “I don’t know what to do. There’s no guidance here. I called the insurance company. The insurance company is setting up an adjuster. I still haven’t seen an adjuster to come and take a look at the damage,” said Kambitsis A spokesperson for the Department of Sanitation told us all claims must go through the Comptroller’s office. Kambitsis said he thought a claim was filed. We are waiting to hear back from the Comtroller’s Office. The City’s Department of Sanitation said in a statement in part that the incident was investigated, and that the Department is taking disciplinary action against the operators of the equipment.U-20 MNT CHICAGO (Aug. 8, 2016) - The U.S. Under-20 Men’s National Team defeated New York Red Bulls II 4-3 in the final seconds of the team’s second club friendly during its training camp in Basking Ridge, New Jersey. The Red Bulls took control early in the match with an opening goal by Anatole Abang in the 10th minute and Dan Metzger scoring the Red Bulls’ second in the 14th minute. The USA countered, earning two goals a minute apart, as Emmanuel Sabbi scored on his own in the 36th minute and Jonathan Lewis equalized off a JT Marcinkowski assist, closing the first half with a draw. The Red Bulls opened the second half with a 46th minute goal from Stefano Bonomo. Nearly 20 minutes later, Sebastian Elney equalized thanks to an assist from Lewis. Just moments before the final whistle blew, the USA took the lead as Jeremy Kelly scored in second half stoppage time off a Yosef Samuel assist to give the U.S. the dramatic victory. -U.S. Under-20 Men’s National Team Match Report- Match: U.S. Under-20 Men’s National Team vs. New York Red Bull II Date: August 7, 2016 Competition: Club Friendly Venue: New York Red Bull Training Facility; Whippany, NJ Kickoff: 12 p.m. ET Attendance: 150 Weather: 84 degrees, clear Scoring Summary: 1 2 F USA 2 2 4 NYRB 2 1 3 NYRB – Anatole Abang (Justin Bilyeu) 10th minute NYRB – Dan Metzger 14 USA – Emmanuel Sabbi 36 USA – Jonathan Lewis (JT Marcinkowski) 37 NYRB – Stefano Bonomo 46 USA – Sebastian Elney (Jonathan Lewis) 67 USA – Jeremy Kelly (Yosef Samuel) 90+1 Lineups: USA: 1-JT Marcinkowski; 2-Aaron Herrera (4-Chad Poarch, 78), 5-Miles Robinson, 24-Robert Castellanos, 3-Marcello Borges; 8-Eryk Williamson (18-Cameron Lindley, 70), 6-Danny Acosta (16-Jeremiah Gutjahr, 55), 15-Jonathan Suarez (10-Jackson Yueill, 83); 11-Coy Craft (19-Sebastian Elney, 45), 9-Emmanuel Sabbi (14-Yosef Samuel, 66), 7-Jonthan Lewis (17-Jeremy Kelly, 78) Substitutions not used: 22-Leo Lopez Head coach: Tab Ramos NYRB: 74-Rafael Diaz (64-Xavier Kennedy, 81); 17-Zachary Carroll; Trial Player (39-Timothy Schmoll, 45); 33-Aaron Long, 20-Justin Bilyeu (77-Junior Flemmings, 63); 80- Devon Williams, 36-Dan Metzger (29-Stefano Bonomo, 45), 88-Vincent Bezecourt; Trial Player, 9-Anatole Abang (21-Brandon Allen, 45), Trial Player (45-Zoumana Simpara, 45) Subs not used: None Head coach: John Wolyniec Stats Summary: USA / NYRB Shots: 7 / 12 Shots on Goal: 5 / 5 Saves: 2 / 1 Corner Kicks: 3 / 4 Fouls: 11 / 18 Offside: 1 / 4 Misconduct Summary: NYRB – Zachary Carroll (caution) 28th minute USA – Yosef Samuel (caution) 86 Man of the Match: Jonathan LewisShortly after the big win, revelers gathered outside Staples Center and, uh, trimmed trees to make kindling for a fire in the middle of the street. I know times are tough, but if you're trying to survive these cold Southern California summers, it's easier to put on a T-shirt. Most people don't realize it, but downtown is so full of wine bars these days that you can throw a rock and hit one. Somebody did, breaking another window. The owners of a different wine bar locked the doors and stood in front until late into the night. They didn't seem to be celebrating. Maybe having two espresso machines 100 feet apart made Lakers fans jittery after the team won its 15th NBA title in Orlando. A metal trash can went through a window of the coffee shop immediately east of Ralph's. Something else broke the glass door of a smoothie shop immediately west. You didn't have a real supermarket for 50 years until Ralph's opened in 2007. It's so nice; there's a dry cleaner and a Coffee Bean inside. And you know what's next door? Another Coffee Bean. Literally -- the next door. See, downtown? This is why you can't have nice things. I was standing between LA Live and Staples Center within an hour of the Lakers' victory. I was walking the streets a little further east as the LAPD struggled to chase the last of the knuckleheads from downtown. What should have been a proud moment for the redeveloped area was anything but. LA Live is supposed to be our version of New York's Times Square. When I drove by on my way home, there wasn't a soul visible -- just some squad cars belonging to the officers who had run everybody away. It wasn't even midnight yet. In the real Times Square, bars were still open -- even with the three-hour time difference. Last call can be as late as 4 a.m. in New York. Yet here in L.A., where the people had good reason to celebrate and gather at a monument to the city, it didn't feel there was anything worth toasting -- or anywhere open to do so. This reaction is nothing new. I was staying in the Radisson Hotel at Figueroa and Exposition when the Lakers won a title over Indiana on June 20, 2000. Born in L.A., I was just about to move back and thought it was cool that the hotel parking lot became the turnaround for an impromptu parade that spanned 25 blocks from Staples Center, back-and-forth for several hours. Later, I found out that two cop cars were set ablaze and that 11 people had been arrested. Early reports from this year's mayhem indicate at least twice as many arrests. I didn't see any cruisers on fire, but I watched the LAPD try to put out blazes in a pair of dumpsters. Thick smoke choked the street about half a mile east of Staples, and I couldn't help but wonder if something you don't want to touch is even worse when you're breathing it in. Speaking of bad smells, I was thankful that a porta-potty I passed wasn't on fire -- though it had been toppled onto its side. The good news? Only a few of the hooligans were actually, well, hooligans. It seemed that the damage was done by a small number of people. And the LAPD showed a lot of restraint, and occasionally courtesy. A squad car pulled up next to me at a red light and the officer -- observing that I wasn't in a Lakers jersey or testing my horn with my fist -- politely called out, "Be safe out there." On Wednesday, the Lakers and the city will split the cost for a victory parade, headed down a corridor where fans will come but might not be under normal circumstances. I would usually be shocked to see a Laker there, unless Lamar Odom was satisfying his sweet tooth at a fast-food joint or Adam Morrison was looking for a payday advance (at $4 million per year, you'd think he could dress sharper while sitting on the bench). The Lakers have done a lot for this city. It's not just bragging rights for their 15 championships. It's the Staples Center and, as a result, LA Live. It's hope for a downtown area that used to have none. They deserve this parade. But do we? Let this moment be a reminder to treat downtown a little better. If you've got money, spend some at one of the eclectic restaurants or bars. Help them stay open late, so people have somewhere nice to gather. If you're broke, support the community and check out a free event like an art walk, organized bike ride, or special museum night. Or at least stop throwing metal trash cans at everything. -- Adam Rose First photo: Unruly Lakers fans damage a police car in front of Staples Center after the Lakers won the NBA championship. Credit: Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times Second photo: A mob destroys a car parked near Staples Center following the Lakers' championship-clinching victory in the NBA Finals. Credit: Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times Third photo: A trash can gets thrown on a car as unruly Lakers fans surround a car at Pico and Figuerora after the Lakers won the NBA championship. Credit: Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times Fourth photo: Unruly Lakers fans loot a shoe store near the Staples Center after the Lakers won the NBA championship. Credit: Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times Fifth photo: Unruly Lakers fans jump on and rock a passing car on Pico Boulevard after the Lakers won the NBA championship. Credit: Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles TimesAfter leftists designated sharia supporter and notorious Jew-hater Linda Sarsour a “leader” of the feminist movement, her ugly past came to the fore (scroll). In a bid to deceive and deflect, Sarsour staged a narcissistic publicity stunt. Hundreds of Jewish gravestones were desecrated and destroyed at various cemeteries (most likely by her coreligionists), so Sarsour glommed onto the news story and made it her own. She jumped on a campaign to raise money to repair the the vandalism (and her reputation due to her long history of antisemitism). Sarsour hijacked the horror for her own personal aggrandizement, and the elite media ate it up. The campaign — named “Muslims Unite to Repair Jewish Cemetery” — had raised $162,468 through the Muslim crowdfunding site LaunchGood, far beyond its set goal of $20,000. Only 30% of the proceeds were disbursed, while designated cemeteries plead for promised funds. Their calls are met with deafening silence. She’s defrauded people before with hoaxes, but exploiting dead Jews, that was a new low, even for that lowlife. People are on to her. Thousands of freedom lovers attended an anti-Sarsour rally I held last month. There’s more. She lied and wrongly portrayed the honor killing of Shaima Alawadi by her husband as a racist-islamophobic-anti-Muslim killing. She faked a hate crime against herself, scoring political points nationally by portraying a mentally ill black homeless man as a violent racist. Director of Colorado Jewish Cemetery Promised $100,000 by BDS Activist Linda Sarsour in March 2017 Says Money Still Hasn’t Arrived A Jewish cemetery in Colorado that has fallen into severe disrepair has yet to receive a check for some $100,000 from a group associated with Palestinian-American BDS activist Linda Sarsour, despite being promised the money several months ago, The Algemeiner learned on Tuesday. Neil Price of the Golden Hill Cemetery in Lakewood, CO said he had left three unreturned voicemails for Tarek El-Messidi, the founder of non-profit Islamic education organization Celebrate Mercy, who led the high-profile effort by the Muslim community in February and March to raise money for vandalized Jewish cemeteries in the US. El-Messidi’s partner in the effort was Sarsour. Price has been the primary caretaker of the Colorado cemetery for 35 years, and has tried doggedly to raise money to restore the area containing 800 graves of impoverished tuberculosis victims, buried there in the 19th and 20th centuries. Over the years, Price said there have been numerous false starts in his attempts to get grants for landscaping and security for the site. “The Jewish community has many needs, and the focus is mostly on the needs of the living, or the active part of the cemetery,” he said. Price was first told about the Celebrate Mercy campaign’s money by Jennifer Goodwin, a local who had never before been involved in the cemetery rehabilitation efforts. The campaign — named “Muslims Unite to Repair Jewish Cemetery” — had raised $162,468 through the Muslim crowdfunding site LaunchGood, far beyond its set goal of $20,000. A total of $50,000 was distributed to three Jewish sites that had been vandalized: Chesed Shel Emeth Cemetery in St. Louis, MO ($40,000), the Waad Hakolel Cemetery in Rochester, NY ($5,000) and the Chicago Loop Synagogue ($5,000). The director of the Missouri cemetery confirmed to The Algemeiner the receipt of the check, while other news sources have reported the New York and Illinois locations got the money as well. El-Messidi and Sarsour also made public announcements that funds raised would go to fix Jewish graves in Philadelphia desecrated in February. Locals in charge of the Pennsylvania effort said they were approached by Celebrate Mercy, but they turned down the money as they were not in need of further assistance. On March 24, the Celebrate Mercy campaign organizers announced on the website: With extra funds raised, we have decided to embark on a major project to restore a neglected and vandalized Jewish cemetery in Colorado which is on the National Register of Historic Places. Costs will be over $100K. Learn about the story of this historic cemetery here. We are now hoping to raise a total of $200,000 to ensure we have the funds for this project while helping other vandalized sites as well. The $200,000 mark set for Golden Hill did not appear to have been reached by the time the campaign ended on May 31. Ted Ruskin, who has been involved with Golden Hill since 1989, took el-Messidi on a well-publicized tour of the cemetery in April. He told The Algemeiner in May that el-Messidi seemed “willing and ready to give the money,” but he had no contact with Celebrate Mercy following that visit. Price, Ruskin and others involved in the cemetery restoration effort met in June to determine what to do with the Celebrate Mercy money. “We divvied up the tasks to get bids on landscaping, a fence and other security,” said Price. “Plans are in place. We just need the money.” But Price has not heard from Goodwin for weeks. At his most recent attempt to get in touch, Goodwin’s husband, David Elustij, told him that she was sick. Goodwin spoke with The Algemeiner on Tuesday. She described herself as a “person who works by opening my mouth to the right people, and getting grant money by connecting people with the right people.” She became interested in Golden Hill after her mother, a reporter, wrote about the site for a local paper. Goodwin said that el-Messidi contacted her after reading that article and expressed interest in helping out the effort. Goodwin said she was last in touch with el-Messidi over Facebook at the end of the Ramadan fasting period, which concluded on June 24. She said she expected the money would eventually exchange hands, though it might take time. Despite Price’s three calls to el-Messidi, Goodwin pinned Price’s inability to connect with the Celebrate Mercy founder on the former’s lack of understanding about crowdfunding and social media (the best way to reach el-Messidi, according to Goodwin, is Facebook). “Neil is used to the formalized traditional structure [of grant-giving],” Goodwin said. “We need to get Neil in front of Facebook Messenger or something. You know, Tarek is raising money for multiple causes at the same time, and he had a lot going on with Ramadan and dealing with Islamophobia.” Goodwin added that she and Elustij would like to “make Golden Hill our priority,” but that for the last few years, she has been working through a disability and her husband has been recovering from a “severe TBI [traumatic brain injury].” Going forward, she noted, “I will be kicking to a support role on Golden Hill and my husband will be working on the project full time.” Concerns were raised about el-Messidi and Sarsour’s handling of the crowdfunded money earlier this year. In May, Sarsour accused Jewish New York Assemblyman Dov Hikind of “put[ting] out lies…without any backup, to cast doubt and to defame me,” after Hikind wrote on Facebook about the Celebrate Mercy crowdfunding effort: “How much of that money — if any — actually went to these cemeteries?” Price told The Algemeiner that he has no expectation that he will ever see the Celebrate Mercy money. “I’ve been doing this [non-profit work] a long time, so I know how it works,” said Price. “You need budgets and time tables, and none of that is here.” El-Messidi did not respond to The Algemeiner‘s request for comment by press time. The Truth Must be Told Your contribution supports independent journalism Please take a moment to consider this. Now, more than ever, people are reading Geller Report for news they won't get anywhere else. But advertising revenues have all but disappeared. Google Adsense is the online advertising monopoly and they have banned us. Social media giants like Facebook and Twitter have blocked and shadow-banned our accounts. But we won't put up a paywall. Because never has the free world needed independent journalism more. Everyone who reads our reporting knows the Geller Report covers the news the media won't. We cannot do our ground-breaking report without your support. We must continue to report on the global jihad and the left's war on freedom. Our readers’ contributions make that possible. Geller Report's independent, investigative journalism takes a lot of time, money and hard work to produce. But we do it because we believe our work is critical in the fight for freedom and because it is your fight, too. Please contribute to our ground-breaking work here. Make a monthly commitment to support The Geller Report – choose the option that suits you best. Contribute Monthly - Choose One Subscriber : $18.00 USD - monthly Contributor : $36.00 USD - monthly Patron : $50.00 USD - monthly Silver member : $100.00 USD - monthly Gold member : $250.00 USD - monthly Platinum member : $500.00 USD - monthlyThis article first published in 2015 and has been updated. To learn more about the historical Jesus, watch the CNN Original Series 'Finding Jesus," Sundays at 9 p.m. ET on CNN. (CNN) With Lent underway, and the original series "Finding Jesus" back on CNN, you're going to hear a lot about Jesus. You may hear revelations from new books that purport to tell the "real story" about Jesus, opinions from friends who have discovered a "secret" on the Web about the son of God, and airtight arguments from co-workers who can prove he never existed. Beware of most of these revelations; many are based on pure speculation and wishful thinking. Much of what we know about Jesus has been known for the last 2,000 years. Still, even for devout Christians there are surprises to be found hidden within the Gospels, and thanks to advances in historical research and archaeological discoveries, more is known about his life and times. With that in mind, here are five things you probably didn't know about Jesus. 1.) Jesus came from a nowhere little town. Nearly all modern-day archaeologists agree the town of Nazareth had only 200 to 400 people. Jesus' hometown is mentioned nowhere in either the Old Testament or the Talmud, which notes dozens of other towns in the area. In fact, in the New Testament it is literally a joke. In the Gospel of John, when a man named Nathanael hears the messiah is "Jesus of Nazareth," he asks, "Can anything good come from Nazareth?" He's dissing Jesus' crummy backwater town. 2.) Jesus probably didn't know everything. This is a thorny theological question. If Jesus is divine, wouldn't he know all things? (Indeed, on several occasions Jesus predicts his death and resurrection.) On the other hand, if he had a human consciousness, he needed to be taught something before he could know it. The Gospel of Luke says that when Jesus was a young man he "progressed" in wisdom. That means he learned things. (Otherwise how would he "progress"?) In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus initially refuses to heal the daughter of a non-Jewish woman, saying rather sharply, "It is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs." But when she replies that even the dogs get the crumbs from the table, Jesus softens, and he heals her daughter. He seems to be learning that his ministry extends beyond the Jewish people. Photos: Christianity's revered (and bizarre) relics The blood of Saint Januarius – The vessel held here by Pope Francis is said to contain the dried blood of Saint Januarius. The vial is kept in Italy's Naples Cathedral. It's brought out three times a year for prayer ceremonies, during which it is said to liquefy. However, the blood doesn't always assume its liquid state -- as was the case on December 16, 2016. According to legend, that could foreshadow disaster in the coming year. To learn more about the evidence behind Christian relics, artifacts and the historical Jesus, watch CNN's original series "Finding Jesus," Sunday nights at 9 ET/PT. Hide Caption 1 of 12 Photos: Christianity's revered (and bizarre) relics The tongue of Saint Anthony – Saint Anthony, often invoked by Catholics when they've lost something, is buried at the Basilica of Saint Anthony in Padua, Italy. The church also houses a large reliquary containing his tongue. According to church legend, when Saint Anthony's body was exhumed years after his death, most of his body had turned to dust. His tongue, however, is said to have appeared moist and alive. Hide Caption 2 of 12 Photos: Christianity's revered (and bizarre) relics The bones of Saint Peter – Pope Francis holds a box -- found in a tomb beneath Saint Peter's Basilica in Vatican City -- which the Catholic Church claims contains the bones of Saint Peter. The relics were first discovered in the 1940s, but Pope Francis put them on display to the public for the first time in 2013. Hide Caption 3 of 12 Photos: Christianity's revered (and bizarre) relics The True Cross – Over the years, countless supposed fragments of the cross on which Jesus was crucified have turned up. Historians say the spread of these relics can be traced to Saint Helena, the mother of Emperor Constantine, the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity. Helena traveled to Jerusalem and while there, excavators working for her discovered three crosses buried beneath a temple. It's claimed that, through a miraculous revelation, Helena was able to discern which of the crosses was the "true cross." She left one piece of it in Jerusalem and took the rest to Europe. Hide Caption 4 of 12 Photos: Christianity's revered (and bizarre) relics The head of Saint Catherine of Siena – Saint Catherine of Siena was known for her miraculous visions and her work helping the sick and poor. Today visitors to the city can see a slightly macabre memorial to her. More than 600 years after her death, Saint Catherine's head remains on display at the Basilica of San Domenico. Hide Caption 5 of 12 Photos: Christianity's revered (and bizarre) relics The Shroud of Turin – The shroud is believed by many Christians to be the burial shroud of Jesus -- but science suggests otherwise. Carbon dating indicates it dates to the 13th or 14th century. The cloth is regarded by the scientifically minded as a medieval forgery. Hide Caption 6 of 12 Photos: Christianity's revered (and bizarre) relics The Veil of Veronica – Legend has it that as Jesus was being led to the hill where he was crucified, Saint Veronica encountered him. She used a cloth to wipe the sweat and blood from his face, and the veil was supposedly imprinted with his image. The existence of the veil has never been proven or disproven -- but there are a number of copies and purported originals scattered across Europe. Hide Caption 7 of 12 Photos: Christianity's revered (and bizarre) relics The crown of thorns – According to the Bible, a crown of thorns was placed on Jesus' head before his crucifixion. Today a number of relics of the crown are venerated by Christians. The one pictured above is held in Paris' Notre Dame Cathedral. Hide Caption 8 of 12 Photos: Christianity's revered (and bizarre) relics The Holy Lance – According to the Gospel of John, a Roman soldier pierced Jesus' side with a spear during his crucifixion. A number of relics purporting to be the tip of this "Holy Lance" have surfaced throughout history. Also known as the "Spear of Destiny" and supposedly bestowing supernatural powers on its owner, there are at least three relics at different locations that claim to be part of the original. Hide Caption 9 of 12 Photos: Christianity's revered (and bizarre) relics The Sudarium of Oviedo – Meaning "sweat cloth" in Latin, the Sudarium of Oviedo is a bloodstained piece of cloth that was allegedly used to wrap the head of Jesus after his crucifixion. Today, the relic is kept in a chest in the Cathedral of San Salvador in Oviedo, Spain. Hide Caption 10 of 12 Photos: Christianity's revered (and bizarre) relics The Sancta Camisia – Chartres is home to one of Europe's most stunning Gothic cathedrals. The church also houses one of Christianity's most venerated relics --The Sancta Camisia. The tunic is said to have been worn by the Virgin Mary during Jesus' birth. Hide Caption 11 of 12 Photos: Christianity's revered (and bizarre) relics The head of John the Baptist – According to the Bible, Herod Antipas ordered John the Baptist's beheading after his step-daughter, Salome, requested it be presented to her on a platter. But what became of John's head? Some claim it's held at the Basilica of Saint Sylvester the First in Rome. Other traditions place it in France or the Middle East. Hide Caption 12 of 12 3.) Jesus was tough. From age 12 to 30, Jesus worked in Nazareth as a carpenter. "Is not this the carpenter?" say the astonished crowds when he begins to preach. The word used for Jesus' profession in the original Greek is tekton. The traditional translation is "carpenter." But most contemporary scholars say it's more likely a general craftsman; some even translate it as "day laborer." A tekton would have made doors, tables, lamp stands and plows. But he probably also built stone walls and helped with house construction. It was tough work that meant lugging tools, wood and stones all over Galilee. Jesus doesn't simply stride onto the world stage after having dreamily examined a piece of wood when the mood suited him. For 18 years, he worked—and worked hard. 4.) Jesus needed "me time." The Gospels frequently speak of Jesus' need to "withdraw" from the crowds, and even his disciples. Today by the Sea of Galilee, where Jesus carried out much of his ministry, you can see how close the towns were, and how natural it would have been for the enthusiastic crowds to "press" in on him, as the Gospels describe. There's even a cave on the shoreline, not far from Capernaum, his base of operations, where he may have prayed. It's called the "Eremos Cave," from the word for "desolate" or "solitary," from which we get the word "hermit." Even though Jesus was the son of God, he needed time alone in prayer with the father. 5.) Jesus didn't want to die. As he approaches his death, and prays hard in the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus says, "Remove this cup." It's a blunt prayer addressed to the father, whom he affectionately calls Abba. He doesn't want to die. Unlike the way some Christians portray Jesus as courting death, and even desiring it, like any human being, the idea of death is terrifying. "My soul is sorrowful even unto death," he says. In other words, "I'm so sad that it feels like I'm going to die." But once Jesus realizes that this is somehow the will of the father, he assents to death, even on a cross. It's natural to want to know as much as we can about Jesus; that's one reason I wrote my new book. But beware of the more outlandish claims about the son of God (he fathered children, he was married to Mary Magdalene, he spent time in India and so on.) Many of these claims tend to project our own desires on a man who will always remain somewhat elusive, hard to fully understand and impossible to pin down. In the end, as theologians like to say, Jesus is not so much a problem to be solved as a mystery to be pondered.Would you believe that one in six Americans is "going hungry"? You shouldn’t, because it’s not true. Nevertheless, the liberal group MoveOn.org claimed something close to that in an end-of-the-year appeal for donations to Feeding America, the national anti-hunger charity. MoveOn’s message said: "This winter, a record 49 million Americans are going hungry because of the economy." (To read the whole fundraising appeal, click the link below.) [EET ]Dear MoveOn member, "I’m sure we’re going to run out of food today, before we serve all the people that are in line." That’s Mary-Sharon Howland, director of a food bank near New Orleans.1 But the same problem is plaguing food banks and soup kitchens across America. This winter, a record 49 million Americans are going hungry because of the economy.2 Our country needs change that gets to the root of the problem, but we also need to help people survive the immediate crisis. Here’s a way to help: Feeding America is the nation’s leading network of food banks—including one near you, Capital Area Food Bank. For every $1 you donate, Feeding America can help provide 7 meals to men, women, and children facing hunger in our country. Please contribute to Feeding America as generously as you can. Click here to make a tax-deductible donation before the end of the year: http://help.feedingamerica.org/moveon As progressives, we share a core belief that we’re all in this together. We’ll continue to fight for lasting change—and help each other weather this economic downturn. Thanks for all you do, and happy New Year! –Justin, Adam, Amy, Anna, Annie, Carrie, Christopher, Daniel, Danielle, Eli, Emily, Gail, Ian, Ilya, Ilyse, Joan, Jodeen, Kat, Keauna, Laura, Lenore, Marika, Matt, Matthew, Melanie, Michael, Nita, Noah, Peter, Scott, Stephen, Steven, Susannah, Tim, and Wes Sources: 1. "Kenner Food Bank may have to turn away needy," WWLTV Eyewitness News (Louisiana), December 23, 2009 http://www.wwltv.com/news/Kenner-Food-Bank-80023467.html 2. "Hunger in U.S. at a 14-Year High," The New York Times, November 16, 2009 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/17/us/17hunger.html [/EET] Now, 49 million would be a lot of hungry people. Consider first that the total U.S. population is just over 308 million. Divide 49 million into that, and it works out to be one in 6.3 Americans. We agree that hunger is a real and serious problem, but could things be that bad? Where is MoveOn getting such a figure? Helpfully, MoveOn’s message provides a footnoted citation to a Nov. 16 New York Times article carrying the headline "Hunger in U.S. at a 14-Year High." It’s a gloomy story that supports MoveOn’s claim that the 49 million number is a "record" of sorts, even though the government’s records only go back to 1995. But the story does not say that 49 million "are going hungry." To the contrary, the Times reported that two-thirds of the 49 million "typically had enough to eat," while the other one-third had skipped meals, cut the size of their portions or otherwise done without food "at some point in the year" of 2008. Hence, the claim that 49 million are "going hungry" at any given time, or even for one day during the year, is very far from the truth. The official Agriculture Department report on which the Times story is based found that 49.1 million Americans were "food insecure" at least some of the time during 2008. The report said that most of those, despite problems getting food, "typically have reported few, if any, indications of reduced food intake." But 17.3 million of them were reported to have "very low" food security. (See Table 1A on page 6.) That "very low" category includes people experiencing varying degrees of hunger. The report says 27 percent of the households in that category reported that an adult went an entire day without food at least once during the year, and nearly half (47 percent) of respondents reported losing weight because of having too little money to buy food, while others skipped a meal or cut down on portions at times. Still, even "very low" food security is not the same thing as being hungry on any given day, as the report cautions its readers: USDA Report: [I]t is important to keep in mind that households were classified as having low or very low food security if they experienced the condition at any time during the previous 12 months. The prevalence of these conditions on any given day is far below the corresponding annual prevalence. For example, the prevalence of very low food security on an average day during the 30-day period prior to the December 2008 survey is estimated to have been between 0.9 and 1.2 percent of households. In other words, the available evidence shows that the number of Americans who were even somewhat hungry on any given day was around one in 100 — far from the one in six that MoveOn.org claimed. The fact that MoveOn.org is vastly overstating the case shouldn’t discourage anyone from giving to Feeding America. In fact, this author is a regular donor to that hunger-relief charity. Indeed, food banks and soup kitchens keep many persons from falling into the "very low" food security category. The hunger problem is real and may be somewhat worse than the Agriculture Department report shows, since it is based on a survey of households and, therefore, does not include the homeless. Also, the unemployment rate has risen sharply since the survey was conducted, up from 6.8 percent in November 2008 to 10 percent in November of last year, according to the most recent official report. So the problem may well be worse this winter than it was a year ago. The problem is bad enough. There’s no need to exaggerate and misrepresent the numbers.Summary https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZ9YYlwfPK3hPlnTYDHNpiB0cvopAabgT THERE IS A NEW BOLT It uses a springloaded extractor, and should give the most consistent extraction of the shells and improved ejection. THE BREECH IS STILL UNTESTED These are the parts I used for my xzeus shotgun build, using sledgefire shells. Some of these parts will probably need tweaking, and I'll upload as I test things that work or don't. The shell stop files needed tweaks, and I also tweaked the lifter with a bit of foam to keep shells from going too far backwards. You may also want to remove some front material from the lifter, about a half inch off the front. This is not a drop in mod, and requires extensive shellwork and building to work. Print Settings Printer Brand
L-NP 60% cf. ALP 40%. Analysis by States The ALP maintains a two-party preferred lead in all Australian States except Western Australia. South Australia: ALP 66% cf. L-NP 34%; Tasmania: ALP 63.5% cf. L-NP 36.5%; Victoria: ALP 59.5% cf. L-NP 40.5%; New South Wales: ALP 58% cf. L-NP 42%; Queensland: ALP 50.5% cf. L-NP 49.5%, while the L-NP leads narrowly in Western Australia: L-NP 51% cf. ALP 49%. Roy Morgan Government Confidence Rating The Roy Morgan Government Confidence Rating is up slightly to 94pts (up 1pt) this week. Now 43.5% (down 0.5%) of Australians say Australia is ‘heading in the wrong direction and only 37.5% (up 0.5%) say Australia is ‘heading in the right direction’. The Morgan Poll surveys a larger sample (including people who only use a mobile phone) than any other public opinion poll. The Morgan Poll asks Minor Party supporters which way they will vote their preferences. News Corp’s poll does not measure or reference the PUP vote! The Morgan Poll allocated preferences based on how people say they will vote – allocating preferences by how electors voted at the last Federal Election, as used by News Corp’s poll shows the ALP (55.5%) cf. L-NP (44.5%) – for trends see the Morgan Poll historic data table. Gary Morgan says: “The ALP 56.5% (up 2%) has increased its lead over the L-NP 43.5% (down 2%) on a two-party preferred basis on the Australia Day long weekend. Over the weekend Opposition Leader Bill Shorten took the chance to raise the possibility of Australia becoming a Republic more than fifteen years after Australians voted against becoming a Republic in a November 1999 Referendum. “However, a look at community attitudes shows support for the Royal Family has increased since 1999. A special telephone Morgan Poll conducted in November 2012 shows a majority of Australians (52%) support Australia retaining the Monarchy compared to only 42% that say Australia should become a Republic with an elected President. “However, despite this strong support for the Monarchy, Prime Minister Tony Abbott has received a great deal of criticism over the past few days for his decision to award Prince Philip, husband of Queen Elizabeth II, a knighthood as part of the Australia Day honours. Abbott has even attracted criticism from senior Ministers in his Government including Finance Minister Mathias Cormann and Agriculture Minister Barnaby Joyce. “However, the discussion about a knighthood for Prince Philip is really a sideshow to the really important issues that face the Abbott Government including the high number of Australians looking for work and looking for more work. The latest Roy Morgan December 2014 employment estimates show Australian unemployment of 1.4 million (10.9%) and an additional 1.2 million under-employed (9.7%). “In addition, today’s very low ABS CPI figures – only 0.2% in the December Quarter 2014 and only 1.7% for the last 12 months – show the Australian economy is slowing down rapidly. Finally, the true state of Australia’s economy is slowly being revealed by the official measures. Next Tuesday the RBA meets for the first time in 2015 and must drop interest rates by 1% to help stimulate the Australian economy – something we have been calling for at Roy Morgan for over two years even though the RBA has left interest rates unchanged now for 18 months.” Electors were asked: “If an election for the House of Representatives were held today – which party will receive your first preference?” Visit the Roy Morgan Online Store to browse our range of Voter Profiles by electorate, detailed Voting Intention Demographics Reports and Most important Political Issue Reports (all 150 electorates ranked by an issue). Finding No. 6043 – This multi-mode Morgan Poll on Federal voting intention was conducted via face-to-face and SMS interviewing last weekend, January 23-27, 2015 with an Australia-wide cross-section of 2,057 Australian electors aged 18+, of all electors surveyed 2.5% did not name a party. For further information: Contact Office Mobile Gary Morgan: +61 3 9224 5213 +61 411 129 094 Michele Levine: +61 3 9224 5215 +61 411 129 093 Data Tables Margin of Error The margin of error to be allowed for in any estimate depends mainly on the number of interviews on which it is based. The following table gives indications of the likely range within which estimates would be 95% likely to fall, expressed as the number of percentage points above or below the actual estimate. The figures are approximate and for general guidance only, and assume a simple random sample. Allowance for design effects (such as stratification and weighting) should be made as appropriate.Sandro is the latest player from the Barca academy to make his mark in the first XI Teenage substitute Sandro Ramirez scored his first Barcelona goal as the Spanish runners-up snatched a late win at La Liga rivals Villarreal. The Catalans dominated throughout but could not find a breakthrough until 18-year-old forward Sandro tapped in. They hit the woodwork before half-time when Lionel Messi's free-kick was pushed onto the post by Sergio Asenjo. But Villarreal almost took the lead against the run of play when Tomas Pina's angled drive hit the post. The visitors controlled possession and territory but looked set to be frustrated against a Villarreal side which finished a credible sixth on their return to the Spanish top flight last season. That was until Sandro, another product of Barca's La Masia academy, gleefully tucked in a loose ball after Messi was denied from a tight angle. Neymar made his return for Barcelona as a second-half substitute following injury The Spain youth international's winner means Barca have taken maximum points from their two La Liga matches under new boss Luis Enrique. Former Barca player Enrique appears to be asking his players to play their trademark possession-based game at a higher tempo than they did under his predecessor Tata Martino. But for a long time, it did not look as though Villarreal would tire and allow themselves to be prised open by the visitors. Unsurprisingly, four-time world player of the year Messi was the focal point of Barca's brightest attacking play, creating a host of chances before providing the assist for Sandro. Barca right-back Dani Alves, who ate a banana thrown on to the pitch in this fixture last season, was jeered by Villarreal fans throughout.Marines with Ground Combat Element, Security Cooperation Task Force Africa Partnership Station 2011 take doxycycline in accordance with a weekly dosage of mefloquine to prevent the spread of malaria. LOS ANGELES — Federal drug officials have issued a strong new warning about a controversial anti-malaria medication once routinely given to U.S. troops, some of whom say it damaged them permanently. The Food and Drug Administration ordered manufacturers of mefloquine hydrochloride to give the medicine a black box label, the agency's strongest warning, reserved for drugs with significant risks of serious side effects. The FDA said that some neurological and psychiatric side effects can last for months or years after a patient stops taking the drug. The medication was approved by the FDA in 1989 under the brand name Larium and quickly became a leading drug for preventing and treating malaria — among travelers and the military. While other drugs must be taken daily, one tablet a week of mefloquine offers protection against the sometimes-deadly mosquito-borne parasite, including against strains that are resistant to other medications. But the drug has long carried warnings tying it to dizziness, seizures, insomnia, anxiety, depression and strange dreams. One clinical trial found that 29% of travelers who took mefloquine experienced at least one of those side effects. There is also evidence suggesting a link to violent behavior, including suicide. Amid growing concerns, the drug fell out of favor over the last decade. Roche, its original manufacturer, stopped selling Larium in the U.S. in 2008. The generic versions still on the market accounted for 226,000 of the 5.4 million U.S. prescriptions for anti-malaria drugs last year, according to IMS Health, which tracks drug trends. The Pentagon, which used the drug widely in Somalia and during the early years of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, offered little explanation when it began scaling back its reliance on mefloquine and eventually recommended that the drug be used only as a third choice. Military officials continued to dismiss the claims of veterans who insisted that the side effects could be long-lasting. The new FDA warning provided those veterans a sense of validation. "I almost fell out of my chair when [the news] was forwarded to me," said Greg Alderete, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who blames his chronic balance and memory problems on the drug, which he took while serving in Somalia in 1993. Alderete said that in 2008 he started to suspect mefloquine after connecting with other veterans of Somalia who were experiencing similar symptoms. He eventually helped launch a Facebook group, Veterans Against Larium, which now has more than 1,100 members. He said most served in Somalia, but the group has also attracted veterans from other wars. Alderete acknowledged that his depression, anger and anxiety could be the result of post-traumatic stress disorder, with which he was diagnosed. But his chronic dizziness and nausea and an inability to remember words are less easily explained. "There was a big gray zone," he said. "I'm not sure where mefloquine begins and PTSD ends." Doctors from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs have insisted that his problems are not related to the drug, he said. The FDA strengthened its warning this week based on a new review of medical literature and reports of patients suffering from dizziness, loss of balance, tinnitus and vertigo, according to a statement from the agency. The symptoms often started after the first dose or two but continued for months or years. In some cases, the damage was deemed permanent. Usually, the neurological symptoms were accompanied by psychiatric ones, including anxiety, confusion, paranoia and depression, which were also long-lasting. Dr. Remington Nevin, an epidemiologist who served in the Army and has been a leading critic of the drug, estimated that hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops have taken it. "Now the military needs to take responsibility to clean up the toxic mess it's created," he said. The controversy surrounding mefloquine has led to speculation by veterans and others that it may have played a role in the March 11, 2012, killing of 16 Afghan civilians by Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales. His lawyer, John Henry Browne, said the new FDA warning of long-term side effects could play a role in sentencing proceedings, which are scheduled to begin Aug. 19. Bales had taken mefloquine while serving in Iraq, but it remains unclear whether he was taking the drug in Afghanistan, Browne said. He said he is requesting the reports that served as the basis of the FDA warning. alan.zarembo@latimes.comMr. Prentice called an election about a year earlier than required. When he took power, the biggest threat to the Conservatives appeared to be the Wildrose Party, which is slightly to its right. At first, it appeared that Mr. Prentice had defused his political opposition by welcoming nine members of Wildrose, including its leader, into the Conservatives. “They thought they would have a free ride,” said Jack Mintz, the director of the school of public policy at the University of Calgary. But the move backfired. Because the Conservatives had stridently campaigned against Wildrose in 2012, Mr. Bratt said, many voters saw the move as cynical. Of the nine defectors, plus two earlier ones, only three ran in Tuesday’s election. The others retired or were unable to secure nominations. The province’s budget woes were another blow to the Conservatives. Falling royalty payments because of low oil prices are expected to cut revenue this year by up to seven billion Canadian dollars, or $5.8 billion. Mr. Prentice responded with a budget that many conservatives saw as not cutting spending enough, while many on the left thought that the cuts were too deep and that corporations should have been taxed more. The party was also hurt by Mr. Prentice’s political style and by campaign blunders. Having quit as vice chairman of a large Toronto-based bank to return to politics, Mr. Prentice sometimes acted like an executive lecturing employees. Asked in a radio interview about the source of the province’s budget problems, he replied, “We all need only look in the mirror.” And in a discussion of economics during the campaign’s sole televised debate, Mr. Prentice said to Ms. Notley of the New Democrats, “I know that math is difficult,” a comment that many found sexist and patronizing. In contrast, Ms. Notley, a lawyer who has worked for unions and the government, came off as witty and articulate. And while Mr. Prentice toured the province in a large motor coach, Ms. Notley used a humble white minivan plastered with party stickers. While Ms. Notley’s victory would not have been predicted a year ago, she has long been a prominent and politically active figure. Her father, Grant, was the leader of Alberta’s New Democrats when he was killed in a plane crash in 1984.The ultimate death stare: New RAF helmet allows pilots to shoot down enemy jets by looking at them Pilot can glance at an aircraft he wants to fire a missile at by using his mind It looks no more high-tech than any other fighter pilot helmet. But this £250,000 headset allows RAF pilots to shoot down planes simply by looking at them. The ‘Striker’ Integrated Display Helmet marks one of the biggest leaps forward in attack capabilities in military history. How it works: The £250,000 'Striker' Integrated Display Helmet allows RAF pilots to shoot down planes simply by looking at them. As long as the enemy's aircraft is in sight, a missile can be directed towards it All a pilot has to do is glance at an enemy aircraft and then steer a missile towards it with his, or her, mind. Targets pop-up in the pilot's visor, at which point he can select by voice command and fire. As long as the enemy's aircraft is in sight - whether that be below, above or to either side - a missile can be directed towards it. The breakthrough brings to an end the century-old concept of the aerial dogfight, in which one plane must be directly behind another in order to hit it with firepower. The innovative two-part helmet design has been co-developed with aircrew and logistic support engineering participation. It works by using tiny optical sensors in the Striker helmet, which are then picked up by further sensors in the cockpit. In flight: The helmet has undergone extensive testing in RAF Typhoon aircraft 'It means the end of the dogfight,' leading pilot Mark Bowman told The Sun. 'Traditionally you have to get behind an aircraft to lock on. With this, I steer the weapons with my head.' The helmet has been developed by Britain's BAE Systems and has been subjected to extensive flight trials in RAF Typhoon planes. A spokesperson for BAE said: 'An advanced optical head tracker is integrated into the helmet system to provide a high accuracy/low latency solution for low, medium, and high altitude operations. 'While the system has been designed for the Eurofighter Typhoon, its modular design can be applied to all platforms, both rotary and fixed wing.'The average Canadian owes $8,539.50 in consumer (non-mortgage) debt, but Canadians overall feel better about their financial situation than they did last year, according to an Ipsos poll conducted exclusively for Global News. The poll, conducted between Dec. 10-14, found that 12 per cent of Canadians report consumer debts above $25,000, while 14 per cent have debts between $10,000 and $24,999. READ MORE: Your debt in 2018: The economic trends that could hit your pocketbook Nearly half of respondents (46 per cent) said they have no consumer debt whatsoever. While that makes for encouraging reading in isolation, it means that those Canadians that do have debts owe huge amounts of money. Considering only those Canadians that report any amount of debt, the average amount of consumer debt lies at $15,473. “That’s an awful lot of money to be carrying a balance on and paying consumer debt interest rates,” says Sean Simpson, VP of public affairs for Ipsos. “It could range from five or six per cent on a line of credit all the way up to 20 per cent for your credit card or even 30 per cent for a corporate credit card that you might get through a retail outlet,” he added. “So that is definitely not a good picture.” The generation that appears to have the most consumer debt is that of the Gen Xers, or people aged 35-54, who report an average debt above $10,000. READ MORE: Canada’s low-income households owe $3.33 for every $1 they earn: Stats Canada “They’ve got kids, they’ve got parents and they’ve got a home, so not only do they have on average $10,000 in consumer debt, but they likely have the biggest mortgages as well,” Simpson explains. “So they’re feeling the pinch, and that might explain why they’ve got the most amount of consumer debt, because they’ve got the most amount of responsibilities.” WATCH: There is good debt and there is bad debt People aged 55 and over reported an average debt just over $9,000, while the consumer debt levels of millennials — people aged 18 to 34 — were far lower, at around $5,600. Simpsons says there may be an array of factors that explain millennials’ relatively lower debts. “We hear on a weekly basis from the Bank of Canada and other sources that we have too much debt, and that debt will eventually undo us, and the data suggests that millennials are perhaps receiving that message and they’re avoiding getting into too much consumer debt,” he said. READ MORE: Financially helping adult kids may just be a return to an old normal “Perhaps they’re doing that because they know that owning a home is going to be more difficult, and they can’t rely on equity in their home to bail them out if they need to pay off a significant chunk of debt.” In this regard, millennials as a generational demographic appear to have something in common with Quebecers as a regional demographic. When consumer debt levels in the different provinces is compared, Quebec wins out easily, with an average debt of less than $5,000. By comparison, average debt in Saskatchewan and Manitoba grouped together was over $14,000, while Albertans and Ontarians reported average debts of over $11,000 and $8,800 respectively. READ MORE: New record: Canadians owe $1.71 for every $1 they make Much like millennials, Quebecers are more likely to choose renting over home ownership, Simpson points out. “There may be a belief in Quebecois society that you earn what you earn and you spend what you earn and no more, whereas in other places where home ownership is more prevalent, maybe people spend more because they’ve got a home that they can fall back on and draw equity on if they need to,” he says. “So we see that Quebecers and millennials have by far the least amount of debt among all Canadians. And what do they share in common? They’re less likely to own a home.” WATCH: Cost of living for boomers vs. millennials The poll also gauged Canadians’ assessments of their online shopping habits, and their perception of how online shopping affects their debt levels. Seventy-two per cent of of Canadians said they shop online, while 69 per cent said they believe that online shopping saves them money. READ MORE: You might think most Canadian shopping happens online. You’d be wrong: B.C. analyst Given that people tend to use credit cards for online shopping, you might expect that consumer debt would be higher among people who do more online shopping, but the data suggested otherwise. Indeed the data shows that consumer debt is higher among people who only shop online occasionally. “What might be happening is that those who use [online shopping] a lot are really skilled and they’re good at finding deals, and it’s saving them money as a result,” Simpson said. “But those people who are only casual shoppers online, with only the odd purchases, are the ones who have the most amount of consumer debt.” Simpson cautions that this doesn’t necessarily imply that there’s a causal effect where occasional online shopping causes higher debt, but that there is a clear relationship between the two. WATCH: Online shopping and growing debt Taking into account their different sources of debt, 81 per cent of respondents said they feel comfortable about their ability to meet their monthly debt-payment obligations. Seventy-eight per cent expressed confidence in their ability to pay down their debts in a timely manner, compared to 19 per cent who said they struggle to do so. All this considered, Canadians rated 2017 higher than 2016 when it came to assessing their personal financial situation, with 64 per cent saying 2017 was a good year, compared to 60 per cent last year. Simpson said there are numerous possible reasons for Canadians’ optimism. “The Bank of Canada just came out essentially saying that things are firing on all cylinders, so that’s good news,” he noted. “Interest rates are going up, but they’re going up reasonably slowly so I think people are able to weather that increase in their debt service payments.” READ MORE: Here are the three things that keep Bank of Canada’s Stephen Poloz up at night “One of the biggest improvements between 2016 and 2017 when people were assessing the year was on the retirement savings. The markets had a really good last six months of the year, and the Canadian economy in general,” he added. “People are convinced that things are going better this year than they were last year, and they see that momentum continuing.” These are some of the findings of an Ipsos poll conducted between December 10 and 14, 2017, on behalf of Global News. For this survey, a sample of 2,098 Canadian aged 18+ from Ipsos’ online panel was interviewed online. Weighting was then employed to balance demographics to ensure that the sample’s composition reflects that of the adult population according to Census data and to provide results intended to approximate the sample universe. The precision of Ipsos online polls is measured using a credibility interval. In this case, the poll is accurate to within ±2.4 percentage points, 19 times out of 20, had all Canadian adults been polled. The credibility interval will be wider among subsets of the population. Follow @KalvapalleIn the last five days Team LDLC have shed half of their roster, starting with Toni "Ube" Häkli walking out last Wednesday and followed today by the departures of Rikard "klanton" Lundberg and Jānis "Clown" Zagrebins. LDLC had recently battled to a 5th-6th place finished at DreamHack Winter's Overwatch Championship, proving to be the best of the BYOC entrants with a flawless run in qualification. I'm a free agent now. Thanks LDLC, was fun and best of luck in the future! Looking to continue as support for someone else! R/T appreciated. Representing the squad's DPS duo, Ube and klanton had played Roadhog and Soldier 76 respectively in the current patch, whilst Clown was predominantly played Lucio in the support role, occasionally flexing to Ana. The team had shown steady improvement since bringing in KabaL and signing to LDLC in mid-September. They would later drop kr4tos for Clown, but ultimately struggled to break Europe's top tier. Talking to Sideshow at DHW, klanton painted a positive picture of a team happy with their progress but aware the challenges they faced. However, much like their DHW rivals, PENTA, who axed their support pair a week ago, LDLC have decided to shake things up rather than continue in the same vein. I took some time to pick the brain of LDLC's Reinhardt mastermind, Mezamorphis, and learn more about the situation: What exactly has been going on with LDLC? How did you get from looking confident at DHW and ready for the challenges of breaking in to Tier 1 to changing half your roster? Mezamorphis: Whenever we went to bootcamps/lans we played much better than we did online. I'm not sure exactly what it was but everybody just seemed much more hyped, way more coordinated. But the moment we went back to online we were starting to have issues. We had a lot of disagreements regarding hero switches which led to some fights. We were very inconsistent for like 2 months already. You could see us fight very close to t1 teams one day and another lose to anybody. If every competition was a LAN this might've worked :D So how exactly did it go down? Did they players leave or were they kicked? What is the reasoning behind the move? M: Ube left after a scrim day where again we had the disagreements that I just mentioned earlier, hero switches and people just not really focusing anymore. After that we decided to take a break and consider if we want to stick together as a team or split, me and mete almost decided to leave but after careful consideration we stayed and now we're trying to rebuild the roster by trialling people - we're trialling the Bonjour players Pipou, NiCOgdh and hqrdest/baud. Both Clown and klanton were very reasonable and understood that a change had to be done, we're still friends and I wish them both good luck, I'm sure they will get in some very good teams What was it in particular that made you want to rebuild rather than dissolve the team completely? What is happening with Bonjour? Is their team dead? Are you going to merge? M: We have the security of an org behind us and we also think that me and Mete are a great duo and KabaL is a smart player and a good support. As for Bonjour I can not say, we're only trying our options right now, we will see if this can become a team or if they're still going to continue with their own. What have the LDLC organisation had to say about all this? M: They understand that this was the player's decision and they can not force them to stay. They're wishing them good luck and they trust that we can find other teammates that can represent the org. Moving past your roster rebuild then, what are your thoughts on the EU scene at present? It seems like there are lack of tournaments worth competing compared to NA and Asia? M: It's sad that many good teams moved or are in the process of moving to NA, the EU scene is dying atm. Even the Winter Premiere forces teams to have at least 3 NA players to be able to participate, while the EU ones don't have such restrictions, I don't really understand the point of it. If we can all agree to participate in it and play with high ping then why not? I can understand that probably for Blizzard the NA scene is the one that brings the most financially but I'm sure that with a little push EU can become just as big, you can see how a lot of the top Overwatch players are coming from here, there's a lot of interest in it and a lot of talent but it will slowly fade away if nothing will be done. Also the recent problems that happened at tournaments didn't help either, DreamHack Winter was good besides the first day with the NiP-coL crashes. MSI was very poorly organized and now the move from Blizzard to restrict maps at MLG Vegas and change them last minute hurts the pro scene a lot. I think they should focus more on talking with the pro players, the competitive mode statistics aren't helpful at all when it comes to the top level. I think I might've went a bit off road with this one :D Don't worry you have just preempted all of my questions! Maybe you can share your thoughts about ongoing tank meta? How much are meta considerations impacting your efforts to rebuild LDLC? Do you want to recruit specialists or generalists? M: When we took the break last week people were still running triple, rarely quadra. Now we started scrimming again with the new roster (with the trials) and so many teams run quadra tank. Even though I am a tank I prefer to not have more than one more with me in the game. This meta is making the game boring for me. And about LDLC, we would prefer to find strong flexible DPS players but sadly with the meta being what it is they might have to play a bit of tank from time to time until it changes, maybe we might just try to play our own comps and see if we can defeat it. Lastly then, any predictions for this weekend's MLG and IEM events? M: MLG - Looking at how EnVyUs performed recently I'd say they will win it but it definitely won't be easy. I would say FaZe or C9 will land in the finals against them or at least get to the semis. FaZe are a bit inconsistent but at LAN they seem to be much stronger and C9 since they acquired the new players are having some good results.( IEM - It's very hard to say since Misfits and Rogue have changed a lot of players, might be Lunatic-Hai taking this one now. Very sensible predictions! Thanks for taking the time to talk to over.gg and good luck with the rebuild! M: Thank you too! I hope the next interview will be about us winning some big LAN in a month or two from now :P Sorry, I'm not Santa Claus :DGetty Image Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown has won a host of awards and, as far as food shows, is generally considered one of the best, thanks largely to Bourdain’s natural charisma and no-bullsh*t attitude. It also “glorifies and wallows in the savage, brutal suffering and slaughter of animals,” according to a recent petition that seeks to cancel the travel series. Its author, Laura Wade, has written to CNN with her complaints, namely that Bourdain’s “debauched depiction of the killings of several animals on his show can only be meant to satisfy bloodlust in certain people, but ultimately horrify and scar all other viewers.” But they’ve never responded, so she’s asking animal rights activists to “sign my petition to tell CNN to cancel this TV show and that we will not accept animal torture as any form of entertainment.” Please tell CNN and Anthony Bourdain that we will no longer be subjected to his Grand Guignol of gore, violence, cruelty and suffering of animals. By signing my petition, you will send a message to heartless executives that animal slaughter and the resulting agony must never be glorified or used as entertainment. Thank you for all who have a heart of human decency; your signature is much appreciated. (Via) Even if you don’t agree with Wade, you gotta admit: “Grand Guignol of gore” is pure poetry. Bourdain has yet to respond to the petition, but when he does, it might look like this. (Via the Petition Site)Peter Yang the best time to see movies. I remember once, years ago, I was walking out a door — I'd been having a conversation and I was walking out the door, and this guy said to me, "Chris," and I stopped and I turned, and he said, "Be careful." And I never forgot that. And it comes back to me often: Be careful. That was good advice. That's supposed to be a fact, that the question mark is originally from an Egyptian hieroglyph that signified a cat walking away. You know, it's the tail. And that symbol meant — well, whatever it is when they're ignoring you. When I was a kid, there was someone in my family, an adult, and whenever I saw them, they would say, "You got a lotta nerve." From the time I was a little kid, it was always like, "Heh, heh, heh — you got a lotta nerve." I always thought, What does that mean? But then when I got older, I thought that it was an instruction. If you tell a kid something, it sticks. I think I do have a lot of nerve. But, I mean, I think I maybe got it from that person who said it to me. My father was a lesson. He had his own bakery, and it was closed one day a week, but he would go anyway. He did it because he really loved his bakery. It wasn't a job. I used to love Danish. My father used to make a Boston cream pie. You never see that anymore. Very good. Most of the jobs I get are basically very unwholesome people. There's always something wrong with the guy, and sometimes something deeply wrong. I'm tired of that. I tell my agent I want a Fred MacMurray part. I want a part where I have a wife and kids and a dog and a house, and my kids say to me, "What do you think I should do, Dad?" and I say, "Be careful." I always figured that if I'm gonna be playing these people, that there should be this relationship to the audience that is very clear. "That's Chris, and look at Chris having a good time, wanting to take over the world and sink California and shoot everybody in the room" — just so long as they understand that that's Chris on the set having fun. And that Chris wouldn't really do anything like that. Golf. My God, that's a mysterious occupation. I know people who are — good friends — who are absolutely smitten, practicing their swing and talking about it. I can understand some sort of sport where your body got a benefit, like marathon running or bicycle racing. That's not golf. And not only that, but the whole business of standing in the sun — my God. That's like torture. I love spaghetti. And I like to cook spaghetti. And I used to eat it every day. I weighed thirty pounds more than I do now. You can't — you can't do that. Ice cream — I love to watch television and eat ice cream. But that's like a ten-year-old. I can't do that anymore. Beer. Beer, spaghetti, ice cream. Professional dancers don't go dancing. When you're onstage and you know you're bombing, that's very, very scary. Because you know you gotta keep going — you're bombing, but you can't stop. And you know that half an hour from now, you're still gonna be bombing. It takes a thick skin. I had an agent when I first got into the movies who said to me, "You're gonna be in Los Angeles now once in a while. If somebody invites you to a party, don't go. Stay in your room, go to the movies." And I have a feeling I know sort of what he meant: Don't show your face around too much. Let 'em be a little glad to see you. It all happened when I did The Deer Hunter. Suddenly — I'd already been in show business for thirty years, and nothing much had happened. I mean, I really was laboring in obscurity, and then suddenly this movie. It was kind of infectious, and I really did become rather social. Gregarious. And that lasted, I don't know, ten years. Movie scripts are usually pretty loose — things usually change a lot. But not with Quentin. His scripts are absolutely huge. All dialogue. It's all written down. You just learn the lines. It's more like a play. Sometimes I look at this watch and I think, There's some guy that puts these little screws in there? There is something about it. I'm not into cars, either, but there is something about a really magnificent car. Me and Dennis [Hopper], when we were doing that scene in True Romance, it was hilarious. It really was — including shooting him. All that laughing was real. He was killing me. And all the guys around us — that was a very cracking-up day. I like to listen to radio interviews. I got a list of things that if I wasn't so lazy, I would do something about, but the idea of having a radio show — two people talking on the radio is fascinating. I'll bet you there's some college around here — they all have radio stations. I get now that I don't like to go anywhere, so if there was some place down the road — twenty minutes' drive. I don't like zoos. Awful. They say that the human smile is in fact one of those primordial things — that in fact it's a showing of teeth, that it's a warning. That when we smile, in a primeval way it has to do with fear. There's something dangerous about what's funny. Jarring and disconcerting. There is a connection between funny and scary. RELATED STORIES:Does Whoopi Goldberg have eyebrows? Get information on Whoopi Goldberg eyebrows and know if she or she does not have them. I guess from her photos you have seen, you would be quickly guessing she probably has no eyebrows. All this and much more will be unveiled in this article. Whoopi Goldberg Has No Eyebrows Whoopi Goldberg, formally known as Caryn Elaine Johnson, is according to Wikipedia, ‘an American comedienne, actress, singer-songwriter, political activist, author and talk show host.’ Whenever she is mentioned, the next thing that comes into many people’s mind, apart from her works and career where she is celebrated is, is her eye brows. She definitely has no brow hairs since according to IMDb, on her biography, one of her trademarks is “Dreadlocks and no eyebrows.” Does Whoopi Goldberg Have Eyebrows While trying to write an article on celebrities with no eyebrows, I came across so many questions about Whoopi Goldberg eyebrows, which included the following: Is Whoopi Goldberg no eyebrows saga true? Is it true that Whoopi Goldberg has no eyebrows? Does Whoopi Goldberg have eyebrows? All these questions and many others about Whoopie Goldberg eyebrows spurred me to want to know if she actually does have eyebrows or she has no eyebrows. The first thing I wanted to know was the reasons why she has no brow hairs. Why Does Whoopi Goldberg Have No Eyebrows According to her own words, in her interview in 2007 she actually said that she has brows but shaves them off. Why would she do that? That must be making her
(i.e., there was no site, no financing, and no development),” she wrote in an email to The Post. “To be clear, the Trump Organization has never had any real estate holdings or interests in Russia.” Still, Trump repeatedly tried for three decades to build in Russia. In 2013, he signed a preliminary agreement to build a tower in partnership with Aras Agalarov, a billionaire who had financed the Trump-owned Miss Universe pageant when it was held in Moscow in 2013. Agalarov told The Post last year that his company’s deal with Trump was on hold because of the presidential campaign. A representative of Agalarov’s company attended a June 2016 meeting with top Trump aides and a Russian lawyer organized by Donald Trump Jr., after he was told that the lawyer would provide damaging information about Democratic rival Hillary Clinton provided by the Russian government. Scott Balber, an attorney for Agalarov, said Agalarov and his company played no role in the 2015-16 Trump Tower proposal. Andrew Roth in Moscow contributed to this report.The Egyptian security forces have bloodily crushed and dismantled the protest camps of Muslim Brotherhood (MB) supporters, set up in Al-Nahda Square and Raba'a al-Adawiyya in Cairo as focal points to regroup and mobilise their forces after the overthrow of Morsi. This marks yet another dramatic change in the situation facing the Egyptian revolution. As expected, this operation by the repressive forces of the Egyptian state – which is essentially the same machine as under Mubarak – was carried out with extreme brutality. The victims are several hundreds; 525 have been killed (including 43 from the security forces) on August 14 and thousands wounded, according to the Health Ministry, but the final count is likely to rise. The interim government has declared a month-long state of emergency with a daily curfew between 7pm and 6am in Cairo and 13 other governorates. This development should come as no surprise, and is the result of tension between the former allies - the army generals and the MB - that has reached breaking point over the last month since the removal and arrest of Morsi on July 3. But what has happened in Egypt after the impressive show of strength and confidence represented by the massive insurrectionary movement that wiped away the MB's government? The masses, who in their millions had determined the downfall first of Mubarak and then of Morsi, have temporarily withdrawn from the main stage, leaving the ground open for reactionary forces to regroup, reorganise and take the initiative. The fragile alliance of the main two wings of the Egyptian bourgeoisie, represented by the MB and the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), has ended in an open clash. Both these forces are reactionary, but the brute force of the state apparatus is still in the hands of the army generals. MB and SCAF – two reactionary forces The camps organised by the Muslim Brotherhood have been portrayed by the mainstream international media as a “Muslim” version of the Tahrir square movement: well organised, peaceful, democratic. This isn’t the first time that reaction - as the case in point of the rise of fascism and Nazism demonstrate - adopts some of the features of a revolutionary movement; but it does so with reactionary aims – to crush the revolutionary forces. This was precisely the aim of the new offensive launched by the leaders of the MB: to defend the “legitimacy” of Morsi's government; to mobilise the ranks of the MB and its social base of support (not by chance the biggest of the camps was based in the Cairo district of Nasr City); to resist against what was portrayed as a “coup”, waving the flag of “democracy”. But at the same time the MB armed thugs, who have been carrying out murderous attacks against revolutionary youth. The extremely reactionary nature of the MB is proven by the spate of attacks, which erupted (and is continuing) after the disbanding of the camps, directed against the Coptic Christians. The campaign of murders and the burning down of dozens of churches, was unleashed and carried out with the aim to derail the struggle along more favourable grounds - that of a civil war on sectarian lines. Incidentally, neither the army nor the police lifted a finger in order to defend the Coptic minority. It is also in their interest that the conflict takes place along sectarian lines. On the other side, the SCAF and the security forces of the Egyptian state share with the MB the common aim to crush the revolution. As long as Morsi was able to contain the movement of the masses, the army generals were happy to take a back seat, their power, wealth and impunity preserved. But they were always uneasy at sharing power with these “allies”, and once the MB could no longer contain the movement of the masses, which threatened to overthrow the whole edifice of the Egyptian state, the generals seized the opportunity to deal the MB a severe blow and gain a certain degree of popular support. The army generals prepared the ground for the forced dispersal of the MB sit-ins by appealing for a mass demonstration on July 26. General El-Sisi set his aims openly: "I urge the people to take to the streets this coming Friday to prove their will and give me, the army and police a mandate to confront possible violence and terrorism." With very few honourable exceptions, that demonstration was supported by most of the left wing parties and organisations, as well as the main trade union federations. For weeks, decisive action was delayed while negotiations were taking place. Imperialism wanted to avoid an open clash by pushing both sides to some sort of a deal. After all, both sides have so far loyally followed the diktats of US imperialism and pursued capitalist economic policies. Finally the army generals announced that they would use decisive force to clear out the sit-ins and even announced the day: at the end of the Eid Fitr holiday, which celebrates the end of Ramadan. The brutal repression used by the security forces against the MB sit-ins was of the same kind that hundreds of thousands of people, and especially the revolutionary youth, have faced before, during and after the downfall of Mubarak. This cannot be forgotten. We know that the same and even worse treatment will be reserved for the revolutionaries whenever the opportunity arises for the SCAF to regain firm control. The SCAF is still the main bastion of reaction in Egypt, also controlling large sections of the economy. The army and security services are the pillar upon which the capitalist system is based. Even since the overthrow of Morsi, the army has been used already to repress workers' struggles, as the episode of the arrest by the military police of two workers at the Suez Steel Company for “incitement to strike” shows. In the IMT resolution on the current situation drafted on July 11 we pointed out: “Periods of sharp class struggle will alternate with periods of tiredness, apathy, lulls, and even reaction. But these will merely be the prelude to new and even more explosive developments. This is shown clearly by the Egyptian Revolution. “In Egypt, after months of disappointment and tiredness, 17 million took to the streets in an unprecedented popular uprising. With no party, no organization or leadership, they succeeded in just a few days in overthrowing the hated Morsi government. “The western media tried to characterise this as a coup. But a coup is by definition a movement of a small minority that conspires to seize power behind the backs of the people. Here the revolutionary people were on the streets and were the real motor force behind events. With 17 million people on the streets determined to overthrow Morsi, the Army tops, which represent the backbone of the Egyptian state, intervened to remove the president, to prevent the overthrow of the whole regime. “In every genuine revolution it is the elemental movement of the masses that provides the motor force. However, unlike the anarchists, Marxists do not worship spontaneity, which has its strong points but also its weaknesses. We must understand the limitations of spontaneity.” (Egypt, Brazil, Turkey: Tremors of World Revolution) Lack of revolutionary leadership The key to understanding the present situation lies in fact that the Egyptian revolution lacks a revolutionary leadership; such a leadership, in the words of Trotsky, is “that tendency which is growing up together with the revolution, which is able to foresee its own tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, which is setting itself clear goals and knows how to achieve them.” (Trotsky, On the Policy of the KAPD, Speech Delivered at the Session of the ECCI, November 24, 1920) Even if such a leadership existed in Egypt, it would be inevitable for the revolutionary process to go through sudden changes in the situation, such as those taking place now. Revolution does not develop in a straight line. It is a struggle between living forces where revolutionary and counter-revolutionary features temporarily prevail. The Spanish revolution of 1931-37 included the bienio negro (the two black years) in which reaction was at the helm, when thousands of workers were massacred and tens of thousands arrested. The Russian revolution of 1917 included July, the “month of the great slander”, in which the Bolsheviks were subject to repression and Lenin had to go underground. The existence of a revolutionary leadership would speed up the process, which under the present circumstances cannot assume anything other than a protracted form. What we are witnessing now is the price to be paid for the fact that the Egyptian revolution has stopped short of smashing the bourgeois state machinery: splitting the army along class lines; disbanding the police and secret services; removing the traditional chain of command of the bourgeois state and replacing it with a new state machine based on workers' councils and a workers' militia. “In Egypt the masses could have taken power at the end of June. In fact, they had power in their hands, but they were not aware of it. This situation bears some resemblance to February 1917 in Russia. Lenin pointed out that the only reason the workers did not take power then had nothing to do with objective conditions, but was due to the subjective factor: 'Why don't they take power? Steklov says: for this reason and that. This is nonsense. The fact is that the proletariat is not organised and class conscious enough. This must be admitted: material strength is in the hands of the proletariat but the bourgeoisie turned out to be prepared and class conscious. This is a monstrous fact, and it should be frankly and openly admitted and the people should be told that they did not take power because they were unorganised and not conscious enough.' (Lenin, Works, vol. 36, page 437, our emphasis) “The Egyptian workers and youth are learning fast in the school of Revolution. That is why the June uprising was far broader, deeper, faster and more conscious than the First Revolution that occurred two and a half years ago. But they still lack the necessary experience and revolutionary theory that would enable the Revolution to achieve a rapid and relatively painless victory.” “The situation is one of deadlock in which neither side can claim total victory. This is what enables the army to raise itself above society and present itself as the supreme arbiter of the Nation, although in reality the real power was in the streets. The confidence expressed by some people in the role of the army shows extreme naivety. Bonapartism represents a serious danger to the Egyptian Revolution. This naivety will be burned out of the consciousness of the masses by the harsh school of life. “The open counterrevolutionaries of the Muslim Brotherhood have been driven from power but because of the limits of its purely spontaneous (i.e. unorganised) nature, the Revolution has failed to take power. On the one hand the Islamist reactionaries are organising a counterrevolutionary rebellion that threatens to plunge the country into civil war. On the other hand, the bourgeois elements, generals and imperialists are manoeuvring to rob the masses of the victory that was won with their blood. “The Revolution was strong enough to achieve the immediate objective: the overthrow of Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood. But it was not strong enough to prevent the fruits of its victory being stolen by the generals and the bourgeoisie. It will have to pass through another hard school in order to raise itself to the level that is necessary to change the course of history.” (Egypt, Brazil, Turkey: Tremors of World Revolution, emphasis added) The massive insurrectionary movement on June 30 – the biggest in the history of Egypt – showed the mass revulsion provoked by the reactionary government of the MB, after only one year in office. It also showed clearly the impossibility for the masses to bear the intolerable conditions imposed by the austerity policies implemented by that government (and by the present government for that matter) under the auspices of imperialism and the IMF, alongside catastrophic economic crisis, inflation and a sudden erosion of living standards for the vast majority. As we pointed out, this movement was the direct cause of the overthrow of Morsi, putting pressure on the army to step in and remove Morsi, in order to prevent an open revolutionary situation from developing, which would have threatened not only the government, but also the real basis of power and privileges of the elite and the system upon which they are based: capitalism itself. The reactionary nature of the Muslim Brotherhood was fully exposed by their year in office. All illusions that the Brotherhood would be able to improve material conditions for the majority of the poor and the workers have been shattered. But, as we warned, the Muslim Brotherhood still retains some social basis of support, although significantly weaker than in the past, particularly among the petty bourgeoisie, the most backward and ignorant layers of the peasantry and the lumpenproletariat. The sheer brutality of state repression is, in fact, strengthening the grip of the leadership of the MB over these layers, providing them with a safe a way to close ranks, retie the knot, revive the links with these layers, and mobilise their social base. In a different situation the MB leaders showed – just one month ago – that they were clearly unable to cope with the pressure of the revolutionary mass movement. Let us be clear: it would have been extremely unlikely for the MB not to have resisted violently against any attempt to disband their reactionary camps. They had, and still have, guns and they are using them regardless of resisting repression; as an offensive weapon against the revolutionary forces, especially the youth. But it is one thing for the revolutionary people to disband a counter-revolutionary attempt – even crushing it violently – by taking a direct initiative through mass action. It is another thing that this task is carried out by the SCAF through the bourgeois state – which is the other side of the counter-revolution. In the second case, it only serves to strengthen the power of the army generals and the security forces, a power which will then be used against the workers and youth, whilst also helping the MB and presenting them as victims and martyrs. What about El Baradei, the liberal bourgeoisie, democracy, etc.? “It has become apparent that the sides striving for power have little concern for the lives of Egyptians and will not hesitate to use the corpses of the Egyptian people as a ladder to reach their goals. The Muslim Brotherhood leaders sacrificed the lives of their followers for the sake of power, and the security forces did not hesitate to prey on those lives with all their violence and brutality.” (Official Response of the 6 April Youth Movement to Wednesday's events) These events are showing the true colours of the so called “liberal bourgeoisie”. The wannabe leader of this section of the ruling class and the darling of the international media and US imperialism, El Baradei, has resigned his ministerial post, after having joined a reactionary government in which he was vice-president, alongside General Abdel Fattah El-Sisi as deputy prime minister. This government, furthermore, had been appointed under the authority of the SCAF. General El-Sisi had announced the crackdown on the MB well in advance and everyone knew it was going to take place. Now El Baradei seems surprised at the loss of life. What El Baradei personifies is the impotency of the petty bourgeois liberals in a situation where the margins for any negotiated settlement simply do not exist. Under these circumstances the social base that El Baradei represents either bends towards supporting the military or the MB. It is a scandal that the leaders of the mainstream forces of the left on a world scale are unable to present a class analysis of these events and are wavering between a mood of relief for the crackdown against the obscurantist forces of the MB (of course tainted by the butchery displayed by the security forces) and empty cries for “democracy”, appeals to conciliation, national unity and so on. These enlightened minds are just buckling to the ideological pressure of their respective ruling classes, who are scared by the prospect of similar revolutionary movements to take place everywhere in the future. The “left” leaders seem to be willing to support the right of the mass of the population of any nation to protest against dictators or unpopular “democratically elected” governments, but seem to deny the right of these same people to overthrow a “democratically elected” government by revolutionary means. Such a possibility is dreaded and presented as tantamount to a coup d'etat. Let us not forget that the “democratic” MB and Morsi were precisely those who appointed El-Sisi as Minister of Defence and Commander in Chief of the Armed forces in their own government. That government was based on a counter-revolutionary agreement between the MB and the SCAF, intended to leave the Army generals and Ministry of Interior untouched, and had presided over brutal repression and killings. The overthrow of Morsi has opened a period of struggle between revolution and counter-revolution in which the decisive factor will be the ability of the masses to carry through the revolution to the end. In this struggle, any confidence in either of the wings of the bourgeoisie - both the army generals or Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood - would be fatal for the revolution. They represent two sides of the same reactionary, counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie. Nor can the interests of the Egyptian masses depend on the so-called “liberal bourgeoisie”, which is totally impotent. All these forces in the final analysis will find a common ground in the need to suppress the revolutionary struggle of the Egyptian workers and youth. Only by standing up independently as a revolutionary force, and appealing to the ranks of the army to support the struggle of their class brothers against the ruling elite, will the workers and youth of Egypt be able to complete the task of the revolution and take their own destinies into their own hands!11th-century Flemish noblewoman and Queen of England Matilda of Flanders (French: Mathilde; Dutch: Machteld) ( c. 1031 – 2 November 1083) was Queen of England and Duchess of Normandy by marriage to William the Conqueror, and sometime Regent of these realms during his absence. She was the mother of ten children who survived to adulthood, including two kings, William II and Henry I. As a niece and granddaughter of kings of France, Matilda was of grander birth than William, who was illegitimate, and, according to some suspiciously romantic tales, she initially refused his proposal on this account. Her descent from the Anglo-Saxon royal House of Wessex was also to become a useful card. Like many royal marriages of the period, it breached the rules of consanguinity, then at their most restrictive (to seven generations or degrees of relatedness); Matilda and William were third-cousins, once removed. She was about 20 when they married in 1051/2; William was some four years older, and had been Duke of Normandy since he was about eight (in 1035). The marriage appears to have been successful, and William is not recorded to have had any bastards. Matilda was about 35, and had already borne most of her children, when William embarked on the Norman conquest of England, sailing in his flagship Mora, which Matilda had given him. She governed the Duchy of Normandy in his absence, joining him in England only after more than a year, and subsequently returning to Normandy, where she spent most of the remainder of her life, while William was mostly in his new kingdom. She was about 52 when she died in Normandy in 1083. Apart from governing Normandy and supporting her brother's interests in Flanders, Matilda took a close interest in the education of her children, who were unusually well educated for contemporary royalty. The boys were tutored by the Italian Lanfranc, who was made Archbishop of Canterbury in 1070, while the girls learned Latin in Sainte-Trinité Abbey in Caen, founded by William and Matilda as part of the papal dispensation allowing their marriage. Marriage [ edit ] Matilda, or Maud, was the daughter of Baldwin V, Count of Flanders, and Adela, herself daughter of King Robert II of France.[1] According to legend, when the Norman duke William the Bastard (later called the Conqueror) sent his representative to ask for Matilda's hand in marriage, she told the representative that she was far too high-born to consider marrying a bastard.[a] After hearing this response, William rode from Normandy to Bruges, found Matilda on her way to church, dragged her off her horse by her long braids, threw her down in the street in front of her flabbergasted attendants and rode off. Another version of the story states that William rode to Matilda's father's house in Lille, threw her to the ground in her room (again, by her braids) and hit her (or violently battered her) before leaving. Naturally, Baldwin took offence at this; but, before they could draw swords, Matilda settled the matter[2] by refusing to marry anyone but William;[3] even a papal ban by Pope Leo IX at the Council of Reims on the grounds of consanguinity did not dissuade her. William and Matilda were married after a delay in c. 1051–2.[4] A papal dispensation was finally awarded in 1059 by Pope Nicholas II. Lanfranc, at the time prior of Bec Abbey, negotiated the arrangement in Rome and it came only after William and Matilda agreed to found two churches as penance.[6] Rumored romances [ edit ] There were rumours that Matilda had been in love variously with the English ambassador to Flanders and with the great Saxon thegn Brictric, son of Algar, who (according to the account by the Continuator of Wace and others[7]) in his youth declined her advances. Whatever the truth of the matter, years later when she was acting as regent for her husband William in England, she is said to have used her authority to confiscate Brictric's lands and throw him into prison, where he died.[8] Duchess of Normandy [ edit ] When William was preparing to invade England, Matilda outfitted a ship, the Mora, out of her own funds and gave it to him.[9] Additionally, William gave Normandy to his wife during his absence. Matilda successfully guided the duchy through this period in the name of her fourteen-year-old son; no major uprisings or unrest occurred. Even after William conquered England and became its king, it took her more than a year to visit the kingdom.[11] Despite having been crowned queen, she spent most of her time in Normandy, governing the duchy, supporting her brother's interests in Flanders, and sponsoring ecclesiastic houses there. Only one of her children was born in England; Henry was born in Yorkshire when Matilda accompanied her husband in the Harrying of the North. Queen [ edit ] Tomb of William of Normandy at Abbaye-aux-Hommes, Caen Matilda was crowned queen on 11 May 1068 in Westminster during the feast of Pentecost, in a ceremony presided over by the archbishop of York. Three new phrases were incorporated to cement the importance of English consorts, stating that the Queen was divinely placed by God, shares in royal power, and blesses her people by her power and virtue. For many years it was thought that she had some involvement in the creation of the Bayeux Tapestry (commonly called La Tapisserie de la Reine Mathilde in French), but historians no longer believe that; it seems to have been commissioned by William's half-brother Odo, Bishop of Bayeux, and made by English artists in Kent.[15] Matilda bore William nine or ten children. He was believed to have been faithful to her and never produced a child outside their marriage. Despite her royal duties, Matilda was deeply invested in her children's well-being. All were known for being remarkably educated. Her daughters were educated and taught to read Latin at Sainte-Trinité in Caen founded by Matilda and William in response to the recognition of their marriage. For her sons, she secured Lanfranc, Archbishop of Canterbury of whom she was an ardent supporter. Both she and William approved of the Archbishop's desire to revitalise the Church.[17] She stood as godmother for Matilda of Scotland, who would become Queen of England after marrying Matilda's son Henry I. During the christening, the baby pulled Queen Matilda's headdress down on top of herself, which was seen as an omen that the younger Matilda would be queen some day as well.[18] Matilda fell ill during the summer of 1083 and died in November 1083. Her husband was present for her final confession.[19] William died four years later in 1087. Contrary to the common belief that she was buried at St. Stephen's, also called l'Abbaye-aux-Hommes in Caen, Normandy, where William was eventually buried, she is entombed in Caen at l'Abbaye aux Dames, which is the community of Sainte-Trinité. Of particular interest is the 11th-century slab, a sleek black stone decorated with her epitaph, marking her grave at the rear of the church. In contrast, the grave marker for William's tomb was replaced as recently as the beginning of the 19th century. Height [ edit ] Over time Matilda's tomb was desecrated and her original coffin destroyed. Her remains were placed in a sealed box and reburied under the original black slab.[20] In 1959 Matilda's incomplete skeleton was examined and her femur and tibia were measured to determine her height using anthropometric methods. Her height was 5 feet (1.52m), a normal height for the time.[21] However, as a result of this examination she was misreported as being 4 feet 2 inches (1.27m)[22] leading to the myth that she was extremely small. Family and children [ edit ] Matilda and William had four sons and at least five daughters.[23] The birth order of the boys is clear, but no source gives the relative order of birth of the daughters.[23] There is no evidence of any illegitimate children born to William.[30] William was furious when he discovered she sent large sums of money to their exiled son Robert.[31] She effected a truce between them at Easter 1080. Ancestry [ edit ] Notes [ edit ] References [ edit ] Sources [ edit ]ORLANDO, Fla.—If soccer fans ever want to see what the notoriously high-octane Loyola Marymount University basketball teams of the late 1980s would look like on the big field, they might want to keep an eye on Orlando City SC. After selecting an attacking duo with pace-to-burn in Richie Laryea and Hadji Barry during the first round of Thursday’s MLS SuperDraft (Nos. 7 and 13, respectively), Lions head coach Adrian Heath made no secret of the fact he is ready to unleash them this season as part of a "fast-break" MLS line-up. Orlando already boasts one of the youngest rosters in the league, with speed merchants like Brek Shea, Rafael Ramos, Carlos Rivas and Cristian Higuita; new boys Laryea, 21, and Barry, 23, will have every chance to join that mix. “There is a lot of pace in those two boys,” Heath said, immediately after the SuperDraft. “They were in the top five or six for nearly everything at the Combine, and they both have talent. I was delighted they were there for us as they were comfortably our top two targets, even though we had to give up a little bit for Hadji. [Orlando sent D.C. United targeted allocation money and the No. 32 overall pick] “They are both keen to make a living as professional footballers and, now, it is up to them. We are not afraid to give young players a chance and that is what we will be telling them at the start of the preseason. If they prove they are worth a roster spot, that is what we will do.” Heath pointed to last season’s Rookie of the Year Cyle Larin – who started well down on the team’s depth chart but finished with an MLS-rookie-record 17 goals – as the perfect example for the two newcomers to emulate. For more Lions news, visit OrlandoCitySC.com “We certainly didn’t know what to expect of Cyle this time last year,” Heath added. “But he got his opportunity and went on from there, and the same could happen with these two guys. “We now have the Orlando City B team to use in player development terms, but there will be players whose futures are decided by their performance from Monday to Friday, and that’s what we will be watching for. The ball is in their court.” Despite Orlando’s youth policy – they now have 11 players aged 23 or younger – Heath admitted they are also looking to add some veteran players: “We are actively trying to bring in two or three who have either MLS or European experience. And we’d hope to have them in place for the preseason.”creative apps in the browser use Try the examples, and hack them right in your browser. hack When you think of an "app," do you think of something that you can open, hack, and change how it works? Meemoo wants to give you this freedom. If you can't open it, you don't own it. Meemoo is a framework that connects open-source modules, powered by any web technology. The way that the data flows from module to module is defined and visualized by colorful wires. If you can connect a video player to a TV, you can program a Meemoo app. build Start from the basic tutorial, or with a blank canvas. share To share images or animations, drag them to the images menu. You can then export them to Facebook, Flickr, Dropbox, and lots of other services. To share your app, press "save public" to get a URL like: http://meemoo.org/iframework/#gist/5110822 Blog PostsRAMALLAH (IRIN) -- The next generation in the Gaza Strip may be less educated, less professional and perhaps more radical because an Israeli blockade has restricted educational and employment opportunities, say UN and other sources. The four-year blockade has particularly affected youths aged 18-24, limiting access to higher education, academic exchanges and professional development, says Gaza's education ministry. About 65 percent of Gaza's 1.6 million people are under 25, according to UN estimates. "Higher education in all its forms is absolutely critical to a functioning society and the creation of a future Palestinian state," UN Humanitarian Coordinator for the occupied Palestinian territory Max Gaylard told IRIN, and "to maintain a necessary level of skills in professional sectors, like medicine and engineering." Gaza's unemployment rate - nearly 50 percent according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics - indicates dire prospects for the rapidly growing and youthful population. The economic blockade, imposed by Israel after the Islamist resistance movement Hamas took control of Gaza, has obstructed the import of books, science laboratory and other educational equipment to Gaza, according to the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Israel allows in limited humanitarian supplies. The lack of facilities, new information and experiences has caused a marked deterioration of Gaza's whole educational system. Noor, an English education student at Al-Azhar University, ranked second in Gaza, said she lacked essential books for her coursework and even chairs were missing from lecture halls. "Our universities are not ready for new generations," she explained. "We only have one laboratory and two computer labs, and it is not enough." Enrollment levels at Gaza's 14 public and private universities and colleges remain high, but conflict and the stringent blockade have seriously undermined access to, and the quality of, higher education, said UNESCO in a report. According to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights in Gaza, [ http://www.pchrgaza.org/files/2010/Illegal Closur.pdf ] "Under the policy of complete closure imposed since June 2007, Palestinians from Gaza who once constituted some 35 percent of the student body at universities in the West Bank are virtually absent from West Bank education institutions." The development of two separate systems due to the Israeli-imposed movement restrictions, meant fewer subjects and facilities for Gaza's university students, said UNESCO. About 80 percent of the Gaza population is aid dependent, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, and higher education institutions in Gaza are feeling the financial strain. According to UNESCO, students are increasingly unable to pay tuition fees, resulting in drop-outs and postponement of studies. The inability of students to cover fees has hit Gaza universities hard, since student fees provide about 60 percent of university running costs, according to Palestinian NGO Sharek Youth Forum. "The level of education is being compromised and we have trouble hiring qualified professors and staff," said Kamalain Shaath, president of the Islamic University, ranked top in Gaza and the West Bank. Half the students at the university, he added, were unable to meet tuition requirements this semester. Islamic University's first medical school class of about 50 promising young doctors will graduate this spring, and will be desperately needed in this conflict area, although the university science labs that were destroyed during Israel's Operation Cast Lead - aimed at ending rocket attacks into Israel - were never rebuilt. Seven universities and colleges were damaged during the offensive, which ended in January 2010, with six buildings fully destroyed and 16 partially, according to UNESCO. As of March 2011, rebuilding has not been possible owing to the embargo on building materials. Overcrowding in schools is another problem. About 81 percent of Gaza's public schools operate on double shifts, according Gaza's education ministry director-general, Sharif Nouman. In 2010, only three new schools were built due to lack of building materials, yet another 100 need to be built, he said. Meanwhile, the internal conflict between Palestinian factions Fatah and Hamas is putting pressure on the education system, due to the lack of communication between the Gaza and West Bank ministries, he added. The unemployment rate among those aged 15-19 is about 72 percent, while unemployment affects 66 percent of those aged 20-24, according to a January socio-economic report by the Office of the UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process. West Bank unemployment rates were 29 percent and 34 percent for these age groups, respectively. About 70 percent of industrial establishments in Gaza have closed under the blockade, according to OCHA, while 120,000 private sector jobs were lost in the first two years of closure. A recent easing has allowed the limited export of cut flowers and strawberries from Gaza to Europe. "When young people graduate they have almost no opportunity to find a job in a company or association," said Bassam, a multi-media student at Al-Azhar University. Some try to start their own businesses, but "this cannot succeed in Gaza now because of the blockade," he added. UN officials in the region have expressed concern that isolating youth in Gaza from broader values and opportunities will backfire. "A rapidly growing society, becoming poorer, that is subject to restrictions on education will encourage extremism in its worst forms," warned Gaylard. Deputy director-general of the Israeli Ministry of Public Diplomacy, Danny Seaman, however, said: "Hamas uses access to Israel to perpetrate terror attacks against our civilians and this immediate threat outweighs the concern over increased militancy amongst youth in Gaza." Some 71 percent of university students surveyed by UNESCO reported they were not hopeful about the future and almost the same number worried there will be another war. "Most of my peers want to emigrate," said Shadi, a 26-year-old physical therapist in Gaza City. "We are isolated and frustrated."Story highlights Prosecutors say 46 women were rescued after a weekend raid in Mexico City 14 people face charges of human trafficking, prosecutors say Mexico City's human rights commission has criticized "alarming" human trafficking stats Authorities in Mexico City say they've rescued 46 women in a human trafficking bust. The women rescued included 27 Mexicans and 19 foreigners, Mexico City prosecutors said in a statement. Forty people were detained after a raid at the Cadillac table-dance club in the country's capital over the weekend, prosecutors said. Fourteen of them face charges of human trafficking for sexual exploitation, the statement said. While an estimated 10,000 women were victims of human trafficking in Mexico's capital in 2010, there were only 40 investigations of the crime and three convictions in the city that year, according to a report from the organization.That so many teens and young women feed those trolls is shocking, and inexplicable. There’s nothing a cybercreeper likes better than catching a revealing Instagram shot on an unprotected Facebook page and then posting it on a “parasite porn” site. Girls fill the ugly maw of the most exploitive websites, either willingly with porn-y self-portraits — “selfies,” as they’re called — or inadvertently because they let their boyfriends shoot them in compromising positions, or because they were careless with privacy controls. We also saw it in three Irish teens and a girl in Texas who, in much-less-publicized cases late in the year, killed themselves after posting their images to Ask.fm, a site where anonymous posters can comment on submitted pictures and ask all sorts of questions. We saw some of the fallout last September in the cyberstalking and sexualized attacks that led to the suicide of B.C. teen Amanda Todd. Trolling, which has been part of the Internet since the first anonymous comment was ever posted, took a turn in 2012 that exposed just how much of a dark dangerous alley the online world is for women, especially young women. But then, that’s what much of trolling is about, pressing on the bruises of a person’s political or personal beliefs, just for the attention, the disruption, the cruelty or the “LULZ” (laughs.) “It’s not that men making sexist comments is a new thing. It’s just that they are so prevalent on the Internet and can be so easily accessed by people.” “It’s systemic; it’s on all levels,” agrees Alice Marwick, an assistant professor
of police force generated by these incidents in recent months, and notwithstanding the DOJ's documentation of widespread problems around use of force in Cleveland and the use of unreasonable force and racial profilingin Ferguson, we have not been able to reconcile the mandate of fair, constitutional, and humane law enforcement with the current status of American policing. The unjustified killings of unarmed people of color by police, often arising from racial profiling or enforcement of minor offenses, continue with reckless and tragic abandon. The steps taken by DOJ are very important, but much, much more needs to be done.PHOSPHORUS Photo by: www.fzd.it Overview Phosphorus is found in Group 15 (VA) of the periodic table. The periodic table is a chart that that shows how chemical elements are related to each other. Phosphorus is part of the nitrogen family along with nitrogen, arsenic, antimony, and bismuth. Phosphorus was first discovered in 1669 by German physician Hennig Brand (ca. 1630-92). Brand is somewhat famous in chemistry. He is sometimes called the last of the alchemists. Alchemy was a kind of pre-science that existed from about 500 B.C. to about the end of the 16th century. Alchemists wanted to find a way of changing lead, iron, and other metals into gold. They also wanted to find a way of having eternal life. Alchemy contained too much magic and mysticism to be a real science. But it developed a number of techniques and produced many new materials that were later found to be useful in modern chemistry. SYMBOL P ATOMIC NUMBER 15 ATOMIC MASS 30.97376 FAMILY Group 15 (VA) Nitrogen PRONUNCIATION FOS-fer-us Brand was convinced that the key to changing metals into gold could be found in urine. He decided to look for the "magic substance" that could change lead into gold in urine. In the process of heating and purifying urine, he obtained phosphorus. The discovery was important because it was the first time someone had discovered an element not known to ancient peoples. In that regard, Brand was the first person who could be called the discoverer of an element. Phosphorus is a fascinating element that occurs in at least three very different forms. If left exposed to the air, it catches fire on its own. It also glows in the dark. Today, its most important use is in the manufacture of phosphoric acid (H 3 PO 4 ). Phosphoric acid, in turn, is used to manufacture fertilizers and a number of other less important products. Discovery and naming Phosphorus and its compounds may have been known before Brand's discovery. Old manuscripts refer to materials that glow in the dark. The word used for such materials today is phosphorescent. Early Christians noted the use of "perpetual lamps" that glowed in the dark. The lamps may have contained phosphorus or one of its compounds. Still, Brand was the first to record the process of making pure phosphorus. No one knows how he decided that urine might contain a chemical that could be used to turn lead into gold. His experiments to find such a chemical were, of course, a failure. But he made an accidental discovery along the way. That discovery was a material that glowed in the dark: phosphorus. Scientists were fascinated when they heard of Brand's discovery. They tried to repeat his research. Some tried to talk him into selling his discovery to kings and princes. The new element seemed to be a way of getting rich and becoming famous. But Brand was never interested in these ideas. Instead, he gave away all of the phosphorus he prepared. Other scientists soon began to experiment with the element. One of the first discoveries they made was how dangerous phosphorus is. One scientist wrote that a servant left some phosphorus on top of his bed one day. Later that night, the bed covers burst into flame. The phosphorus had caught fire by itself! Eventually, Brand's method of making phosphorus became widely known. The element joined iron, gold, silver, arsenic, and the handful of other elements known to early chemists. Little is known about what happened to Brand after his discovery. In fact, there is no record of where or when he died. Physical properties Phosphorus exists in at least three allotropic forms. Allotropes are forms of an element with different physical and chemical properties. The three main allotropes are named for their colors: white phosphorus (also called yellow phosphorus), red phosphorus, and black phosphorus (also called violet phosphorus). These allotropes all have different physical and chemical properties. White phosphorus is a waxy, transparent solid. Its melting point is 44.1°C (111°F) and its boiling point is 280°C (536°F). It has a density of 1.88 grams per cubic centimeter. If kept in a vacuum, it sublimes if exposed to light. Sublimation is the process by which a solid changes directly to a gas when heated, without first changing to a liquid. White phosphorus is phosphorescent. It gives off a beautiful greenish-white glow. It does not dissolve well in water, although it does dissolve in other liquids, such as benzene, chloroform, and carbon disulfide. White phosphorus sometimes appears slightly yellowish because of traces of red phosphorus. Red phosphorus is a red powder. It can be made by heating white phosphorus with a catalyst to 240°C (464°F). A catalyst is a substance used to speed up or slow down a chemical reaction without undergoing any change itself. Without a catalyst, red phosphorus sublimes at 416°C (781°F). Its density is 2.34 grams per cubic centimeter. It does not dissolve in most liquids. Black phosphorus looks like graphite powder. Graphite is a form of carbon used in "lead" pencils. Black phosphorus can be made by applying extreme pressure to white phosphorus. It has a density of 3.56 to 3.83 grams per cubic centimeter. One of its interesting properties is that it conducts an electric current in spite of being a non-metal. Brand was convinced that the key to changing metals into gold could be found in urine. Instead, he found phosphorus. Chemical properties White phosphorus is the form that occurs most commonly at room temperatures. It is very reactive. It combines with oxygen so easily that it catches fire spontaneously (automatically). As a safety precaution, white phosphorus is stored under water in chemical laboratories. Phosphorus combines easily with the halogens. The halogens are the elements that make up Group 17 (VIIA) of the periodic table. They include fluorine, chlorine, bromine, iodine, and astatine. For example, the reaction between phosphorus and chlorine is: Phosphorus also combines with metals to form compounds known as phosphides: White phosphorus combines with oxygen so easily that it catches fire automatically. As a safety precaution, white phosphorus is stored under water in chemical laboratories. Occurrence in nature The abundance of phosphorus in the Earth's crust is estimated to be 0.12 percent, making it the 11th most common element. It usually occurs as a phosphate. A phosphate is a compound that contains phosphorus, oxygen, and at least one more element. An example is calcium phosphate, Ca 3 (PO 4 ) 2. The only important commercial source of phosphorus is phosphate rock. Phosphate rock is primarily calcium phosphate. The United States is the largest producer of phosphate rock in the world. In 1996, 13,300,000 metric tons of phosphate rock were mined in the United States. That amounted to about a third of the world's total phosphate rock. About 86 percent of phosphate rock comes from North Carolina and Florida. Smaller amounts are also mined in Idaho and Utah. Other major producers of phosphate rock are Morocco, China, Russia, Tunisia, Jordan, and Israel. Isotopes Only one naturally occurring isotope of phosphorus exists, phosphorus-31. Isotopes are two or more forms of an element. Isotopes differ from each other according to their mass number. The number written to the right of the element's name is the mass number. The mass number represents the number of protons plus neutrons in the nucleus of an atom of the element. The number of protons determines the element, but the number of neutrons in the atom of any one element can vary. Each variation is an isotope. Six radioactive isotopes of phosphorus are known also. A radioactive isotope is one that breaks apart and gives off some form of radiation. Radioactive isotopes are produced when very small particles are fired at atoms. These particles stick in the atoms and make them radioactive. One radioactive isotope, phosphorus-32, has applications in medicine, industry, and tracer studies. A tracer is a radioactive isotope whose presence in a system can easily be detected. The isotope is injected into the system where it gives off radiation. The radiation is followed by means of detectors placed around the system. Phosphorus-32 is especially useful in medical studies, because phosphorus occurs in many parts of the body. Radioactive phosphorus can be used as a tracer to study parts of the body as well as chemical changes inside the body. Radioactive phosphorus can also determine how much blood is in a person's body. It can also help locate the presence of tumors in the brain, eyes, breasts, and skin. Finally, it is sometimes used to treat certain forms of cancer. Radiation given off by the phosphorus-32 may kill cancer cells and help slow or stop the disease. Phosphorus-32 is important in a variety of scientific studies. For example, it is added to tires when they are made. Then, the radiation it gives off can be studied as the tires are used. This information tells where the tire wears out and how long it takes to wear out. Extraction It is possible to make pure phosphorus from phosphate rock. The rock is mixed with sand and coke (pure carbon). The mixture is then heated in an electric furnace. An electric furnace is a device for producing very high temperatures. Pure phosphorus is produced in this reaction. It escapes from the mixture as a vapor (gas). The cooled vapor solidifies into white phosphorus. The reaction is: Radioactive phosphorus helps locate the presence of tumors in the brain, eyes, breasts, and skin. This reaction is not very important because pure phosphorus has few uses. The most important compounds of phosphorus are all made from phosphate rock or calcium phosphate. Therefore, the most important step in producing "phosphorus" is simply to separate pure calcium phosphate from phosphate rock. This can be done fairly easily. Uses and compounds In 1996, 91 percent of all the phosphate rock mined in the United States was used to make fertilizer. Modern farmers use enormous amounts of synthetic (artificial) fertilizer on their crops. This synthetic fertilizer contains nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, the three elements critical to growing plants. These elements normally occur in the soil, but may not be present in large enough amounts. Adding them by means of synthetic fertilizer helps plants grow better. Most farmers add some form of synthetic fertilizer to their fields every year. This demand for synthetic fertilizers accounts for the major use of phosphorus compounds. Phosphorus and its compounds have other uses. These uses account for about 10 percent of all the phosphorus produced. For example, the compounds known as phosphorus pentasulfide (P 2 S 5 ) and phosphorus sesquisulfide (P 4 S 3 ) are used to make ordinary wood and paper safety matches. These compounds coat the tip of the match. When the match is scratched on a surface, the phosphorus pentasulfide or phosphorus sesquisulfide bursts into flame. It ignites other chemicals on the head of the match. Another compound of phosphorus with a number of uses is phosphorus oxychloride (POCl 3 ). This compound is used in the manufacture of gasoline additives, in the production of certain kinds of plastics, as a fire retardant agent, and in the manufacture of transistors for electronic devices. Health effects Phosphorus is essential to the health of plants and animals. Many essential chemicals in living cells contain phosphorus. One of the most important of these chemicals is adenosine triphosphate (ATP). ATP provides the energy to cells they need to stay alive and carry out all the tasks they have to perform. Phosphorus is critical to the development of bones and teeth. Nucleic acids also contain phosphorus. Nucleic acids are chemicals that perform many functions in living organisms. For example, they carry the genetic information in a cell. They tell the cell what chemicals it must make. It also acts as the "director" in the formation of those chemicals. The daily recommended amount of phosphorus for humans is one gram. It is fairly easy to get that much phosphorus every day through meat, milk, beans, and grains. Two phosphorus compounds are used to coat the tip of a match. On the other hand, elemental phosphorus is extremely dangerous. Elemental phosphorus is phosphorus as an element, not combined with other elements. Swallowing even a speck of white phosphorus produces severe diarrhea with loss of blood; damage to the liver, stomach, intestines, and circulatory system (blood flow system); and coma. Swallowing a piece of white phosphorus no larger than 50 to 100 milligrams (0.0035 ounce) can even cause death. Handling white phosphorus is dangerous as well. It causes serious skin burns. Making lakes too healthy T he second most important use of phosphate compounds is in making detergents. The compound most often used in detergents is called sodium tripolyphosphate, or STPP (Na 5 P 3 O 10 ). STPP adds a number of benefits to a detergent. For example, it can kill some bacteria and prevent washers from becoming corroded (rusted) and clogged. The most important function in detergents, however, is as a water-softening agent. Natural water often contains chemicals that keep soaps and detergents from sudsing. They reduce the ability of soaps and detergents to clean clothes. STPP has the ability to capture these chemicals. It greatly improves the ability of soaps and detergents to make suds and clean clothes. The first detergent to use STPP was Tide, in 1947. The introduction of Tide brought about a revolution in clothes cleaning. But STPP can create problems for the environment. After detergents have been used, they often end up in rivers and streams and, eventually, in lakes from waste water. And that's just fine for the algae that live in those lakes. Algae are tiny green plants that use phosphorus as they grow. As more detergents get into lakes, the amount of STPP increases. That means there is more phosphorus in a lake and that, in turn, means that algae begin to grow much faster. In some cases, there is so much STPP and phosphorus in a lake that algae grow out of control, clogging the lake with algae and other green plants. The lake slowly turns into a swamp, and finally into a meadow. The lake disappears! Many people became concerned about this problem in the 1960s. They demanded that less STPP be used in detergents. A number of cities and states banned the sale of STPP detergents. STPP production had grown rapidly from 1.10 billion pounds in 1955 to 2.44 billion pounds in 1970. But then production began to drop off. By the mid-1990s, production had dropped well below a billion pounds a year. Interestingly, red phosphorus does not have the same effects. It is considered to be relatively safe. It is dangerous only if it contains white phosphorus mixed with it.Abstract In the philosophical theory of communicative action, rationality refers to interpersonal communication rather than to a knowing subject. Thus, a social view of rationality is suggested. The theory differentiates between two kinds of rationality, the emancipative communicative and the strategic or instrumental reasoning. Using experimental designs in an fMRI setting, recent studies explored similar questions of reasoning in the social world and linked them with a neural network including prefrontal and parietal brain regions. Here, we employed an fMRI approach to highlight brain areas associated with strategic and communicative reasoning according to the theory of communicative action. Participants were asked to assess different social scenarios with respect to communicative or strategic rationality. We found a network of brain areas including temporal pole, precuneus, and STS more activated when participants performed communicative reasoning compared with strategic thinking and a control condition. These brain regions have been previously linked to moral sensitivity. In contrast, strategic rationality compared with communicative reasoning and control was associated with less activation in areas known to be related to moral sensitivity, emotional processing, and language control. The results suggest that strategic reasoning is associated with reduced social and emotional cognitions and may use different language related networks. Thus, the results demonstrate experimental support for the assumptions of the theory of communicative action. Citation: Schaefer M, Heinze H-J, Rotte M, Denke C (2013) Communicative versus Strategic Rationality: Habermas Theory of Communicative Action and the Social Brain. PLoS ONE 8(5): e65111. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0065111 Editor: Ben J. Harrison, The University of Melbourne, Australia Received: September 25, 2012; Accepted: April 23, 2013; Published: May 29, 2013 Copyright: © 2013 Schaefer et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: This work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Scha105/6-2). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. Introduction The theory of communicative rationality by Jürgen Habermas [1] is a contemporary philosophical approach to practical reasoning. Habermas' communication theory differentiates between two kinds of rationality, the emancipative communicative reasoning and the strategic or instrumental thinking. Hence, social action can be either success oriented strategic action or understanding-oriented communicative action. Strategic action is purposive-rational action oriented towards other persons from a utilitarian point of view, for example calculative manipulation of others. In other words, an actor who acts strategically is primarily trying to achieve his own ends. In contrast, communicative action is oriented towards mutual conflict resolution through compromise. Actors here do not primarily aim at accomplishing their own success, but want to harmonize their plans of actions with the other participants [1], [2]. This attempt to sustain consensus is based on the intersubjective recognition of criticisable validity claims [1]. Thus, communicative action is the opposite of strategic action. In addition, Habermas argues that the use of language with an orientation of understanding is the ‘original’ mode of language. Communicative reasoning is inherent in language and semantics, whereas the strategic use of language is ‘parasitic’. Hence, ‘ordinary’ language is implicitly social and consensus oriented [1]. How can this communication theory about different kinds of rationality be linked with the history of human moral reasoning and religion? It seems clear that communicative reasoning is regarded as morally desirable, whereas strategic rationality is perceived as unsociable and morally undesirable. Habermas situates the moral point of view within the communication, thereby suggesting a social view of rational behaviour. Therefore, Habermas extends previous theories on moral behavior by shifting the emphasis of the concept from the individual to the social. The last years have shown a growing interest in research on the neural mechanisms for perceiving and understanding social interactions. In particular, numerous studies tried to unravel neural correlates of moral judging. First evidence that social and moral behavior might have a neurobiological basis came from the classic case of Phineas Gage, who's social and moral behavior was impaired after damage to his ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) [3], [4]. Subsequent lesion studies confirmed these findings and reported that lesions in the VMPFC lead to deficits in social and moral behavior (e.g., [5]). More recently, studies used fMRI to unravel the underpinnings of moral behavior. In one of the first studies on moral decisions, Greene et al. [6] used moral dilemmas as probes to study the engagement of emotional processing in order to examine how these variations in emotional engagement influence moral judgment. Results showed involvement of brain regions known to be related to emotion and social cognition (medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), posterior cingulate/precuneus, and superior temporal sulcus (STS)/temporoparietal junction area) when participants considered personal moral dilemmas (e.g., stealing one person's organs in order to distribute them to five others). In contrast, ‘cognitive’ brain regions were activated when participants considered impersonal moral dilemmas (e.g., dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), BA46, inferior parietal lobe, BA40). Moral impersonal dilemmas consisted out of scenarios such as, for example, voting for a policy expected to cause more deaths than its alternatives. The authors concluded that the controversy surrounding moral philosophy reflects an underlying tension between competing subsystems in the brain [7]. However, whereas Greene et al. [6] aimed to test the hypothesis that some moral dilemmas engage emotional processing to a greater extent than others (and these differences in emotional involvement affect people's judgment), the theory of communicative rationality by Habermas does not refer to emotion at all, but states that we can act according to a strategic (instrumental-utilitarian communication style, morally not desired) or to a communicative rationality (consensus oriented communication style, morally desired), hypothesizing that the latter is natural to us (or our language) and the first one ‘parasitic’. Other studies reported similar networks associated with moral judgments than Greene et al. [6]. Yamada et al. [8] used fMRI to examine ordinary citizens who were potential jurors, deciding on mitigation of punishment of murder. They found that sympathy activated regions linked with mentalizing and moral conflict (DLPFC, precuneus, right temporo-parietal junction area (RTPJ)), while sentencing was associated with activation in anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and also precuneus. Young et al. [9] aimed to test the role of the RTPJ area for moral judgments by using the technique of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). They found that disruption of the right temporoparietal junction reduces the role of beliefs in moral judgments. Whereas the above mentioned studies investigated predominantly moral judgments on harmful actions, Cáceda et al. [10] examined neural networks for two different forms of moral cognitions, care and justice ethics. Both networks included common areas in STS, precuneus, temporo-parietal junction, and mPFC. Furthermore, care relative to justice revealed different involvement of precuneus and right DLPFC, whereas justice relative to care showed stronger responses in left DLPFC, insula, STS, precuneus, and precentral gyrus. Focusing explicitly on prosocial or cooperative behavior, Leube et al. [11] reported similar results. Viewing actors cooperating was associated with a neural network including precuneus, STS, and mPFC. Robertson et al. [12] argued that moral sensitivity is a precondition to judgment, which can be described as the ability to detect and evaluate moral issues. They demonstrated three key areas for sensitivity to moral issues or prosocial behavior: mPFC, STS, and posterior cingulate cortex. Since these areas point to an involvement of autobiographic memory retrieval and social perspective taking, the authors suggest that moral sensitivity is linked to access to knowledge unique to one's self [12]. The above-mentioned studies examined moral judging in various scenarios. Habermas theory refers to moral behavior through different communication styles. Communicative reasoning is regarded as morally desirable, because it is oriented towards others. Strategic rationality describes action orientation from a utilitarian point of view, therefore it is perceived as ‘anti-social’ and morally undesirable. Moreover, communicative rationality is inherent to ‘ordinary’ language and semantics, while strategic reasoning is ‘parasitic’. Hence, according to Habermas, everyday reasoning is usually oriented towards a communicative rationality. Strategic reasoning is special in the sense that it is not inherent to ‘ordinary’ language. This communication-based idea of moral grounding has not been investigated by previous studies. The present study wanted to investigate moral behavior as a communication style. We aimed to test if brain responses of participants during communicative and strategic reasoning can be linked with areas known to be related to moral reasoning and prosocial behavior. Based on previous studies on prosocial behaviour and sensitivity to moral issues (e.g., [11], [12]), we hypothesized roles for the mPFC, STS, posterior cingulate cortex, and precuneus when participants were asked to perform communicative and strategic reasoning. These brain regions have been suggested to represent key areas for moral sensitivity and prosocial behaviour (e.g., [10], [11], [12]). In order to test our hypothesis, we conducted an fMRI study in which subjects were confronted with short scenarios, followed by questions in which participants had to assess how much the protagonist is behaving according to communicative or strategic rationality, respectively. Since the theory states that there are clear validity claims that can be used to identify communicative rationality (if brought to a satisfactory resolution), we used questions that were based on these validity claims. Thus, the participants are requested to judge the situation either in a communicative or in a strategic action mode. Since Habermas refers to everyday communicative practices, we used scenarios describing different conflicts in everyday life, but not moral dilemmas in more or less artificial situations. Thus, the stimuli allowed the participants to relate the interactions to everyday speech and ordinary situations. We hypothesized that in a communicative mode brain areas known to be related with moral sensitivity or prosocial behaviour (mPFC, precuneus, STS, posterior cingulate cortex) are more involved compared with strategic reasoning. Furthermore, since communicative reasoning is assumed to be ‘inherit’ in ordinary (but not strategic) language, we assumed no or only minor activation of the moral sensitivity and prosocial behaviour network when compared with a semantic control task. Materials and Methods Participants Twenty right-handed subjects (ten females) with a mean age of 25 years (range 23–29) participated in the study. The participants gave informed written consent to the study, which adhered to the Declaration of Helsinki and was approved by the human subjects committee of the Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg. Procedure The stimuli were presented on a visual display projected into the scanner. The stimuli consisted out of texts describing a short scenario, followed by questions about the appropriateness of an action performed in that scenario with respect to either strategic or communicative rationality. For example, participants read the following scenario: “The citizen from the small city Biberach are upset. A waste-to-energy-plant shall be build close to their small town. The citizens worry about potential health hazards and a bad impact on tourism. The operating company invites all citizens to a round table in the town hall. In advance, the operating company offers the mayor and other important people in the town profitable consultancy contracts, if they behave ‘cooperative’ in the following debate”. In the strategic rationality condition the participant was now prompted with the following question: “Do you think it is likely that the operating company will soon be able to build the plant?” In the communicative rationality condition the participant was asked: “Do you think the operating company is behaving in a sincere way?” The questions were based on validity claims described by Habermas [1]. There are four validity claims that can be challenged: The meaningfulness of what is said, the truth of what is said, the speaker's right to speak (with respect to his authority to make an assertion or order), and the sincerity (or truthfulness) of the speaker (e.g., lying, teasing, irony). Furthermore, we added a control condition, in which participants were asked questions regarding the content of the story (e.g., “Is Biberach the correct name of the small town?”). For the response participants used a four-point Likert scale (ranging from −2 to +2). Prior the beginning of the experiment we made the participants familiar with the task. The experiment consisted out of eight scenarios, each followed by the request to assess the behavior of the protagonist according to either strategic or communicative rationality. Furthermore, each scenario was once followed by a control question. In addition, all scenarios were presented once in a strategic version (as the example above) and once in a communicative rationality version, resulting in a total number of 48 scenarios for the whole experiment. Hence, each of the three conditions (communicative, strategic, control) included 16 repetitions (even distribution of condition trials). Each screen describing the scenario lasted for 24 seconds, followed by a screen prompting the question, which lasted for another 24 seconds. The intertrial interval lasted for 12 seconds. Condition-related activity was measured using a ‘floating’ time window of eight images surrounding (four before, one during, and three after) the point of response (analogue to [6]), starting at the prompt of the question as the earliest point of time. Statistical analysis included all items. The experiment consisted out of four runs, each lasting about 12 minutes. The order of presentation was randomized. The experiment lasted for about one hour. FMRI Data Acquisition and Analysis The functional imaging was conducted by using a 1.5 T scanner (General Electrics Signa LX, Fairfield, Connecticut, USA) to conduct functional imaging (gradient echo T2-weighted echo-planar images; TR = 2 sec, TE = 35 ms, flip angle = 80 degrees, FOV = 20 mm). Data were acquired in four functional imaging sessions. In each session, 363 volumes were acquired including 4 ‘dummy’ volumes, which were obtained at the start of each session and subsequently discarded to allow for T1 equilibration effects. Functional volumes consisted of 23 slices. Each volume comprised 5 mm slices (1 mm gap, in plane voxel size 3.125×3.125 mm). Functional slices were acquired interleaved in ascending order. For anatomical reference a high-resolution T1-weighted structural image was collected (3D-SPGR, TR = 24 ms, TE = 8 ms). FMRI data was preprocessed and analysed using the Statistical Parametric Mapping Software (SPM5, Wellcome Department of Imaging Neuroscience, University College London, London, UK). Functional images were corrected for inter-scan movement using a sinc interpolation algorithm that estimates rigid body transformations by minimizing head-movements between each image and the reference image. The high-resolution anatomical image and the functional images were coregistered and subsequently normalized into a standard anatomical space (MNI, Montreal Neurological Institute template), resulting in isotropic 3 mm voxels. The scans were then smoothed with a Gaussian kernel of 6 mm full-width half maximum. To remove slowly varying signals (drifts), a high-pass filter with a cut-off period of 128 s was applied. Statistical parametric maps were calculated using multiple regression with the hemodynamic response function modeled in SPM. First, we examined data on the individual subject level by using a fixed effects model (the four runs were concatenated for each subject). Second, the resulting parameter estimates for each regressor at each voxel were then entered into a second-level analysis with the random effects model. We then performed an ANOVA for repeated measurements with the factor condition (communicative reasoning, strategic reasoning, control). Subsequently, statistical contrasts (t-tests) were performed to examine cortical activation associated with communicative relative to strategic reasoning, communicative reasoning relative to control, and strategic reasoning relative to control. Statistical maps were created using a false discovery rate correction (FDR) of p<0.05. Anatomical interpretation of the functional imaging results was performed by using the SPM Anatomy toolbox [13]. Discussion In his theory of communicative action Jürgen Habermas tried to analyze in which way humans communicate to establish social relationships [1]. He argues that there is a communicative and a strategic rationality. According to his theory communicative action is assumed to be inherent in the (‘ordinary’) language, whereas strategic rationality is ‘parasitic’. The current study aimed to test these hypotheses by employing an experimental fMRI design. If strategic rationality performs against social and moral validity claims, brain areas known to be related with prosocial and moral reasoning should be less engaged (or suppressed) during strategic reasoning. In contrast, for communicative thinking these networks should be activated when compared with strategic reasoning. Furthermore, since communicative reasoning is assumed to be inherited in the language, those areas should not (or only slightly) be engaged when comparing communicative reasoning with a semantic control task (which represents ‘ordinary’ language). The results confirmed our hypotheses. Communicative reasoning activated a network of brain areas including temporal poles, STS, and precuneus when compared with strategic rationality or a control condition. Previous studies linked these brain areas to moral sensitivity and prosocial behavior (see above). Strategic reasoning revealed less activation in this network and areas known to be related to emotional processing (insula) compared with communicative reasoning and control. Numerous studies addressed the neural underpinnings of moral-decision-making and prosocial behavior (e.g., [6], [14]–[16]). In most of these studies moral is conceptualized as referring to a knowing subject. In addition, the experimental tasks, in which subjects are required to perform moral decision-making, are often very artificial. In contrast, the theory of communicative rationality provides an elaborated term of rationality, which is based on the goal to achieve and sustain consensus. Therefore, Habermas shifts the concept of rationality from the individual to the social. In addition, he argues that the use of language with an orientation of understanding is the ‘original’ mode of language; hence, (‘ordinary’) language is implicitly social and inherently rational [1]. Furthermore, the theory explicitly points to everyday situations. The present study examined this view of moral behavior as a communication style by using an fMRI approach. For communicative reasoning we found a network of brain areas more involved compared with strategic reasoning. This matrix included mPFC, STS, precuneus, posterior cingulate cortex and temporal pole. The findings are in line with previous studies reporting neural substrates for moral sensitivity, prosocial behavior, and social understanding (e.g., [10], [11], [12]). For example, Moll [17] reported a network including STS, prefrontal cortex, and temporal pole when participants performed moral judgments. Comparing brain activations during strategic reasoning with the control condition revealed similar less activated brain areas. Thus, strategic reasoning seems to entail less engagement of these moral or prosocial cognitions, thereby confirming our hypothesis. Furthermore, strategic reasoning revealed also less activation of the insula, compared with both communicative reasoning and the control condition. Hence, we conclude that strategic reasoning is also associated with reduced activation in brain areas representing emotional processing. Here we interpreted the network of decreased brain regions associated with strategic reasoning in terms of moral and social functions. Nevertheless, the STS has not only been related to social cognition but also to language processing [18]. Similarly, the brain areas left BA44 and left BA45 are well known to play crucial roles in speech production (Broca's area). In addition, temporal poles and hippocampi have also been related to language (e.g., [19]). Thus, the network of brain regions less activated during strategic reasoning may also point to an altered language network. This different use of language related networks can be related to the strategic communication style. Whereas communicative rationality is hypothesized to be natural to our language, the strategic communication style is assumed to be different. Hence, communicative and strategic reasoning differ not only in social and moral terms, but also seem to be different in the recruited neural network of language production and processing. In our hypotheses we assumed that communicative rationality is “inherent” to ‘ordinary’ language (in contrast to the ‘non-ordinary’ strategic reasoning or language). Hence, we hypothesized that differences in brain responses for the comparison between communicative and control condition are less extensive than for the comparison between strategic and control condition. Our results revealed an involvement of temporal poles, STS and precuneus associated with communicative rationality when compared with control. As outlined above, these brain regions have been linked to moral judgements (e.g., [17]). However, this network seems to be more involved when compared with strategic reasoning. In addition, no areas linked to emotional processing are engaged (insula). Thus, we suggest that communicative reasoning is the ‘ordinary’ way of thinking in a social situation. In an ordinary situation we are always oriented towards understanding of each other. In this sense, communicative action may represent the ‘default’ mode of communication, whereas strategic reasoning is an exception and requires less activation of brain areas known to be related to understanding, moral, and prosocial behaviour. The argument that communicative reasoning is the ‘default’ mode of communication is also supported by developmental studies on humans and primates. Numerous studies demonstrated that young children are naturally and uniquely cooperative (without expectation of reward). In contrast, primates show the ability to work together and share, but choose not to [20]. Thus, altruism seems to be natural in children. Based on these data, Tomasello [20] argues that there is a link between the cooperative structure of social interaction in human (as opposed to other primate) and the fundamental cooperative structure of human communication (or language) (see also [21]). We conclude that strategic reasoning is associated with reduced activation in brain regions previously described as the moral sensitivity network and to areas linked to emotional processing, most likely pointing to the selfish and less social character of this logic. Furthermore, both communication styles may be different with respect to language related networks. However, other explanations should also be taken into account. The brain areas we here identified as the moral sensitivity network have also been reported to be linked with other tasks. In particular, the default mode brain network and self-processing activity have been related with activation of these brain regions (e.g., [22]). However, since the BOLD percental signal changes during strategic reasoning were lower relative to both communicative reasoning as well as the control task (see Fig. 3), we think that it is unlikely that the default mode brain network may explain our results. Nevertheless, given
would be average data usage by an individual per day as defined by TRAI," Mr Khetan said.He said the Public Works Department is the nodal agency for the optic-fibre project, which he said was an essential pre-requisite for a smart city. Work has started in this regard, he added.The project, which he described as 'fibre to home', will ensure that people manage to access internet in gigabit speed.Such high-speed internet was imperative towards bringing "definitive changes" in the areas of education, health, power, water, public transport and security, Mr Khetan said."Fibre optic network in the whole of Delhi up to your home. This is a big decision by delhi government. Congrats Delhi," Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal tweeted. According to a Nokia MBiT study, the average 3G data consumption per user in the country has soared to 753 MB per month.Canada's judicial watchdog is initiating a complaint against Ontario Superior Court Justice Susanne Goodman after the province's appeal court issued a blistering rebuke of her judicial duties. In a decision handed down Thursday, Ontario Court of Appeal Justices David Paciocco, Jean MacFarland and David Doherty quashed Goodman's acquittal of Stanislaw Sliwka, who was accused of viciously physically and sexually assaulting a woman over several months. The judges ordered a new trial. "Our order directing a new trial is a terrible result for everyone involved in this proceeding," the justices wrote. "The trial judge's failure to give reasons, despite her repeated promises to do so, has frustrated the proper administration of justice." Not only that, the justices noted this wasn't the first time Goodman had failed to do her job. "Nor is this the first time that this trial judge's failure to provide reasons has required this court to order a new trial. It must be the last time," reads the ruling. Norman Sabourin, executive director of the Canadian Judicial Council, told CBC News Thursday that he had read the decision from the appeal court relating to the Sliwka case and had "decided to initiate a complaint against Justice Goodman, in keeping with my authority," Goodman acquitted Sliwka on all charges on March 11, 2016, without thoroughly explaining how she arrived at her decision. She told the court she needed three more days to issue her detailed written reasons. She never did. Crown counsel, who wanted to appeal the decision, was stuck. After months of contacting the trial judge's office and not getting a written decision, the prosecutor wrote directly to Goodman to advise her that "as no reasons had been produced, the Crown would argue that the appeal should proceed on the basis that no further reasons for judgement existed." Goodman never responded. 'Brief' oral comments In her submission to the Court of Appeal, the Crown's lawyer Karen Shai argued that Goodman's "brief comments on March 11, 2016, were never intended as an adequate explanation of her acquittal of the respondent on all counts." Counsel for the accused in the case submitted that while brief and "arguably less than can reasonably be expected from a trial judge, [the comments] adequately explained the trial judge's reasons for acquitting the respondent." The submission added that if the Crown really wanted to appeal the verdict, prosecutors could just review the trial record. The panel of appeal court judges had none of it. "Trial judges must give reasons for their verdicts. Reasons that explain to the parties and the public the result arrived at by the trial judge are crucial to maintaining the proper level of transparency and accountability essential to the maintenance of the integrity of the trial process and public confidence in the process," they wrote in Thursday's decision. As for Goodman's brief oral comments at the time of her verdict, the appeal court said she didn't explain how she analyzed evidence or contradictions in testimony. They said her "silence" on evidence given by police raises questions, not to mention the fact she never addressed each of the eight counts separately. "There is no way of knowing how the trial judge arrived at her verdicts. Without any semblance of a road map to those verdicts, the Crown's right to appeal from the acquittals is rendered illusory," wrote the panel. Goodman was a family lawyer before she was appointed to Ontario's Superior Court in 2000. The Ontario Court of Appeal ordered a new trial in another one of Goodman's cases in 2011 after she took 25 months to deliver her ruling in the case of a man who'd been caught carrying a loaded weapon.In what has been billed as a world first, four music companies and internet server provider Eircom have agreed to work together to end illegal music downloading. The settlement brought to an end an eight-day trial in which the music companies were suing Eircom as the country's largest internet service provider - over illegal downloading. The four music companies have agreed to provide Eircom with the IP addresses of internet users detected illegally uploaded or downloading music. For its part Eircom is agreeing to implement a three-step process - informing a subscriber if their IP address has been detected infringing copyright, warning the subscriber that if they do not stop they will be disconnected, and finally disconnecting the user if fail to heed the warning. EMI Managing Director and Chair of IRMA Willie Kavanagh says he is delighted that a settlement has been reached and that the four music companies involved - EMI, Warner, Sony, and Universal - will now be looking to have similar arrangements put in place with the rest of the country's internet service providers."The Fault in Our Stars," this month's resounding box-office success, has been marked as the triumphant return of the "tear-jerker" genre to the cinema. But Esther Earl, who inspired John Green's bestselling Young-Adult book-turned-movie, would not want you to cry, but rather to celebrate friendship and life. When asked what message she would like to share with the world, it was: "tell the people you love that you love them." Like Hazel, the fictional character she inspired, 16-year old Esther fought thyroid cancer. Unlike Hazel, she found her strength not in a romantic relationship, but in a community of teenagers who spent countless hours online sharing a common love for Harry Potter, Spelling Bees, and "all things nerdy." Esther's greatest wish, granted to her by the Make-A-Wish Foundation, was to meet her online friends face-to-face. The online group that was so meaningful to Esther is "Nerdfighteria," now comprising of several millions of young people who have gathered around the "Vlogbrothers"--the name of the successful YouTube video-blog channel of author John Green and his brother Hank--but, have come to be a significant online phenomenon of their own. The hype around "The Fault in Our Stars" being a record-breaking movie, even before its release, is at least partially the work of avid Nerdfighters. Social media analysts have caught on to the online community's role in driving the movie's success, asking about the "strategic takeaways" that those wishing to build an audience can learn from the Nerdfighters. Having conducted more than three years of research with Nerdfighters, I'm frustrated when this group is framed as simply a movie-going audience. Instead, Nerdfighters should be acknowledged as a self-standing online community, meaningful both as a source of friendship and support for young people, and as a site for civic learning and action. Nerdfighters simply call it "decreasing world suck." Nerdfighters are a creative and unorthodox bunch, as likely to be playing a hand-made ukulele as they are to be shooting the next installment of their collective video-blog on YouTube. Unlike what the media coverage may suggest, Nerdfighters aren't just "fans of John Green" (or his brother Hank, who for Nerdfighters holds the same celebrity status). The Green brothers are only one common ground uniting Nerdfighters. Rather, Nerdfighteria is a place where young people meet like-minded others, and can proudly let their "inner nerd" shine. It is a place where they can share their most intimate worries and concerns. Just as Esther shared her struggles with cancer, other Nerdfighters share the problems they face, such as their parents' divorce, battling depression, or uncertainties around their sexual identities. While many have come to acknowledge that online communities can provide social support for young people, they may be surprised that Nerdfighteria is also a place where young people come to see themselves as civic actors. As part of my research, I've seen Nerdfighters learning about social issues through VlogBrothers' humorous, fast-paced yet highly informative videos. I've seen them modeling the VlogBrothers by becoming YouTube video producers themselves, sometimes using this forum for expression of political views. And, I've heard Nerdfighters discussing political issues with others in the community through YouTube comments or extended conversations on Skype. Their actions have had tangible real-world effects. Nerdfighters have been the largest community of lenders on Kiva.org, a non-profit organization granting loans to people without access to traditional banking systems. Every year, Nerdfighters promote charities and non-profit organizations by creating YouTube videos about them, and encouraging donations. In 2013, this endeavor raised more than $850,000 to the "Foundation to Decrease World Suck," a nonprofit created by the VlogBrothers, benefiting a variety of causes and organizations. Nerdfighters have accomplished these goals precisely by building on the cultural and social bonds that tie the community together. One of the non-profits that benefited from the Nerdfighters' civic work is This Star Won't Go Out, a foundation started by Esther Earl's parents to provide funds and assistance to families of children with cancer.CLOSE Manning was freed from Fort Leavenworth military prison in Kansas on Wednesday after serving just seven years of her 35-year sentence. Video provided by Newsy Newslook In this undated file photo provided by the U.S. Army, Pfc. Chelsea Manning poses for a photo. (Photo11: AP) Pvt. Chelsea Manning was released from Fort Leavenworth military prison Wednesday after serving seven years of a 35-year sentence for leaking thousands of diplomatic cables and other secret documents to WikiLeaks. The transgender soldier, 29, who entered prison as a man named Bradley Manning, will remain an active-duty, unpaid soldier, eligible for health care and other benefits while her court-martial conviction remains under appeal, said Dave Foster, an Army spokesman. She will also have access to commissaries and military exchanges, but will not be paid. "After another anxious four months of waiting, the day has finally arrived," Manning said in a statement after her release. "I am looking forward to so much! Whatever is ahead of me is far more important than the past. I’m figuring things out right now – which is exciting, awkward, fun, and all new for me." She also tweeted "First Steps of Freedom!!" above a photo showing tennis shoe-clad feet — presumably hers — taking a step on a wood floor. Nancy Hollander and Vincent Ward, Manning's clemency and appellate lawyers, said in a joint statement that she "has expressed her deep appreciation to her supporters and looks forward to the future." Cynthia Smith, an Army spokesperson, confirmed Manning left Fort Leavenworth's United States Disciplinary Barracks but declined to provide additional information because of privacy act restrictions. Manning was convicted of leaking more than 700,000 classified documents, including battlefield reports on Iraq and Afghanistan and State Department cables, while working as an intelligence analyst in Iraq. Manning said the leaks were intended to expose wrongdoing. The soldier was arrested outside a U.S. Army base in Iraq in May 2010. Her 2013 sentence was commuted in the final days of the Obama administration, a move that infuriated some in the military as well as President Trump. She would have been eligible for parole in six years. Chase Strangio, staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, said that despite solitary confinement and four years of confinement, Manning "has emerged with grace, resilience, and an inspiring amount of love for others." READ MORE: The Pulse Films production company announced at the Cannes Film Festival in France that Manning would be filmed for a documentary upon her release Wednesday. Two more days until the freedom of civilian life ^_^ Now hunting for private #healthcare like millions of Americans =P — Chelsea Manning (@xychelsea) May 15, 2017 Manning’s mother Susan Manning told the Guardian that it will be very hard for Manning to adjust after four years in prison, but that she will be staying in Maryland where she has family to look out for her. "Chelsea is so intelligent and talented, I hope she now has the chance to go to college to complete her studies, and to do and be whatever she wants," Susan Manning told the newspaper. "My message to Chelsea? Two words: ‘Go, girl!’” Courage Foundation, an international organization that supports people who place themselves at risk to contribute to historical records, Reporters Without Borders Germany and the German-based nonprofit Wau Holland Foundation, which says it supports moral courage in the digital realm, started a fundraising campaign Wednesday to help Manning pay for her legal appeal. Read or Share this story: https://usat.ly/2qrzxQQPor Post Digital El texto concluye con un llamamiento a las autoridades a respetar y garantizar “más que nunca” los Derechos Humanos, en una situación de “alta tensión”, en palabras de la coordinadora de la organización en Cataluña, Adriana Ribas Concretamente, pone de relieve que las manifestaciones espontáneas no deben ser consideradas ilegales y advierte a las autoridades de que no deben “esgrimir la obligatoriedad de la notificación previa a la celebración de la manifestación” para obstaculizarla ni “imponer sanciones penales ni de sanciones administrativas consistentes en multas” a los organizadores o participantes. Amnistía Internacional ha valorado la situación por la que pasa Cataluña como un escenario de “alta tensión” y ha pedido a los responsables estatales y autonómicos que cumplan la obligación de “respetar y garantizar los derechos humanos”, entre los que destaca particularmente la libertad de expresión. “Estos derechos deben ser protegidos en todo momento, y cualquier restricción sobre ellos, debe ser impuesta solo cuando es demostrablemente necesario y proporcionado para proteger la seguridad nacional, el orden público o la salud o la moral públicas, o los derechos de otros”, subraya la organización en un comunicado.More on the investigation into the judge BP wants to oversee lawsuits resulting from the Deepwater Horizon explosion on tonight's AC360 at 10 p.m. ET Houston, Texas (CNN) -- The judge that BP wants to hear an estimated 200 lawsuits over the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster gets tens of thousands of dollars a year in oil royalties and is paid travel expenses to industry conferences, financial disclosure forms show. Lawyers who practice before U.S. District Judge Lynn Hughes say he's tough but fair, and a CNN review of his cases found he ruled in favor of oil companies only slightly more often than he ruled against them. But his connections to the industry have raised eyebrows at a time when BP is under fire for the worst oil spill in U.S. history. Federal financial disclosure forms obtained by CNN show that since 2003, Hughes has consistently been paid annual fees from the oil and gas industry, mostly in the form of lease payments for wells and mineral rights on land he owns. None of the payments comes from BP, but his holdings include mutual funds that draw income from Anadarko Petroleum, a minority owner in the well now pouring up to 2.5 million gallons a day into the Gulf. In some cases, the amounts are significant. In others, the payments are relatively small. Oil giant ConocoPhillips paid him between $50,000 and $100,000 in 2008, the last year in which records are publicly available. In a note attached to the 2008 form, Hughes said he expected the amounts to be relatively similar for 2009. He gets smaller amounts from smaller producers such as Sun Oil, Everest Oil and Wagner Oil, which pay for the right to drill oil and gas from lands he owns. The federal disclosure form does not require exact amounts, only estimates and approximate figures. A legal expert on ethics, Indiana University professor Charles Geyh, told CNN that judges with financial ties to the oil industry should make their connections crystal clear. "When you take it together, is there a concern that a reasonable person might say, 'Look-it, he's not a judge that happens to be dabbling -- he's in effect a participant in the industry he's trying to judge,' " Geyh said. Hughes has been sitting on the federal bench in Houston since the mid-1980s, and BP has asked that he supervise all of the estimated 200 cases filed against it since the April sinking of the offshore drill rig Deepwater Horizon. The sinking left 11 workers dead and uncorked a gusher that has been fouling the Gulf for more than eight weeks. In court filings in early May, BP requested Hughes be assigned to preside over the spill lawsuits because he already was assigned to one of the first cases, a lawsuit filed on behalf of Vietnamese-American fishermen from Louisiana. According to an e-mail sent to CNN, BP said the judge "is an appropriate choice to provide oversight of these cases." The Department of Justice has asked that the suits be consolidated in New Orleans, Louisiana, the closest federal court to the spill. The sinking took place in the waters off southeastern Louisiana, about 40 miles off the mouth of the Mississippi River. BP would not comment on Hughes' financial disclosures. But the judge has held two recent meetings in Houston to discuss possible ethics concerns, a lawyer who attended those meetings told CNN. "In both of those hearings, the questions have been raised about whether or not he should preside over these cases or whether there will be a conflict," Mark Lanier, a prominent Houston plaintiff attorney, told CNN. "In the second one, the judge explained he had listed online all of his financial disclosure information, so people would be able to look at and probe." One particular case over which Hughes presided in 2009 is raising questions. In 2008, Hughes listed royalty payments from about 10 wells leased to Devon Energy, an Oklahoma City-based oil and gas company. The amounts were relatively small -- under $15,000, according to his disclosure form -- and a source told CNN the payments were for a collection of nine or 10 wells scattered in land across two or three states. In May of 2009, Hughes issued a favorable decision for Devon Energy in a dispute with its insurance company. According to an attorney for the insurance firm, the total amount was $3.9 million. Court records show that Hughes did not disclose his royalty payments from Devon at any point during the proceedings. No one claims the judge has violated the federal code of judicial ethics, but Geyh says appearances matter. "I think the best practice that is out there, and I think what judges across the country are encouraged to do, is that if there is any doubt, put some sunshine on the problem," he said. "Turn your cards face up, to mix metaphors, and make it clear to the parties what your potential interests are." Hughes also travels widely and speaks to meetings held by the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, including one held in early June in the Canadian city of Calgary and an earlier conference in Cape Town, South Africa. He's the association's distinguished lecturer on ethics, having delivered 10 speeches to the trade group in the past three years. The association doesn't pay him a fee but does supply his travel, accommodation and expenses, said Larry Nation, a spokesman for the trade group. Federal judges rarely respond to requests for comment from journalists. But Hughes told CNN in an e-mail that while he couldn't speak to past or present cases, he did quote Thomas Jefferson: "Let facts be submitted to a candid world," he wrote. Lawyers who know him call Hughes a tough but fair judge and say the reference is to a desire for transparency on his part. But attorneys for environmental advocacy groups say that for BP to request Hughes be assigned to the spill lawsuits is "outrageous and unseemly." CNN examined three years of Hughes' rulings on oil and gas cases, finding he ruled in favor of oil companies only slightly more often than ruling against them. As for other federal judges, a recent survey showed more than 20 federal judges across the Gulf states have a financial interest in oil and gas companies. Several of them have recused themselves from presiding over cases related to the Gulf spill. Watch Anderson Cooper 360° weeknights 8pm ET. For the latest from AC360° click here.I made it! I cycled past Penzance and it’s beautiful St Michael’s Mount, along more and more empty roads and lanes right to the Land’s End! The place itself was a tiny bit disappointing with a 4D cinema and hundreds of people, but what else should I expect from such a destination? What counts is my journey and challenges I went through to get there. I’m very proud of myself (but not of my knees… They need improving)! I ended my journey at a farm hostel 2 miles from St Ives where I’ll spend the last night. On the way, I saw wild ponies busy clearing some shrubs: Here’s how my total mile count looked like before and after I travelled from Brighton to the last stop: That gives the total of 384 miles – not bad for a week of cycling, right? Here’s the map of today’s ride: That’s it! Expect no more posts about cycling, for a good while – I don’t think I’ll go anywhere worth leaving a note here. Back to programming! Thanks everyone for your comments, they really made a difference 🙂TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iran is defiant in a row with the West over its disputed atomic plans but may be seeking to ease tension with the United States by trying to restrain Shi’ite militias in Iraq and restricting arms crossing the border. Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (L), Gholamhossein Nozari, candidate for Oil Minister (C), and Aliakbar Mehrabian, candidate for Industries Minister, attend a parliament session in Tehran, November 14, 2007. REUTERS/Raheb Homavandi U.S. officials, who accuse predominantly Shi’ite Muslim Iran of stirring up instability in its neighbor, appear to have softened their language in the past few weeks and pointed to a decline in attacks in Iraq by groups using Iranian munitions. Some analysts say this may show Iran’s desire to tone down a war of words about Tehran’s nuclear goals. Washington says Iran is seeking to build bombs and that, if the country succeeds, it could spark World War Three. Iran says its aims are peaceful. “For both sides, there is some logic in at least trying to reduce tension,” said one Iranian political analyst. “For both sides, the prospect of confrontation is dangerous.” Iraq’s foreign minister, Hoshiyar Zebari, said last week Iran had helped “rein in” militias blamed for fuelling violence. Tehran may be trying to show goodwill at the same time as it underlines its ability to cause trouble again if pushed, said security expert Mustafa Alani. “It is (aiming) to prove the size and weight of Iranian influence in Iraq,” said Alani, who is based in Dubai. But analysts said it was difficult to assess Iran’s motives and the extent of its ability to shape developments in Iraq, where many majority Shi’ites may feel more loyalty towards their own country than Tehran, despite close religious ties. FEWER ATTACKS Iran has consistently dismissed accusations it is arming and training allied groups in Iraq and says the violence there is due to the presence of U.S. forces, which it wants withdrawn. “I don’t think Iran has as strong influence in Iraq as the Americans want to show, but they do have influence,” said one European diplomat in Tehran, who was skeptical that Iran had changed tack over Iraq. U.S. officials have attributed falls in U.S. military and Iraqi civilian casualties in the past two months to a “surge” of 30,000 extra U.S. troops and tribal Sunni Arab sheikhs organizing supporters into local police units. They have also noted a sharp drop in mortar attacks on Baghdad’s heavily fortified Green Zone last month. Many of those have been blamed on Shi’ite militias using Iranian-made weapons. Another Western diplomat in Tehran said Iran appeared to be curbing the flow of weapons to Iraq, a policy which could be reversed if it felt the need, even though Iran would ultimately prefer to have a stable neighbor. “I do see some restriction here on arms exports (to Iraq), but they could just open the border,” he said. Alani said reduced Iranian activities in Iraq may also be a response to a successful U.S. crackdown. The United States, which cut ties shortly after Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution, has not ruled out military action if diplomacy fails to convince Tehran to halt its atomic work. Iran, the world’s fourth largest oil producer, has refused to stop, saying it wants the technology to make electricity. IRAN “SEEING SENSE” Any lessening of tension, even if restricted to Iraq, may be welcomed by oil markets, where fears of Middle East turmoil have helped to push up prices towards $100 per barrel. British-based defense analyst Paul Beaver suggested that Iran may be trying to lower the risk of any conflict with the United States. “Iran has the power to make life easier in Iraq’s south and on the border, or make it worse, and it really seems from my perspective that they appear to be seeing sense,” Beaver said. But Christopher Pang, head of the Middle East and North Africa program of the Royal United Services Institute in London, stressed internal Iraqi developments in explaining the reduction in violence. He pointed to a ceasefire called by Moqtada al-Sadr, head of the feared Shi’ite Mehdi Army, in August and said this group had realized “it is not in their interest to foment further intra-sectarian violence.” U.S. officials accuse Sadr of having close links with Iran. In what some have seen as another sign of easing tension, the U.S. military last week freed nine Iranians held in Iraq, including two it accused of links to Iran’s Qods force, which handles the foreign activities of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. Zebari, Iraq’s foreign minister, said he believed it would “enhance confidence” in dialogue between Iran and the United States over Iraq. Both sides have indicated willingness to attend further talks after three meetings so far this year. But in comments highlighting Washington’s deep-seated suspicions about Tehran’s aims, a U.S. general on Sunday said extensive Iranian influence in Iraq remained evident and that 20 Iranian-trained agents were still operating south of Baghdad.LONDON (Reuters) - The world’s biggest banks still could not be dismantled safely, more than five years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the Bank of England’s deputy governor for financial stability said on Monday. The Bank of England is seen in the City of London August 7, 2013. REUTERS/Toby Melville International standard setters have made progress in reforming banking rules since Lehman went under in September 2008, Jon Cunliffe, the deputy governor, told a Chatham House financial conference. But the core task of ending too-big-to-fail banks remains, he said. He urged the European Parliament to approve a new European Union law that would give national regulators the powers to wind down ailing banks. “I do not think we can say with confidence now that we could resolve a failing global giant,” said Cunliffe, Britain’s former ambassador to the EU in Brussels. Heads of the G20, the world’s leading 20 economies, will meet in Brisbane, Australia in November. Agreeing new rules to end too-big-to-fail banks was perhaps the most important regulatory priority for the summit, Cunliffe said. The success of those reforms will hinge on applying them consistently worldwide and on mutual trust among financial supervisors to avoid unintended consequences, he said. U.S. LITMUS TEST LOOMS The EU has expressed alarm that the United States is forcing offshoots of foreign banks to hold capital there, to keep U.S. taxpayers off the hook if a foreign lender goes bust, even as Europe introduces reforms to reduce the chances that might happen. Cunliffe echoed the European concern. “Regulators and supervisors who cannot trust the implementation of standards in other jurisdictions will defend stability in their own jurisdictions by raising barriers,” he said. “Such action minimizes the risk of international crises, but the cost is the rolling back of financial globalization with less effective and efficient intermediation on global savings.” Without mutual trust there is a risk of more crises and fragmentation in global markets, Cunliffe said. The International Monetary Fund and the G20’s Financial Stability Board, chaired by BoE Governor Mark Carney, can play key roles in establishing mutual trust, he said. Robert Jenkins, a former member of the BoE’s Financial Policy Committee, which sets the tone for UK regulation, said a global standard is desirable if it is sufficient to the task. “But if the agreed global standard is insufficient, then national authorities not only might but should deviate in order to protect their taxpayers,” Jenkins told Reuters. The U.S. initiative bolsters a global set of bank capital rules known as Basel III, which Jenkins said are insufficient. EU-U.S. spats have also surfaced over new rules to regulate financial derivatives. “The litmus test will be the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s forthcoming rules on foreign clearing-house recognition,” Patrick Pearson, a senior official at the European Union’s executive European Commission, told Reuters. “To that extent we will learn if they willing to mutually recognise clearing houses from other jurisdictions,” he said. “The jury is still out.” Lack of trust among regulators is also making it hard to knit together data from derivatives-reporting venues worldwide, a participant at the conference said. That means there is still no single snapshot of risks in the $700 trillion market. Rachel Lomax, a former BoE deputy governor, told Reuters that as long as regulators are under domestic political pressure to crack down on bankers’ bonuses, misconduct and other issues, they will find it hard to develop mutual trust with their foreign counterparts.The Kansas City Royals may be facing a serious exodus at season’s end. According to Jon Heyman of FanRag Sports, four Royals players who are set to become free agents after the season – Eric Hosmer, Mike Moustakas, Lorenzo Cain, and Alcides Escobar – are likely to hit the open market. A source told Heyman that there is no evidence that contract talks are progressing with any of the four players. The Royals are optimistic about retaining one or two of the players, with first baseman Hosmer their top priority. Hosmer is regarded as the “golden boy” of the organization, but the two sides failed to reach a deal when discussions opened early in spring. Hosmer has said he is unwilling to negotiate once the season starts, considering it a distraction. One of the four players has expressed a desire to stay with Kansas City, but the finances won’t make it possible to retain all four. They’d probably all like to stay, but we may be watching the end of this iteration of the Royals in 2017.UPDATED 11/11: Red Hot Chili Peppers are pleased to announce additional dates to the 2017 North American tour! April 12 \| Washington, DC \| Verizon Center April 14 \| Atlanta, GA \| Phillips Arena April 15 \| Raleigh, NC \| PNC Arena April 17 \| Charlotte, NC \| Spectrum Center April 19 \| Columbia, SC \| Colonial Life Arena April 22 \| North Little Rock, AR \| Verizon Arena April 24 \| Jacksonville, FL \| Veterans Memorial Arena April 26 \| Orlando, FL \| Amway Center April 27 \| Tampa, FL \| Amalie Arena April 29 \| Miami, FL \| American Airlines Arena May 11 \| Pittsburgh, PA \| PPG Paints Arena May 13 \| Cleveland, OH \| Quicken Loans Arena May 14 \| Columbus, OH \| Schottenstein Center May 16 \| Louisville, KY \| KFC Yum! Center May 18 \| Indianapolis, IN \| Bankers Life Arena May 19 \| Cincinnati, OH \| US Bank Arena May 21 \| Kansas City, MO \| Sprint Center May 23 \| Des Moines, IA \| Wells Fargo Arena May 26 \| Winnipeg, MB \| MTS Centre May 28 \| Edmonton, AB \| Rogers Place May 29 \| Calgary, AB \| Scotiabank June 20 \| Montreal, QC \| Bell Centre June 22 \| Hamilton, ON \| FirstOntario Centre June 23 \| Ottawa, ON \| Canadian Tire Centre June 25 \| Grand Rapids, MI \| Van Andel Arena June 30 \| Chicago, IL \| United Center Arena July 1 \| Chicago, IL \| United Center Arena [JUST ADDED] * *Tickets available at 12pm CT Presale begins Wednesday, November 9th at 10am local. General on sale starts Friday, November 11th at 10am local. Log in to the RHCP Community for your unique presale password. Go to your PROFILE and click USER SETTINGS. Your unique pre-sale password will be under YOUR PROMO CODE. Please note that in order to receive a code for the presale, you must have registered to the Fan Club before November 6, 2016. Every ticket purchased includes your choice of a standard physical or standard digital copy of The Getaway! You will receive one redemption code per ticket following your purchase as well as a link to the redemption page. Each unique code can only be used once to redeem a single copy of The Getaway. Full details of how you can gift the album, should you have already purchased, will be given on the redemption page. View all tour dates here.Texan Roy Hofheinz (CR) sitting with his family at home. Texan Roy Hofheinz (CR) sitting with his family at home. Photo: Dmitri Kessel, Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image Texan Roy Hofheinz (CR) sitting with his family at home.photo-5498313.74636 - \|ucfirst Texan Roy Hofheinz working in his machine shop. Texan Roy Hofheinz working in his machine shop. Photo: Dmitri Kessel, Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image Texan Roy Hofheinz working in his machine shop.photo-5498320.74636 - \|ucfirst Mrs. William P. Hobby posing for a picture at home. Mrs. William P. Hobby posing for a picture at home. Photo: Dmitri Kessel, Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image Mrs. William P. Hobby posing for a picture at home.photo-5498321.74636 - \|ucfirst Texan William P. Hobby and his wife posing for a picture in their home. Texan William P. Hobby and his wife posing for a picture in their home. Photo: Dmitri Kessel, Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image Texan William P. Hobby and his wife posing for a picture in their...photo-5498322.74636 - \|ucfirst window._taboola = window._taboola \|\| []; _taboola.push({ mode: 'thumbnails-c', container: 'taboola-interstitial-gallery-thumbnails-5', placement: 'Interstitial Gallery Thumbnails 5', target_type:'mix' }); _taboola.push({flush: true}); item-85307.74636 - \|ucfirst Texans Jesse Jones, William P. Hobby, and Glenn McCarthy talking at McCarthy's home. Texans Jesse Jones, William P. Hobby, and Glenn McCarthy talking at McCarthy's home. Photo: Dmitri Kessel, Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image Texans Jesse Jones, William P. Hobby, and Glenn McCarthy talking at...photo-5498323.74636 - \|ucfirst Texans Jesse Jones and Glenn McCarthy playing cards. Texans Jesse Jones and Glenn McCarthy playing cards. Photo: Dmitri Kessel, Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image Texans Jesse Jones and Glenn McCarthy playing cards.photo-5498324.74636 - \|ucfirst Texan Jesse Jones posing at his house with his granddaughter. Texan Jesse Jones posing at his house with his granddaughter. Photo: Dmitri Kessel, Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image Texan Jesse Jones posing at his house with his granddaughter.photo-5498325.74636 - \|ucfirst Mr. and Mrs. Hugh Roy Cullen posing for a picture in their home. Mr. and Mrs. Hugh Roy Cullen posing for a picture in their home. Photo: Dmitri Kessel, Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image Mr. and Mrs. Hugh Roy Cullen posing for a picture in their home.photo-5498326.74636 - \|ucfirst window._taboola = window._taboola \|\| []; _taboola.push({ mode: 'thumbnails-c', container: 'taboola-interstitial-gallery-thumbnails-10', placement: 'Interstitial Gallery Thumbnails 10', target_type:'mix' }); _taboola.push({flush: true}); item-85307.74636 - \|ucfirst Texan Hugh Roy Cullen posing for a picture. Texan Hugh Roy Cullen posing for a picture. Photo: Dmitri Kessel, Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image Texan Hugh Roy Cullen posing for a picture.photo-5498328.74636 - \|ucfirst Texan Glenn McCarthy (C) riding a horse during a parade. Texan Glenn McCarthy (C) riding a horse during a parade. Photo: Dmitri Kessel, Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image Texan Glenn McCarthy (C) riding a horse during a parade.photo-5498329.74636 - \|ucfirst Mr. and Mrs. Glenn McCarthy riding horses. Mr. and Mrs. Glenn McCarthy riding horses. Photo: Dmitri Kessel, Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image Mr. and Mrs. Glenn McCarthy riding horses.photo-5498330.74636 - \|ucfirst Texan Glenn McCarthy and his family posing for a picture. Texan Glenn McCarthy and his family posing for a picture. Photo: Dmitri Kessel, Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image Texan Glenn McCarthy and his family posing for a picture.photo-5498331.74636 - \|ucfirst window._taboola = window._taboola \|\| []; _taboola.push({ mode: 'thumbnails-c', container: 'taboola-interstitial-gallery-thumbnails-15', placement: 'Interstitial Gallery Thumbnails 15', target_type:'mix' }); _taboola.push({flush: true}); item-85307.74636 - \|ucfirst Texan Glenn Mccarthy riding in a plane with his
let alone any joy, they just ignore us,” he said. Osborne has already spent more than 10 years working on the GML case, which is testing Russia’s willingness to abide by international financial agreements. One promising development is a recent $4 billion settlement between Yukos shareholders and Rosneft, announced in April. “That’s the first indication there’s been that there’s any commerciality on that side of the fence, the first time they’ve demonstrated any willingness to look at it purely from the point of view of ‘is this a sensible thing to do,’” Osborne said. “Ours is a simple legal question, and we’ve had our arbitration, and we’ve won that. We’ll go through the set aside application and we will win that. And we’ll go for recognition and enforcement in all the countries we have to go to until we get our $50 billion.” If GML succeeds, it will provide a lasting model for other parties seeking compensation from the Russian Federation. “If it took 10 years it wouldn't surprise me, but we are ready for that,” said Gaillard. “We’ll get there, over time.”Carbon dioxide concentrations are approaching 400 parts per million, higher than any found in at least 800,000 years. To commemorate the occasion, a Wall Street Journal op-ed has revived an old, repeatedly debunked argument about the benefits of CO 2. Authors Harrison Schmitt and William Happer take the fact that plants need CO 2 to grow and argue that more is better, ignoring both common sense and overwhelming scientific evidence. The following is a guest post by Climate Nexus (in PDF format here): Tired, Disproven Argument on “Benefits” of CO 2 Resurfaces in WSJ Carbon dioxide concentrations are approaching 400 parts per million, higher than any found in at least 800,000 years. To commemorate the occasion, a Wall Street Journal op-ed has revived an old, repeatedly debunked argument about the benefits of CO 2. The authors take the fact that plants need CO 2 to grow, and argue that more is better, ignoring both common sense and overwhelming scientific evidence. Common sense says that it’s possible to have too much of a necessary thing; for example, vitamin D is necessary for our health, but too much can cause permanent heart and kidney damage. And science tells us that the negative impacts of global warming far outweigh any isolated benefits. The Claim: The authors argue that plants use carbon dioxide to grow, and more carbon dioxide will make them grow faster. This will be good for agricultural yields. Also, in the distant past, there was even more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and “life flourished on land” during those times. They rely on this generalized anecdote to claim that there are no negative side effects of excess carbon dioxide. The Facts: In reality, the negative effects of excess carbon dioxide are devastating, with more than enough impacts to wipe out any growth benefit crops might experience. The warming effects of CO2 have been verified by independent scientific studies, professional organizations, and government investigations all over the world. This warming will present serious problems for agriculture. Here are a few reasons why we won’t see an agricultural benefit from increased CO 2 : Extreme weather can devastate crop yields, and is linked to human-caused global warming despite Schmitt and Happer’s unsourced assertions to the contrary. Both droughts and storms take their toll. The recent U.S. drought caused maize yields to drop by 45 million tons, and is consistent with projections that extreme droughts will be more frequent in a warmer world. Carbon dioxide and warmth can spur the activity of weeds and pests as well as agricultural crops. Studies have shown that beetles eat more crops in a high-carbon environment (both through modern experiments and studying prehistoric warming events). Weed-killing herbicides have also been found to lose effectiveness at high CO 2 levels. levels. Plants need water, sunlight, nitrogen, and other nutrients to grow, in addition to carbon dioxide. Many studies have found nitrogen to be a limiting factor in plant growth, negating the temporary growth boost caused by increased CO 2. Other studies show that high nighttime temperatures cause plants to use up energy reserves faster, reducing corn yields. Water availability concerns are also projected to increase in a warmer future. Plants exhibit a growth boost under increased CO 2 conditions only when all other factors have been controlled for, and the real world is nothing like these greenhouse conditions. We are effectively conducting a “real-world” experiment on our whole planet today, and have found food prices rising in response to higher temperatures and more extreme events. Adverse effects of global warming are so numerous that this kind of simplistic and repeatedly disproven argument has no place in our national debate. * * * Also see: Media Matters: “Wall Street Journal ‘s Idiocracy: CO2 Is What Plants Crave” Climate Denial Crock of the Week: Wall Street Journal: CO2 Good for Plants. Seriously. Columbia Journalism Review: “The WSJ editorial page hits rock bottom” Earlier CSW posts: MacCracken v. Happer: The Real Truth about Greenhouse Gases and Climate Change In Wall Street Journal op-ed, Bjorn Lomborg urges delay with misleading stats Scientists respond to the Wall Street Journal’s latest junk-science climate predictions “Like dentists practicing cardiology” – Climate scientists respond to Wall Street Journal disinformer op-ed. When you’re talking about planetary life suppport, it really matters what your credentials are.Two weeks ago today we rubbished the possibility of Ronaldo making a fairy tale return to Old Trafford when we looked in detail at what truth lay behind the transfer rumours. Ronaldo: Transfer Truth: 10% We're reducing our truth rating slightly to 10%, but there have been some recent developments, and tasty quotes from the forever chirpy Real Madrid President Florentino Perez when he spoke to 20minutos. Whilst attempting to imply in no uncertain terms that Ronaldo is going nowhere, he might have actually gone so far as to over egg the cake and raise suspicions about the situation. Sort of like silently farting in a lift and then spontaneously starting to sing the national anthem as the last gasps of foul smell rise to nose level. There may be suspicions about your sudden surge of patriotism: He's (Ronaldo) our most important asset, and we will build the future of Madrid around him. Soon we will clarify this issue. I have no doubt that Cristiano is going to retire at Real Madrid. I'm convinced that he'll renew. The renewals are done before the season starts. Whilst everything Perez says should be taken with a hefty pinch of sensational salt, he is also a man who will move mountains to avoid losing face. Having made so many comments on Ronaldo that we reported in our initial story of a potential move to Manchester United and now continuing with this, it seems almost certain that Ronaldo will be staying put at Real Madrid. Contract Concerns The only whimper of life left in these reignited rumours is that Ronaldo is yet to sign an extension to the 2 years he has left on his contract at Real but given that the players are only just starting to make their way back to pre-season training it should only be a matter of time before a massive contract extension is announced for Ronaldo. There are one or two other minor issues that remain, firstly the fact that Perez is known for making wild claims about all sorts of things and his resolve has a history of suddenly shifting from one thing to the next, some sources believe the excessive love and bravado being shown toward Ronaldo are desperate attempts to win the heart of a star who has lingering lust for his former employers. With Carlo Ancelotti having only just been announced as new Real Madrid manager there is also the teeniest possibility that Ronaldo will simply decide he doesn't like the shape of his new manager's beard (yes we know he doesn't have a beard!) or that Ancelotti will decide there is another player somewhere on earth who is better than Ronaldo and will decide to shift the player, but that would require Ancelotti to be certifiably insane, and then change his name to "the man who sold Ronaldo and got sacked a week after being employed" by deed poll. The Rooney Factor Some reports have also surfaced recently which suggest that United are looking to off load Rooney to Real Madrid whilst we have already reported twice on that story, on both occasions stating that there was little to no hard evidence suggesting that the move was a possibility, new stories have emerged implying the new Real Madrid boss loves Rooney so much that he is willing to sacrifice Ronaldo in a bizarre swap deal that would see the Englishman and a huge sack of cash laid at his door in exchange for for Ronaldo going the other way and that this might some how fund the signature of Gareth Bale for Real Madrid in a crazy Ronaldo + £20m = Rooney + Bale formula that would be a world wide sensation. We could only find a handful of scandalous, half-news papers whose main quoted source was actually themselves (no really, they quoted their own reporter, the same one who had written the story!) so as fantastical as it sounds there is zero evidence to suggest it is anything but a work of fantasy football fiction. Likeliness of Signing: 10% Fit at Club: 90%EFF Sues NSA Again Over Failure To Release Procedures For Dealing With Zero Days from the eff-may-need-a-whole-floor-devoted-to-nsa-lawsuits dept "This FOIA suit seeks transparency on one of the least understood elements of the U.S. intelligence community's toolset: security vulnerabilities," EFF Legal Fellow Andrew Crocker said. "These documents are important to the kind of informed debate that the public and the administration agree needs to happen in our country." Over the last year, U.S. intelligence-gathering techniques have come under great public scrutiny. One controversial element has been how agencies such as the NSA have undermined encryption protocols and used zero days. While an intelligence agency may use a zero day it has discovered or purchased to infiltrate targeted computers or devices, disclosing its existence may result in a patch that will help defend the public against other online adversaries, including identity thieves and foreign governments that may also be aware of the zero day. "Since these vulnerabilities potentially affect the security of users all over the world, the public has a strong interest in knowing how these agencies are weighing the risks and benefits of using zero days instead of disclosing them to vendors," Global Policy Analyst Eva Galperin said. Another day, another lawsuit filed by the EFF against the NSA. As you may recall, back in April there was some discussion about how the NSA deals with zero day exploits it discovers, and (specifically) whether or not it reveals them to relevant parties or keeps them for its own ability to exploit them. The NY Times revealed that President Obama had put in place an official rule that said the NSA should have a "bias" towards revealing the flaws, but left open a gaping loophole in saying the NSA could exploit those zero days for "a clear national security or law enforcement need." That's a pretty big loophole -- especially when you consider how law enforcement has been abusing every opportunity of late.EFF filed a FOIA request to find out about the NSA's process for determining whether to exploit or reveal a zero day... and hasn't received a response, despite a promise by the government to "expedite" the request. Hence: the new lawsuit.These days, it really does seem that the only way to get the government to cough up these kinds of documents is to file a lawsuit, which really defeats the purpose of the whole FOIA process. Perhaps the government should just admit it's a charade and let people go straight to the lawsuit filing process instead. Filed Under: cybersecurity, exploit, foia, james clapper, nsa, odni, surveillance, zero days Companies: effRepublicans late Friday afternoon unveiled the final text of their bill to rewrite the tax code, which they are racing to send to President Trump Donald John TrumpREAD: Cohen testimony alleges Trump knew Stone talked with WikiLeaks about DNC emails Trump urges North Korea to denuclearize ahead of summit Venezuela's Maduro says he fears 'bad' people around Trump MORE’s desk before Christmas. Like the bills that came before it, the legislation produced by the House-Senate conference committee would result in massive changes to the tax system, cutting rates for many individuals and businesses while placing new limitations on tax breaks. (Read the bill here.) "I'm very excited about this moment. It's been 31 years in the making and took a lot of hard work by a lot of people to make this day happen. I'm proud of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act," said Rep. Kevin Brady Kevin Patrick BradySmaller tax refunds put GOP on defensive Key author of GOP tax law joins Ernst and Young Lawmakers beat lobbyists at charity hockey game MORE (R-Texas), the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. The measure appears on track for passage next week, after getting a jolt of momentum Friday from Sens. Marco Rubio Marco Antonio RubioWhite House pleads with Senate GOP on emergency declaration Sixteen years later, let's finally heed the call of the 9/11 Commission Schumer urges GOP to reject Trump's 'destructive' national emergency MORE (R-Fla.) and Bob Corker Robert (Bob) Phillips CorkerBrexit and exit: A transatlantic comparison Sasse’s jabs at Trump spark talk of primary challenger RNC votes to give Trump 'undivided support' ahead of 2020 MORE (R-Tenn.), who both announced their support. The House will vote on the bill first, on Tuesday, and then the Senate will vote. Under the final bill, the top individual rate would be lowered from 39.6 percent to 37 percent, which is lower than the top rate in the original bills passed by the House and Senate. The corporate tax rate would be cut from 35 percent to 21 percent, up from 20 percent in the original bills. The measure has seven individual tax brackets, and like both the House and Senate bills, substantially increases the standard deduction. It also increases the child tax credit from $1,000 to $2,000, as the Senate bill did, and increases the maximum amount that is refundable to $1,400, up from $1,100 in the original Senate measure. The latter change was made to secure Rubio’s vote. The legislation preserves the deductions for mortgage interest and charitable giving, though it lowers the cap on the mortgage deduction from $1 million to $750,000. Seeking to win over House Republicans from high-tax states, the conference committee legislation caps the state and local tax deduction at $10,000, with filers allowed to deduct property taxes and state and local income and sales taxes. Several popular tax preferences that were eliminated in the House bill are preserved. They include the deduction for medical expenses, the deduction for student-loan interest, the exclusion for graduate students’ tuition waivers and the ability to issue tax-exempt private-activity bonds. The bill does not repeal the estate tax or the alternative minimum tax for individuals, both long-time goals for Republicans, but it does increase the exemption amounts. The corporate alternative minimum tax, which was retained in the Senate bill, is eliminated, a change that is certain to please the business community. The final bill provides tax relief to pass-through businesses — entities such as small businesses whose income is taxed through the individual code — through a 20-percent deduction. Sen. Rob Portman Robert (Rob) Jones PortmanAddressing repair backlog at national parks can give Congress a big win Texas senator introduces bill to produce coin honoring Bushes GOP Green New Deal stunt is a great deal for Democrats MORE (R-Ohio), a member of the conference committee, said the structure of the final bill hews closer to the Senate's version because of the pass-through provisions. The Senate’s policies were “viewed as simpler,” Portman said. The measure also moves the U.S. to a territorial tax system that generally does not subject American companies’ foreign earnings to U.S. taxes. Companies’ current offshore earnings would be taxed at rates of 15.5 percent for liquid assets and 8 percent for illiquid assets, which are higher rates than in both the House and Senate bills. Like the Senate bill, the legislation repeals ObamaCare’s individual insurance mandate starting in 2019 and allows for drilling in a portion of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Republicans are advancing the measure through a process called reconciliation that prevents a filibuster from Democrats in the Senate. Under reconciliation, bills can’t add to the deficit after 10 years, so the bill’s tax cuts for individuals expire after eight years. The corporate tax changes and individual mandate repeal are permanent. The House and the Senate are expected to approve the bill next week and send it to Trump, delivering him his first major legislative victory. Republicans have long wanted to rewrite the tax code, arguing that doing so would boost economic growth and lead to more job creation. The Joint Committee on Taxation estimates the bill will lower federal revenue by $1.456 trillion over 10 years — a key finding, as the bill cannot add more than $1.5 trillion in debt and qualify for special Senate rules. Most analysts doubt that the economic growth from the bill will offset the revenue losses, but GOP lawmakers and the White House disagree. They say the changes to the tax code will unleash business investment. Corker, who voted against the original Senate bill because of deficit concerns, said in a statement Friday that he will vote for the final package because he thinks the bill accompanied with other policies “could have significant positive impact on the well-being of Americans and help drive additional foreign direct investment in Tennessee.” While Rubio's and Corker’s support boosts the odds for passage, several GOP senators have not yet announced how they will vote, including Sens. Susan Collins Susan Margaret CollinsWhite House pleads with Senate GOP on emergency declaration Cohen grilled by Senate Intelligence panel Pence meets with Senate GOP for 'robust' discussion on Trump declaration MORE (Maine) and Jeff Flake Jeffrey (Jeff) Lane FlakeBrexit and exit: A transatlantic comparison Poll: 33% of Kentucky voters approve of McConnell Trump suggests Heller lost reelection bid because he was 'hostile' during 2016 presidential campaign MORE (Ariz.). Republicans expect Sens. John McCain John Sidney McCainGOP lobbyists worry Trump lags in K Street fundraising Mark Kelly kicks off Senate bid: ‘A mission to lift up hardworking Arizonans’ Gabbard hits back at Meghan McCain after fight over Assad MORE (R-Ariz.) and Thad Cochran William (Thad) Thad CochranTop 5 races to watch in 2019 Bottom Line Races Dems narrowly lost show party needs to return to Howard Dean’s 50 state strategy MORE (R-Miss.) to return to the Senate to vote for the tax bill. Both missed votes this week because of health issues. Democrats are expected to remain united in opposition against the bill. They say the measure provides most of its benefits to wealthy individuals and corporations and would end up raising taxes on some middle-class families. - Scott Wong contributed. This story was updated at 6:32 p.m.Now Uttar Pradesh has its own foreign policy. Mohammad Azam Khan has broken off the state's diplomatic relations with the US. No minister of the UP government, it appears, will ever again visit the US. He has asked all Indian Muslims living in the US to return to the fertile and prosperous lands of UP (in time for the general elections to vote for his Samajwadi Party) and quit that miserable country. Azam Khan's anger arises from the fact that he was detained for 10 minutes at Logan airport when he went to Boston on UP Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav's trip to Harvard to trumpet the way in which UP had managed the Kumbh Mela. The poor Harvard graduates will have to stay ignorant of that great achievement. After all, ministers in India are not used to going through security at airports or stopping at traffic lights or abiding by any law, civil or criminal. By not extending such basic human rights to UP ministers on US soil, Obama has damaged his country's economic prospects. Deprived of visits by UP ministers, the US will plunge into another recession. Only when Obama comes in person to kowtow at the airport in Netaji Mulayam Singh Yadav's home town and is detained for 10 hours at least without airconditioning will the US begin to recompense for that act of lese majeste. Azam Khan was lucky that he got a visa and was able to visit the US. Narendra Modi is still waiting for that. He would have been thrilled to change places with Azam Khan. About the only thing lacking in Modi's anointment as the BJP's chosen leader is a nod from the US that he is kosher. Now we hear that there are people in the US who insist that he be denied a visa. Maybe Gujarat should break off diplomatic relations with the US. Modi can then say that he does not want a visa from the US, in solidarity with Azam Khan. That will enhance the BJP's chances of winning the Muslim vote in UP. ... contd. ALSO READ The taper tigers Please read our terms of use before posting commentsThe head of Siemens said Tuesday his company had quit taking orders from Iran. The announcement came as German Chancellor Angela Merkel predicted movement toward tougher sanctions over Tehran's nuclear enrichment program. Siemens CEO Peter Löscher told shareholders on Tuesday that the Siemens board had decided in October 2009 to wind down business with the Islamic Republic. A number of bids were still open from before October, he said, but if they fall through Siemens will end its dealings with Iran by mid-2010. Western countries believe Iran is building a nuclear weapons program, but Tehran says it needs enriched uranium exclusively for civilian use in nuclear power plants. The United States imposed a deadline at the end of 2009 for Iran to respond to a package of incentives to quit enriching uranium. Iran let the deadline pass, and Chancellor Merkel said Tuesday that the United Nations Security Council will now take up the question of tighter sanctions. "The issue of sanctions on Iran will be on the agenda when France has the (Security Council) chair," she told a joint press conference with visiting Israeli President Shimon Peres. Peres was in Berlin to observe Holocaust Memorial Day, which falls on Wednesday. Sanction talks would likely occur in February, Merkel said. France takes over the Security Council chair this month from China, which still opposes sanctions. 'A Long Tradition of Cooperation' In spite of three rounds of milder sanctions imposed by the UN, Berlin has struggled to suppress high-tech exports to Iran. Siemens -- Europe's largest engineering firm -- sells about 500 million ($703.6 million) worth of goods to Iranian companies every year, according to Reuters. In 2009 that number amounted to 0.7 percent of its overall sales. "There is a long tradition of economic cooperation (between Germany and Iran)," Merkel said at the press conference Tuesday. "There has been a significant reduction. But we believe it is only effective if you try to introduce international sanctions on as broad a base as possible. Germany will adhere to sanctions in all sectors that are affected." German customs officers in December found 16 million worth of turbocompressors bound for Iran from a Siemens branch in Sweden. The compressors -- part of a larger 80 million shipment -- could be have been used in Iran's missile program, investigators said. A Siemens spokesman said there was nothing underhanded about the company's behavior, but he never addressed the shipment itself. "Our business activities in Iran are exclusively for civil purposes and are in accordance with applicable international laws and regulations," he told SPIEGEL at the time.We reached out to Jon Stewart to ask him to participate in a 30 day vegan challenge. He responded that living with his... Jon Stewart leftabout eight months ago. Since then, he's used his free time for a few different things: dropping in on the WWE to get slammed to the mat by John Cena, for example, and working on a new series of shows for HBO.And, as we learned this morning, writing fan letters to food shops he likes. In this case, Stewart sent a letter of appreciation to Herbivorous Butcher, the new northeast Minneapolis purveyors of vegan "meats" and "cheeses."Apparently, the store challenged Stewart to go vegan for a whole month. Stewart replied with a couple shots of him wolfing down its vegan cheese, adding a note that he and his wife eat that way, anyway — and that it's a lot more enjoyable when Herbivorous Butcher is responsible for the food.Marcus Johansson. (Alex Brandon/AP) Marcus Johansson’s last two contract negotiations have been prolonged, with the skilled forward filing for player-elected arbitration last season and going a similar route in 2013, remaining unsigned as a restricted free agent until the eve of training camp, when he inked a two-year, $4 million deal. It’s too early to tell how quickly Johansson and the Washington Capitals will come to a resolution this offseason, but the two sides have started discussions. Johansson, a restricted free agent again, has new representation in CAA Sports’ J.P. Barry. Barry said he and General Manager Brian MacLellan spoke at the NHL Draft Combine, and early talks with the Capitals have revolved around settling on a term that both sides can agree on, with salary ideally falling in place after that. It’s early, especially with the salary cap for next season not announced yet. “Does the team want to do a three-year deal, a four-year deal, a five-year deal? Then what does Marcus want?” Barry said. “That’s why we’re trying to find a term that everybody is comfortable with.” [Karl Alzner undergoes surgery for sports hernia] “I know the language is, everybody wants to come back, everybody likes it here, but you know, money’s money,” MacLellan said a month ago. “I don’t think we’re gonna get a break. No discount.” Johansson’s one-year deal worth $3.75 million was awarded in arbitration last summer, falling roughly between the $3 million requested by Washington and the $4.75 million filed by Johansson in the pre-arbitration briefs. If the Capitals and Johansson required an arbitration ruling again, it would be for a one-year deal again and Johansson would be an unrestricted free agent at its conclusion. “He likes where he is and would love to find a way to stay there a little bit longer and work something out,” Barry said. “That’s why we’re doing our best. Once we can find a link that both of us are comfortable with, then I think things will get a little bit easier.” [The NHL is expanding to Las Vegas, and here’s what it means for the Capitals] Johansson’s $3.75 million arbitration ruling came after a breakout season, when he finished with 20 goals and 27 assists and played in every game. He maintained that production last season with 17 goals and 29 assists in 74 games, and Johansson displayed a greater versatility when he converted to center midway through the season and succeeded there. MacLellan has indicated that Johansson’s future probably isn’t at center — he was at wing in the postseason — but with the Capitals wanting a more offensively reliable third line, Johansson could be a third-line center option again if that need isn’t filled in free agency. Johansson also plays on the top power-play unit, giving Washington another option for breakouts and often serving as the net-front presence. “I see him as a guy that you can move around,” MacLellan said. “I like what the coaches have done with him. Ideally is he a center? Probably not unless we put there for an extended period of time. But he can play left wing, he can play center, he can play right wing, he can move up second line, he can play first line, he can play third line — he’s a versatile guy. He can take faceoffs, he plays the power play, he’s just a player that you can use in a lot of different situations.” A third straight season with at least 40 points and a strong playoff performance (two goals and five assists) should help Johansson this offseason. One possible comparison is Toronto’s Nazem Kadri. Though a top-line center for the Maple Leafs, Kadri’s point totals are slightly below Johansson’s for the last two seasons and in April, Toronto extended Kadri for six years with an average annual value of $4.5 million. “Whenever you’re talking about players like this, are they prepared to make a longer-term analysis?” Barry said. “That sort of the dialogue we’re having now. How do they project their lineup over the next three to five years? So, we’re just having that open discussion about that and the values.” >>> It’s too early for the Capitals to extend qualifying offers to their restricted free agents, with teams typically waiting until closer to the June 27 deadline for that. MacLellan has indicated the intention is to re-sign all four of the team’s restricted free agents, as teams rarely part with those players. “I would assume they all come back as of now,” MacLellan said. He’s recently talked at length about future roles for right wing Tom Wilson and defenseman Dmitry Orlov, both hitting restricted free agency this summer. On Orlov, MacLellan has said that he expects Orlov to move up in the lineup after mostly playing on the team’s third defensive pairing last season. Orlov’s development was set back by a wrist injury that caused him to miss the entire 2014-15 season, but he rebounded by playing 82 games this year and scoring eight goals with 22 assists, both career highs. MacLellan has said that the Capitals want to turn Wilson into a Joel Ward-type player and that Wilson could be put in more offensive situations in the future. A former Washington player, Ward scored 21 goals to go with 22 assists with San Jose this season, and while Wilson’s production has steadily improved every campaign, the 22-year-old finished with seven goals and 16 assists in a mostly defensive role last season. His defensive zone play has taken significant steps with Wilson evolving into one of the team’s top penalty killers. Wilson’s agent, Mark Guy with Newport Sports Management, said that preliminary talks with the Capitals have started, but they haven’t gone into great detail yet and he expects things will ramp up over the next several weeks. “I think when you’re going through these negotiations with guys of Tom’s experience level, there’s a lot of variables that come into play,” Guy said. “A large part of the process is projections and what role a player is going to play going forward, but it’s largely based on what he’s done in the past and what other people around the league have done with similar experience levels. All those factors come into play, but definitely there’s some projection that comes into it.” The restricted free agent facing the most uncertainty this summer is Michael Latta, as he was in the lineup just twice after the trade deadline. Latta was the team’s fourth-line center before the acquisition of Mike Richards, and in 43 games, he scored a career-high three goals and added four assists. With Latta making $575,000 last season, a qualifying offer to him would be at least $632,500. “He’s gotta be frustrated,” MacLellan said in May. “I think he’s a great teammate, guys love having him around, coaches like him. I think the key for him is he’s gotta bring something besides energy in that fourth-line role. He’s got to kill penalties, there’s got to be another dimension to his game for him to be successful in the league.”Have you ever wondered why selfish, arrogant, and entitled individuals are so charming? These narcissistic people have parasitic effects on society. When in charge of companies they commit fraud, demoralize employees, and devalue stock. When in charge of countries they increase poverty, violence, and death rates. And yet, there is no shortage of examples to illustrate the cultural appeal of narcissistic antiheroes, whether fictional (Walter White of Breaking Bad; Batman, and James Bond), all-too real (Silvio Berlusconi, Steve Jobs, Kanye West, and too many professional athletes to name), or a mix of both, such as the so-called Wolf of Wall Street. We are attracted to them despite their self-absorption — or perhaps, even because of it. Why? After decades of scientific research, psychologists have begun to deconstruct the seductive power of narcissists, explaining the precise mechanisms underlying their charm and ability to get ahead in all domains of life. Here are the key findings: 1. Narcissists are masterful impression managers: Thanks largely to their intense self-obsession and self-adulation, narcissists excel at managing initial impressions. They care a lot about their appearance and dress to impress, which signals status and makes them attractive. As Kaiser and Craig note in a recent review (“Destructive leadership in and of organizations”), “it is the obsessive focus on the self that links the narcissistic personality with charisma.” Furthermore, narcissists’ desire to make a great initial impression enables them to disguise their arrogance as confidence, which they often achieve through humor and by being entertaining or eccentric. Unsurprisingly, narcissists perform well on interviews and they are excellent social networkers – you can even spot them by their social media activity (e.g., more Twitter followers, Facebook friends, or a higher Klout score). 2. Narcissists manipulate credit and blame in their favor: Through a mix of shameless self-promotion and a guilt-free, Machiavellian agenda, narcissists are quick to take credit for others’ achievements and blame colleagues and subordinates for their own failures. As Ben Dattner notes, narcissistic managers “lead with the main purpose of receiving personal credit or glory. When things go wrong or they make mistakes, they deny or distort information and ‘rewrite history’ in order to avoid getting blamed.” What makes narcissists so effective at this is their complete conviction that they are actually special. In Dattner’s words: “they believe that they deserve credit for simply being who they are, regardless of their actual contributions or achievements.” Such delusions of grandeur allow narcissists to be more effective manipulators than individuals who are politically savvy but inhibited by their inability to distort reality or morality in their favor. It is always easier to fool others when you have already fooled yourself; it is always harder to feel guilty when you think you are innocent. 3. Narcissists fit conventional stereotypes of leadership: Because of their ability to accumulate power and influence, narcissists enjoy a prominent spot in laypeople’s views about leadership. However, the idea that leaders must be overconfident, charismatic, or selfish in order to be effective is in stark contrast with reality. Yes, these characteristics help them emerge as leaders, but they are also the cause of their dishonest and incompetent behaviors once they get to the top. Whether in sports, business, education or politics, effective leadership requires building high-performing teams and, when it comes to that, the critical ingredients for success are competence rather than confidence, altruism rather than egotism, and integrity rather than charisma. In other words, the real essence of good leadership is the exact opposite of what the Hollywood version of leadership implies. Until we understand this, we will unfortunately continue to invite narcissists to the top while overlooking more competent and healthier alternatives. In Eastern and collectivistic cultures narcissism rates are lower because society condemns it – we should follow that model in the West. Importantly, there are different degrees of narcissism and, though we tend to use the term categorically, it is more appropriate to refer to people as either more or less narcissistic. In fact, some people may display relatively benign levels of narcissism, while others may resemble true psychopaths. Interestingly, a small degree of narcissism may not be detrimental for leadership, at least in corporate America. In a recent meta-analytic study, managers with moderate narcissism scores did tend to outperform not only managers with high, but also low, rates of narcissism. This finding reminds us of some of the bright side characteristics associated with narcissistic leadership, such as effective communication skills, strategic vision, and ambition. No wonder we find narcissistic people appealing, despite themselves. However, if such competencies can also be found in non-narcissistic individuals – and they can – the derailment risks will decrease. It is useful to recall one of the unique characteristics of narcissistic individuals, which is their inability to prolong their seductive powers for too long. Much like crack cocaine, the charm of narcissists produces an intense but short-lived high; and, unlike crack cocaine, it is far from addictive, except for narcissists themselves. As a seminal study in this area showed, the charisma of narcissists wears off after a mere 2.5 hours. Their initial flamboyance, charm and confidence soon morphs into deluded self-admiration, defensive arrogance, and moral disengagement. It is this rapid expiry date of narcissistic charms, which keeps narcissists always on the hunt for new fans — or victims. So, when dealing with charismatic individuals, a good rule of thumb is to delay making decisions — whether to hire that person, promote them, or take them on as clients — until you work out who they really are. Not all charismatic people are narcissistic, but many narcissists are charismatic, and the more charismatic they are, the more time it takes to spot them.The new version of the CUBA platform has been released, bringing in several major new features, along with some improvements and bug fixes. As this is a major release, there are also some breaking changes listed in the release notes. Most of them will be revealed on the compilation of your project, so just follow recommendations listed in the release notes and hints from your IDE. If you have any troubles with the upgrade, feel free to ask us on the support forum. The main improvements and enhancements of the 6.0 version are as follows. Java 8 Language Features The platform now requires Java 8 and you can use all its features in the application code: lambdas, streams, etc. We’ve added new listener interfaces suitable for implementation by lambda expressions to Datasource, CollectionDatasource and some other classes. The old interfaces still exist but are deprecated. EclipseLink ORM EclipseLink 2.6 framework is now used for ORM instead of OpenJPA. It supports the latest JPA 2.1 specification and allows you to use database functions and “on” clause in JPQL. Besides, EclipseLink can be more effective when fetching related collections from the database: see the documentation on view’s fetch attribute. The whole API for working with data on the EntityManager level has remained the same. The main difference is that now access to an unfetched attribute leads to an exception. Previously you could read unfetched attributes and got nulls, which could result in NullPointerException. We think that the new approach with the definitive exception is better for troubleshooting because the exception tells you what attribute should be included in the view. Sometimes EclipseLink treats non-trivial JPQL queries differently from OpenJPA, so you may need to modify them if you get exceptions at runtime. Security Improvements We have strengthened control over data sending from middleware to the client tier. First, all attribute permissions
a copy of The Manual. It is a reference to Chumbawamba's earlier success with their hit single, "Tubthumping".[citation needed] Jamie Reynolds of Klaxons admitted in an interview to reading The Manual and stated that he "took direct instructions from it.... Get yourself a studio, get a groove going, sing some absolute nonsense over the top, put a breakbeat behind it, and you're away! That's what I did! That's genuinely it. I read that, I noted down the golden rules of pop, and applied that to what we're doing and made sure that that always applies to everything we do. That way, we always come out with a sort of catchy hit number."[7] Editions [ edit ] An audiobook in German language was released in 2003.Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Video of police using what campaigners said was "excessive force" during a search Three police officers have been removed from usual duties after concerns over the use of force in a video circulating on social media. The footage shows an officer using a baton after a row breaks out between a man and plain-clothed policemen in Upper Sutton Street, Aston, Birmingham. West Midlands Police said after an initial investigation, the matter has been referred to the police watchdog. The three officers have been redeployed to other work. See more stories from across Birmingham and the Black Country here Image copyright Other Image caption The altercation took place in Upper Sutton Street, Aston The video was posted on Sunday by police monitoring campaign group Netpol. In a statement, West Midlands Police said: "We are aware of a video circulating on social media relating to arrests made by officers in Birmingham yesterday. 'Unjustified force' "We are quickly gathering as much information as possible and we will undertake an assessment of that information to understand exactly what has happened. The force initially confirmed five of its neighbourhood policing officers had been involved. However, later on Monday it said the investigation involved three officers, all of constable rank, who will be redeployed to other work but will not be engaged in duties outside a police station. The matter has also been referred to the Independent Police Complaints Commission, the force said. In a tweet, community campaigner Desmond Jaddoo, said: "This not the way to conduct stop & search or treat the public. "Excessive disproportionate unjustified use force against the BME (black minority ethnic) community." The force said a 20-year-old man arrested for a public order offence had been released while inquiries continued. A 28-year-old male was cautioned for possessing cannabis.The NBA off-season eclipsed the NBA Finals in record time this year. I don’t even remember who won the championship. Meanwhile, Dwight Howard getting traded five minutes after starting a Twitter Q&A is something I look forward to telling my grandchildren about. It’s been that kind of summer so far, with trades and rumors and pure entropy overtaking the NBA ever since Paul George told the Pacers he’s breaking up with them once their lease ends. The only sad part about the NBA off-season is the rumors that go unfulfilled. Nothing is worse than when some juicy trade gossip ends up being a useless endeavor because one team gets cold feet or another won’t part with an inconsequential young player. So with that being said, here are the rumors I hope absolutely come to fruition as the draft approaches. New York Daily News via Getty Images 1. Knicks trade Kristaps Porzingis Wishing a Kristaps trade on Knicks fans is cruel, sure. I know many Knicks fans, and some of them are even decent people. Still, you know how it feels when you almost witness a car accident and you’re kind of sad for a split-second before realizing it’s better no one was physically maimed? That’s what a Kristaps trade would be. It would be like seeing that car accident actually happen, without the guilt caused by human injury. The Knicks getting rid of Porzingis would be one of the worst moves in franchise history, and this is the same team that once gave Jared Jeffries a five-year contract a season after he averaged 6.4 points per game. New York would never forgive Phil Jackson. I imagine there would be protests outside the Garden every day, which Jackson may or may not pay attention to as he relaxes in Los Angeles. 2. Clippers trade DeAndre Jordan Continuing with analogies that may or may not be specific only to my life, the Clippers trading DeAndre Jordan would be like if you begged your parents to buy you an Xbox, you played it a lot for one year, not so much the next, and then traded it in for some spare parts. That’s right, the Clippers are reportedly exploring trading Jordan only two years after he was basically held hostage in his own home until he re-signed with the team. A Jordan trade actually makes sense! He has value right now, and Los Angeles desperately needs to get younger. Trading DeAndre could also help restock the cupboard for a rebuild in the event Chris Paul and Blake Griffin head elsewhere as free agents. Mostly, though, Doc Rivers trading Jordan after desperately pleading for him to stay would be the icing on the cake of a hilariously awful tenure as general manager. When is Jerry West’s first day? 3. Cavaliers hire Chauncey Billups The Cavs have reportedly interviewed former Pistons star Chauncey Billups to be their president of basketball operations, and if this happens, I don’t see how Cleveland keeps LeBron next summer. Is James really going to put his future in the hands of a novice? Chauncey definitely has the potential to be great at running an NBA team, but the situation with the Cavs seems way too complicated to bring in someone with no front office experience. How bad of an owner is Dan Gilbert? He’s never extended the contract of one of his general managers. He’s still paying the salary of Mike Brown, who was an assistant coach on the team that just beat Gilbert in the Finals. And we haven’t even gotten to the predatory lending! Gilbert fell ass-backwards into LeBron not once, but twice, and outside of cutting some checks, he has seemingly done everything he can to mess it up both times. Count me completely in for another summer of LeBron free agency drama next year. 4. Warriors trade for Paul George Completely made this one up but Golden State’s got to start putting its name out there even if only as like a prank or something. Rumor that hopefully doesn’t come true Rockets guard Patrick Beverley started following the Pacers on Twitter, and then basically confirmed himself he could be on the move. Why would the Rockets get rid of one of their best individual defenders and best agitator? Beverley is the type of player who is most fun on a contending team like Houston. If he’s going to get moved, then hopefully it’s to another great team. Otherwise, the Rockets should be trying to run back last year’s squad, perhaps with a couple additions on the wing. Incredible true thing that already happened Kawhi Leonard got rid of his braids! RIP Kawhi Leonard braids 1991-2017 pic.twitter.com/VQ1jrWOAuQ — Legends (@LegendsofCH) June 21, 2017 First LeBron goes bald and now this. The NBA off-season loves to watch the world burn.Best players at every position for the 2016 NFL preseason By Sam Monson • Sep 5, 2016 The 2016 preseason is in the books, and with “real” football just around the corner, it’s time for one last look back at the players who stood out over the past four weeks of action. As always, one of the variables to preseason is that some players are plying their trade against Pro-Bowlers and starters, while others are deployed against guys who won’t be playing professional football again after this week, but all you can do is beat what’s in front of you, and a standout performance is a standout performance. Here is PFF’s Team of the Preseason: Offense QB: Ryan Tannehill, Miami Dolphins Tannehill completed 64.2 percent of his passes this preseason, which is OK, but he also suffered from seven dropped passes, the third-most in the league. Add those drops in and his adjusted completion percentage is 77.4, and featured some excellent passes. This is a big season for Tannehill in new coach Adam Gase’s offensive system, and at least in preseason the signs are good. RB: Derrick Henry, Tennessee Titans Henry came within a dozen yards of leading the league in rushing over the preseason, and he gained 216 yards on his 34 carries, generating 138 of them after contact. He also scored three touchdowns and forced 12 missed tackles, looking like the kind of player he was at Alabama will instantly translate to the NFL and demand a big role from day one. WR: Allen Robinson, Jacksonville Jaguars Robinson caught nine of the 10 passes thrown his way for 124 yards across his preseason action, and makes the team despite only 58 snaps of action because of his trademark highlight-reel catch ability mixed in among those catches. Robinson is on the cusp of being one of the very best receivers in the game. WR: Robbie Anderson, New York Jets Anderson had more than three times the snaps Robinson did, and only one receiver in the preseason was targeted more, with 25 passes sailing in his direction. The reason he saw so many was because he was open a lot, and a big play waiting to happen, catching 13 of them and gaining 20.3 yards per reception on the way to three touchdowns. Slot WR: Jeremy Butler, Baltimore Ravens OK, so slot receiver might be pushing it here for Butler, but he deserved a place in the team and did play 22 of his 107 snaps in the slot. Butler caught 16 of the 20 passes thrown his way (80 percent), scoring three times and forcing three missed tackles after the catch. TE: A.J. Derby, New England Patriots Houston’s Eric Tomlinson had an excellent blocking grade over the preseason, but was barely used as a receiver, and in today’s passing league, that’s a deal breaker. Enter Derby, who caught 15 of the 20 balls thrown his way for 189 yards and a touchdown. LT: Garry Williams, Chicago Bears In 177 snaps of action, Williams allowed just one sack, one hit and three hurries out on an island for the Bears, almost all of which came in the final game against the Browns and were long-developing plays rather than quick wins for the pass-rush. Williams also had a strong run-blocking grade. LG: Sebastian Tretola, Tennessee Titans The Titans are starting Quinton Spain at left guard, but based on the preseason Sebastian Tretola will be pushing him hard. He allowed just two total pressures in 65 pass-blocking snaps, wasn’t penalized all preseason and had the second-best run-block grade of any guard in the league. Spain wasn’t bad himself, but neither was he close to matching that level. C: Joey Hunt, Seattle Seahawks In 121 snaps of the preseason and 73 pass-blocking plays, blocking for some of the more challenging quarterbacks to keep protected, Joey Hunt didn’t allow a single pressure, nor was he penalized, and trailed only Travis Frederick in run-blocking grade. RG: Oday Aboushi, Houston Texans The Houston guard was one of only six guards to top 200 snaps of play (201) this preseason, and while he did allow some pressure (a sack and three hits), it totaled just four pressures over those snaps, and his run-blocking was on another level from any other guard. RT: Brent Qvale, New York Jets In 143 snaps, Qvale didn’t allow his QB to hit the ground, surrendering just three hurries. His run blocking didn’t stand out, but on an island in pass protection he was excellent, and did it without drawing any penalty flags in the process. Defense EDGE: Steven Means, Philadelphia Eagles With 17 total pressures, Means tied for the league lead in the preseason, and unlike Detroit’s Kevin Hyder, spread them across his four games, rather than racking a dozen of them up in a single outing. Means had two sacks, four hits, 11 hurries, a batted pass and three defensive stops in his 131 snaps of preseason action. DI: Darius Latham, Oakland Raiders He may not have managed to record a sack, but Darius Latham did notch a hit, six hurries and a batted pass while rushing the passer, as well as grading well in the run game, where he posted six defensive stops and one of the best grades among any interior defender. DI: Chris Jones, Kansas City Chiefs Jones only played 59 snaps this preseason, but was sufficiently dominant in those snaps to make this team anyway. He didn’t notch a sack, but did have eight total pressures in only 36 pass-rushing snaps. His quickness and strength was impressive to watch and earned him dominant grades against the run and pass. EDGE: Matt Longacre, Los Angeles Rams Each year the Rams seem to find a defensive lineman to crush the preseason, and this year it was Longacre, overshadowing fellow rookie Ian Seau despite the latter getting more face time on Hard Knocks. Longacre had an excellent grade in both pass rush (11 total pressures) and run defense (five defensive stops). LB: Shayne Skov, San Francisco 49ers An excellent preseason wasn’t enough to save Skov from roster cuts, but he has at least made it to the 49ers practice squad. He had fine grades against both the run and in coverage, with 12 defensive stops to his name over the preseason, the most of any linebacker. LB: Jamie Collins, New England Patriots At the other end of the depth chart spectrum, Collins had a very good preseason, with solid to good grades in every single game. He made eight defensive stops in just 97 snaps and looked like one of the league’s best linebackers, which of course is exactly what he is. CB: Kendall Fuller, Washington Redskins In 170 snaps of game time, Fuller didn’t allow a touchdown catch, surrendering nine catches on the 18 balls thrown his way for 93 yards. He recorded an interception and five pass breakups, and QBs throwing the ball his way had a passer rating of 42.1. CB: Rashard Robinson, San Francisco 49ers Robinson was always a talented prospect, and at least this preseason he has shown why. Seven of the 13 passes thrown his way (53.8 percent) have been caught for just 58 yards, 15 of which came after the catch. He didn’t allow a touchdown in preseason, while picking one pass off and breaking two more up. Slot CB: Vernon Hargreaves III, Tampa Bay Buccaneers Hargreaves was almost entirely perfect across preseason. Thrown at eight times, he allowed just one catch, for two yards. He caught twice as many passes himself on interceptions (two) as he allowed receivers he was covering to haul in, and he yielded a passer rating of 0.0 when thrown at, almost 40 points lower than just throwing the ball into the turf. S: Robert Blanton, Buffalo Bills Grading well in both coverage and run defense, Blanton was arguably the performer of the preseason at the safety position. With six defensive stops to his name as well as an interception, he was a standout for the Bills. S: Landon Collins, New York Giants It seems Collins may actually become the player the Giants thought he would when they drafted him, it just took an adjustment to his role. This preseason his coverage has been good, not the liability it was last regular season, and he has shown up in the run game. P: Dustin Colquitt, Kansas City Chiefs Seven of his 18 punts resulted in the opposition starting their drive within the 20-yard line, with just one ending up in a touchback. He did also suffer from a blocked kick. K: Steven Hauschka, Seattle Seahawks He nailed seven of eight attempts, including three of four from 50-plus yards. His lone miss came from north of 50 yards. ST: Rontez Miles, New York Jets Tied for the league lead in special teams with five tackles over the course of the preseason, he graded well on both kick offs and punts. RS: Alex Erickson, Cincinnati Bengals He had just one kick return and brought it back 31 yards, but returned six punts for 185 yards and a touchdown, and was good enough that the Bengals felt comfortable enough to cut long-time return man Brandon Tate.Cape Town - The Brumbies will welcome nine new faces into the squad for the 2018 Super Rugby season, including returning Wallaby back-rower David Pocock, as head coach Dan McKellar prepares for his first season in charge of the two-time champions. Pocock, who has 65 caps for Australia, will be back in Brumbies colours following his year’s sabbatical and is part of a formidable looking pack that includes eight Wallaby internationals. Pocock could potentially be joined by fellow Wallabies Scott Sio, Allan Alaalatoa, Ben Alexander, Josh Mann-Rea, Rory Arnold, Sam Carter and Blake Enever with the strength in depth throughout the forwards evident. Three of the new signings are up front with the former-Force trio of Mees Erasmus (prop), Richie Arnold (lock), and Isi Naisarani (No 8) joined by Lachlan McCaffrey (flank) who returns to the Brumbies after a three-year absence playing in Europe. Rookie hooker Folau Fainga’a joins fresh off an inclusion in the Wallabies train-on squad during the Rugby Championship following impressive form with Canberra Vikings in the National Rugby Championship. Amongst the backs, the Brumbies faithful will no doubt be delighted to see Christian Lealiifano return to full fitness and with some much-needed playing time under his belt in the PRO14 for Ulster. The pivot, who is two-points shy of 800 in his career for the Australian Capital Territory-based club, could have a huge impact. New faces in the back-line include scrumhalf Matt Lucas, an off-season capture from the Waratahs who will push Wallaby youngster Joe Powell for a starting berth, whilst outside backs Chance Peni and James Verity-Amm join from the Force. International stars Tevita Kuridrani, Kyle Godwin and Henry Speight are included whilst the continuing emergence of talented speedsters Tom Banks and Andrew Muirhead will be worth keeping an eye on. There’s a plenty of youth amongst the squad with Tuggeranong Vikings lock Darcy Swain and promising scrumhalf Ryan Lonergan aiming to push their more established teammates for a place in the matchday squad. In the coaching department, former assistant McKellar takes over from Stephen Larkham as head coach. He is joined by Laurie Fisher as forwards coach and Peter Hewat as backs coach while Peter Ryan (defence) and Dan Palmer (scrum) continue their important roles within the organisation. The Brumbies pre-season fixtures kick-off on Saturday, February 3 with a clash against the Rebels at Seiffert Oval in Queanbeyan. Brumbies 2018 Super Rugby squad: Forwards Robbie Abel, Allan Alaalatoa, Ben Alexander, Richard Arnold, Rory Arnold, Sam Carter, Tom Cusack, Blake Enever, Mees Erasmus, Folau Fainga’a, Lolo Fakaosilea, Ben Hyne, Leslie Leulua’Iali’i-Makin, Josh Mann-Rea, Nic Mayhew, Lachlan McCaffrey, Isireli Naisarani, David Pocock, Scott Sio, Darcy Swain, Rob Valetini Backs Tom Banks, James Dargaville, Kyle Godwin, Wharenui Hawera, Jordan Jackson-Hope, Tevita Kuridrani, Christian Lealiifano, Ryan Lonergan, Matt Lucas, Andrew Muirhead, Chance Peni-Ataera, Joe Powell, Andrew Smith, Henry Speight, Lausii Taliauli, James Verity-AmmReady to fight back? Sign up for Take Action Now and get three actions in your inbox every week. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. 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Be the first to hear about Nation Travels destinations, and explore the world with kindred spirits. Sign up for our Wine Club today. Did you know you can support The Nation by drinking wine? Israel has killed almost 800 Palestinians in the past twenty-one days in the Gaza Strip alone; its onslaught continues. The UN estimates that more than 74 percent of those killed are civilians. That is to be expected in a population of 1.8 million where the number of Hamas members is approximately 15,000. Israel does not deny that it killed those Palestinians using modern aerial technology and precise weaponry courtesy of the world’s only superpower. In fact, it does not even deny that they are civilians. Ad Policy Israel’s propaganda machine, however, insists that these Palestinians wanted to die (“culture of martyrdom”), staged their own death (“telegenically dead”) or were the tragic victims of Hamas’s use of civilian infrastructure for military purposes (“human shielding”). In all instances, the military power is blaming the victims for their own deaths, accusing them of devaluing life and attributing this disregard to cultural bankruptcy. In effect, Israel—along with uncritical mainstream media that unquestionably accept this discourse—dehumanizes Palestinians, deprives them even of their victimhood and legitimizes egregious human rights and legal violations. This is not the first time. The gruesome images of decapitated children’s bodies and stolen innocence on Gaza’s shores are a dreadful repeat of Israel’s assault on Gaza in November 2012 and winter 2008–09. Not only are the military tactics the same but so too are the public relations efforts and the faulty legal arguments that underpin the attacks. Mainstream media news anchors are inexplicably accepting these arguments as fact. Below I address five of Israel’s recurring talking points. I hope this proves useful to newsmakers. 1) Israel is exercising its right to self-defense. As the occupying power of the Gaza Strip, and the Palestinian Territories more broadly, Israel has an obligation and a duty to protect the civilians under its occupation. It governs by military and law enforcement authority to maintain order, protect itself and protect the civilian population under its occupation. It cannot simultaneously occupy the territory, thus usurping the self-governing powers that would otherwise belong to Palestinians, and declare war upon them. These contradictory policies (occupying a land and then declaring war on it) make the Palestinian population doubly vulnerable. The precarious and unstable conditions in the Gaza Strip from which Palestinians suffer are Israel’s responsibility. Israel argues that it can invoke the right to self-defense under international law as defined in Article 51 of the UN Charter. The International Court of Justice, however, rejected this faulty legal interpretation in its 2004 Advisory Opinion. The ICJ explained that an armed attack that would trigger Article 51 must be attributable to a sovereign state, but the armed attacks by Palestinians emerge from within Israel’s jurisdictional control. Israel does have the right to defend itself against rocket attacks, but it must do so in accordance with occupation law and not other laws of war. Occupation law ensures greater protection for the civilian population. The other laws of war balance military advantage and civilian suffering. The statement that “no country would tolerate rocket fire from a neighboring country” is therefore both a diversion and baseless. Israel denies Palestinians the right to govern and protect themselves, while simultaneously invoking the right to self-defense. This is a conundrum and a violation of international law, one that Israel deliberately created to evade accountability. 2) Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005. Israel argues that its occupation of the Gaza Strip ended with the unilateral withdrawal of its settler population in 2005. It then declared the Gaza Strip to be “hostile territory” and declared war against its population. Neither the argument nor the statement is tenable. Despite removing 8,000 settlers and the military infrastructure that protected their illegal presence, Israel maintained effective control of the Gaza Strip and thus remains the occupying power as defined by Article 47 of the Hague Regulations. To date, Israel maintains control of the territory’s air space, territorial waters, electromagnetic sphere, population registry and the movement of all goods and people. Israel argues that the withdrawal from Gaza demonstrates that ending the occupation will not bring peace. Some have gone so far as to say that Palestinians squandered their opportunity to build heaven in order to build a terrorist haven instead. These arguments aim to obfuscate Israel’s responsibilities in the Gaza Strip, as well as the West Bank. As Prime Minister Netanyahu once explained, Israel must ensure that it does not “get another Gaza in Judea and Samaria…. I think the Israeli people understand now what I always say: that there cannot be a situation, under any agreement, in which we relinquish security control of the territory west of the River Jordan.” Palestinians have yet to experience a day of self-governance. Israel immediately imposed a siege upon the Gaza Strip when Hamas won parliamentary elections in January 2006 and tightened it severely when Hamas routed Fatah in June 2007. The siege has created a “humanitarian catastrophe” in the Gaza Strip. Inhabitants will not be able to access clean water, electricity or tend to even the most urgent medical needs. The World Health Organization explains that the Gaza Strip will be unlivable by 2020. Not only did Israel not end its occupation, it has created a situation in which Palestinians cannot survive in the long-term. 3) This Israeli operation, among others, was caused by rocket fire from Gaza. Israel claims that its current and past wars against the Palestinian population in Gaza have been in response to rocket fire. Empirical evidence from 2008, 2012 and 2014 refute that claim. First, according to Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the greatest reduction of rocket fire came through diplomatic rather than military means. This chart demonstrates the correlation between Israel’s military attacks upon the Gaza Strip and Hamas militant activity. Hamas rocket fire increases in response to Israeli military attacks and decreases in direct correlation to them. Cease-fires have brought the greatest security to the region. During the four months of the Egyptian-negotiated cease-fire in 2008, Palestinian militants reduced the number of rockets to zero or single digits from the Gaza Strip. Despite this relative security and calm, Israel broke the cease-fire to begin the notorious aerial and ground offensive that killed 1,400 Palestinians in twenty-two days. In November 2012, Israel’s extrajudicial assassination of Ahmad Jabari, the chief of Hamas’s military wing in Gaza, while he was reviewing terms for a diplomatic solution, again broke the cease-fire that precipitated the eight-day aerial offensive that killed 132 Palestinians. Immediately preceding Israel’s most recent operation, Hamas rocket and mortar attacks did not threaten Israel. Israel deliberately provoked this war with Hamas. Without producing a shred of evidence, it accused the political faction of kidnapping and murdering three settlers near Hebron. Four weeks and almost 700 lives later, Israel has yet to produce any evidence demonstrating Hamas’s involvement. During ten days of Operation Brother’s Keeper in the West Bank, Israel arrested approximately 800 Palestinians without charge or trial, killed nine civilians and raided nearly 1,300 residential, commercial and public buildings. Its military operation targeted Hamas members released during the Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange in 2011. It’s these Israeli provocations that precipitated the Hamas rocket fire to which Israel claims left it with no choice but a gruesome military operation. 4) Israel avoids civilian casualties, but Hamas aims to kill civilians. Hamas has crude weapons technology that lacks any targeting capability. As such, Hamas rocket attacks ipso facto violate the principle of distinction because all of its attacks are indiscriminate. This is not contested. Israel, however, would not be any more tolerant of Hamas if it strictly targeted military objects, as we have witnessed of late. Israel considers Hamas and any form of its resistance, armed or otherwise, to be illegitimate. In contrast, Israel has the eleventh most powerful military in the world, certainly the strongest by far in the Middle East, and is a nuclear power that has not ratified the non-proliferation agreement and has precise weapons technology. With the use of drones, F-16s and an arsenal of modern weapon technology, Israel has the ability to target single individuals and therefore to avoid civilian casualties. But rather than avoid them, Israel has repeatedly targeted civilians as part of its military operations. The Dahiya Doctrine is central to these operations and refers to Israel’s indiscriminate attacks on Lebanon in 2006. Maj. Gen. Gadi Eizenkot said that this would be applied elsewhere: What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on. […] We will apply disproportionate force on it and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases. Israel has kept true to this promise. The 2009 UN Fact-Finding Mission to the Gaza Conflict, better known as the Goldstone Mission, concluded “from a review of the facts on the ground that it witnessed for itself that what was prescribed as the best strategy [Dahiya Doctrine] appears to have been precisely what was put into practice.” According to the National Lawyers Guild, Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, Israel directly targeted civilians or recklessly caused civilian deaths during Operation Cast Lead. Far from avoiding the deaths of civilians, Israel effectively considers them legitimate targets. 5) Hamas hides its weapons in homes, mosques and schools and uses human shields. This is arguably one of Israel’s most insidious claims, because it blames Palestinians for their own death and deprives them of even their victimhood. Israel made the same argument in its war against Lebanon in 2006 and in its war against Palestinians in 2008. Notwithstanding its military cartoon sketches, Israel has yet to prove that Hamas has used civilian infrastructure to store military weapons. The two cases where Hamas indeed stored weapons in UNRWA schools, the schools were empty. UNRWA discovered the rockets and publicly condemned the violation of its sanctity. International human rights organizations that have investigated these claims have determined that they are not true. It attributed the high death toll in Israel’s 2006 war on Lebanon to Israel’s indiscriminate attacks. Human Rights Watch notes: The evidence Human Rights Watch uncovered in its on-the-ground investigations refutes [Israel’s] argument…we found strong evidence that Hezbollah stored most of its rockets in bunkers and weapon storage facilities located in uninhabited fields and valleys, that in the vast majority of cases Hezbollah fighters left populated civilian areas as soon as the fighting started, and that Hezbollah fired the vast majority of its rockets from pre-prepared positions outside villages. In fact, only Israeli soldiers have systematically used Palestinians as human shields. Since Israel’s incursion into the West Bank in 2002, it has used Palestinians as human shields by tying young Palestinians onto the hoods of their cars or forcing them to go into a home where a potential militant may be hiding. Even assuming that Israel’s claims were plausible, humanitarian law obligates Israel to avoid civilian casualties that “would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated.” A belligerent force must verify whether civilian or civilian infrastructure qualifies as a military objective. In the case of doubt, “whether an object which is normally dedicated to civilian purposes, such as a place of worship, a house or other dwelling or a school, is being used to make an effective contribution to military action, it shall be presumed not to be so used.” In the over thee weeks of its military operation, Israel has demolished 3,175 homes, at least a dozen with families inside; destroyed five hospitals and six clinics; partially damaged sixty-four mosques and two churches; partially to completely destroyed eight government ministries; injured 4,620; and killed over 700 Palestinians. At plain sight, these numbers indicate Israel’s egregious violations of humanitarian law, ones that amount to war crimes. Beyond the body count and reference to law, which is a product of power, the question to ask is, What is Israel’s end goal? What if Hamas and Islamic Jihad dug tunnels beneath the entirety of the Gaza Strip—they clearly did not, but let us assume they did for the sake of argument. According to Israel’s logic, all of Gaza’s 1.8 million Palestinians are therefore human shields for being born Palestinian in Gaza. The solution is to destroy the 360-kilometer square strip of land and to expect a watching world to accept this catastrophic loss as incidental. This is possible only by framing and accepting the dehumanization of Palestinian life. Despite the absurdity of this proposal, it is precisely what Israeli society is urging its military leadership to do. Israel cannot bomb Palestinians into submission, and it certainly cannot bomb them into peace.More options: Share, Mark as favorite Now that we’re at the beginning of college graduation season, I thought it would be a good time to show the updated chart above of the huge college degree gap by gender for the upcoming College Class of 2015 (data here). Based on Department of Education estimates, women will earn a disproportionate share of college degrees at every level of higher education in 2015 for the tenth straight year. Overall, women in the Class of 2015 will earn 142 college degrees at all levels for every 100 men, and there will be a 660,800 college degree gap in favor of women for this year’s college graduates (2.25 million total degrees for women vs. 1.59 million total degrees for men). By level of degree, women will earn: a) 161 associate’s degrees for every 100 men (female majority in every year since 1978), b) 131 bachelor’s degrees for every 100 men (female majority since 1982), 152 master’s degrees for every 100 men (female majority since 1987) and 108 doctoral degrees for every 100 men (female majority since 2006). Over the next decade, the gender disparity for college degrees is expected to increase according to Department of Education forecasts, so that by 2022, women will earn 148 college degrees for every 100 degrees earned by men, with especially huge gender imbalances in favor of women for associate’s degrees (162 women for every 100 men) and master’s degrees (162 women for every 100 men). MP: The huge gender inequity in higher education for the Class of 2015 is nothing new — women have earned a majority of US college degrees in every year since 1981 and since then have earned an increasingly larger share of college degrees compared to men in almost every year, so that men have now become the “second sex” in higher education. Despite the huge and growing “degree gap” over the last 34 years in favor of women, there are still almost 200 women’s centers on college campuses around the country (list here), some receiving public funding, most with the stated goal of “promoting (or advocating) gender equity” and promoting “women’s success.” Here are some examples: The University of Minnesota’s Women’s Center advances equity for women students, staff, faculty, and alumnae across identities by increasing connections for women’s success, cultivating socially responsible leaders, and advocating for organizational culture change toward excellence for all. The University of Virginia Women’s Center educates U.Va. students in how to create change in self, community, and the world by providing programs and services that advocate gender equity. The Duke University Women’s Center is dedicated to helping every woman at Duke become self-assured with a kind of streetwise savvy that comes from actively engaging with the world. We welcome men and women alike who are committed to gender equity and social change. The mission of the University of Idaho Women’s Center is to promote and advocate for gender equity on campus and in the community through programs and services that educate and support all individuals in building an inclusive and compassionate society. The University of North Carolina Women’s Center strives to be a leader on efforts and initiatives related to gender equity. MP: Even though the publicly stated goal of almost every Women’s Center is “gender equity,” there seems to be a very selective concern about sex imbalances, with no concern at all about the gender inequities at every level of higher education favoring women to the point that men have clearly become the “second sex” in higher education. Here apparently is the feminist approach to the goal of gender equity: Rule A: Any outcome where women statistically represent less than 50% of a population (or if the women’s softball field bleachers are inferior to the boy’s baseball field bleachers) is a case of gender inequity, sexism, and/or discrimination that must be addressed with government investigations, awareness, public funding for women’s centers, legal action, regulation, legislation (Title IX), scholarships for women, etc. to correct the sex imbalances, with the ultimate goal being perfect statistical gender equity. Rule B: Any gender imbalance where women represent more than 50% of a population (e.g. higher education at all levels: associate’s, bachelor’s, master’s, and doctor’s degrees; degrees in biology, psychology, veterinary science, nursing, education, etc.) isn’t really gender inequity, or at least it is gender inequity that doesn’t really count and can be completely ignored because that statistical gender disparity is a natural outcome of women being more talented and/or more highly motivated than men. Like in “Animal Farm” both genders are equal but………. Bottom Line: Now that there’s a huge (and growing) college degree gap in favor of women and men have become the second sex in higher education, maybe it’s time to stop funding hundreds of women’s centers that promote a goal of gender equity that was achieved thirty years ago?“Words belong to each other,” Virginia Woolf said in the only surviving recording of her voice, a magnificent
rounder for a bad route? Fck you, Marv. Fck you. The Denver Broncos The Bengals beat the Broncos?.. Is the season saved?!.. Calm your tits, this wasn’t a “good win”, but Andy Dalton managed to do what everyone’s fcking man-crush AJ McCarron couldn’t do; beat the Brock Lobster. I’m not going to go down that AJ McCarron rabbit hole, but if the Bengals thought he was better than Andy, they wouldn’t have tried to trade him to the most incompetent football team on the planet. Andy is the man, deal with it. Anyways… Aside from Dre Kirkpatrick nearly doing the most Bengal thing ever, this game was boring as fckkkk. How do the Bengals find even more ways to Bengal up plays, that was incredible — Cincinnati Problems (@CincyProblems) November 19, 2017 The offense sputtered to the tune of 190 yards and only 12 first downs. The defense allowed the Broncos to march up and down the field. Fat Randy missed yet another PAT. and in Breaking News; water is wet. The Broncos ran 26 more offensive plays than the Bengals (52/79), out-gained them 190 to 341 and out-possessed them 24:49 to 35:11. Good win? Tell me what the fck I’m supposed to be excited about by barely beating a 3-8 Broncos team. The Most Incompetent Football Team On The Planet Also known as the Cleveland Browns. Listen, the Bengals were always going to win this game. It didn’t matter what they did. The Browns aren’t just “bad”, they’re unequivocally beyond explanation. “Browns Last Win” Clock?? #GraphicOfTheYear #PoorBrowns A post shared by Cincinnati Problems (@cincyproblems) on Nov 27, 2017 at 8:38am PST A lot of people were labeling this a “trap game”. No, traps sometimes catch things; Cleveland Browns receivers do not. In a turn of events from the entire season thus far, the Bengals took care of business and kept this game largely uninteresting. We finally got to see Joe Mixon do some Joe Mixon sht thanks to some decent play from the offensive line. Yes, the defense still worries me, but they played well enough to win and pop the fcking champagne, Fat Randy didn’t miss any kicks and Bodine’s dumb ass tackled Mixon into the end-zone. Yay. What a winning formula. Playoff Bound? Through all of this, the orange-n-black men currently sit at 5-6 and are alive in the playoff hunt of the Dumpster Fire that is the entire AFC. Next up is Pittsburgh looming on Monday Night. Do I think the Bengals will win? No. Do I hope they’ll win? Fck yes I do! I’ll be there. I’ll be loud. (And you know I’ll be damn drunk!) The Steelers Suck. Always and Forever. Who Dey! /end rant Look for more Drunken Bengals Postgame Rants All Season From THE JUNGLER FollowPrivacy advocates are standing up in Apple’s fight against the FBI. At Apple stores in more than 30 cities worldwide Tuesday, protesters are planning to rally in support of Apple’s decision not to break into the phone of one of the San Bernardino, California, shooters. Apple publicly opposed the call by the FBI Wednesday and has since been tossed into a stand-off between Silicon Valley and Washington. Fight for the Future, a group that works to defend the Internet as a free and open system and has campaigned for net neutrality and online privacy, are coordinating the protests across the world, the organization announced Saturday. The current list of protests can be viewed at DontBreakOurPhones.org. Events are planned in Hong Kong, Munich, Britain and throughout the United States, including in New York City, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, and Palo Alto, California. Members of Fight for the Future in Washington will gather at FBI headquarters. “People are rallying at Apple stores because what the FBI is demanding here will make all of us less safe, not more safe,” Evan Greer, campaign director of Fight for the Future, said in a statement. “Their unconstitutional attack on our digital security could put millions of people in danger, so we’re giving those people a way to get their voices heard.” Photo: Fight for the Future The protesters plan to carry 10-foot banners and iPhone-shaped signs that read “FBI: Don’t Break Our Phones” and “Secure Phones Save Lives.” The coordinators also are encouraging people to turn their smartphones, laptops and tablets into protest signs, a press release said. On Wednesday, Apple CEO Tim Cook released a statement against the FBI’s demands to access the contents of the iPhone 5C used by Syed Rizwan Farook, one of two shooters in the Dec. 2 terrorist attack in San Bernardino. In the day following the motion, other leaders in Silicon Valley took Cook’s side by issuing public statements on Facebook and Twitter. Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, along with Facebook, WhatsApp and Mozilla all have come out in support of Cook’s decision. Even so, the U.S Justice Department filed a motion Friday to compel the tech giant to comply with court orders.SCP-1225 Item #: SCP-1225 Object Class: Safe Special Containment Procedures: SCP-1225 is kept within its original packing, including styrofoam padding, in an isolated room measuring 15 m x 15 m x 15 m at Site 37. SCP-1225 is kept in a locked stainless steel box on a concrete pedestal that is protected from the elements, in a 25 m x 25 m roofless containment area open to the air in at least a 180 degree arc. Unless part of an experiment, no sealed or closed containers are allowed within the containment area, including pockets in clothing and end-caps on pens. Personnel should spend no more than 60 minutes per 24 hour period within the containment area. Description: SCP-1225 is a spindle-shaped glass ornament with a small loop at the top allowing it to be hung from a hook. When hung on a tree, bush or other "woody" plant, it initiates a process of accelerated decay and aging in any closed containers within 4 meters of it. The contents of these containers will change so as to reflect the signs of typical wear-and-tear that the object would acquire over the course of several years. Textiles, clothing and stuffed plush items become faded and threadbare, often with ripped seams and missing or broken fasteners. Solid-state metal, plastic or glass objects will display chips, cracks, scratches, and heavy corrosion similar to acid burns. Electronics display both hardware and software problems sufficient to cause fatal shutdowns within a few minutes of use. Foodstuffs will become stale or moldy. Living organisms do not die, but display health problems consistent with age as well as extended malnourishment, neglect or abuse. The decay process is rapid, with affected objects displaying approximately 1 year's worth of aging within the first 24 hours of exposure. However, the rate of decay slows over time and asymptotically approaches a maximum of approximately 10 years' worth of aging over the course of 3 weeks. Addendum 1225-D: Study of SCP-1225's pre-containment circumstances, as well as experimentation regarding the aging effects of long-term exposure to SCP-1225, indicate that SCP-1225 has a secondary effect. Any individuals that spend more than 4 hours per 24 hour period within 10-12 meters of SCP-1225 begin to display increased levels of aggression, anger and irritability, decreased patience and frustration tolerance, and exaggeration of negative or annoying personal traits such as over-eating, alcohol consumption, snoring and unpleasant body odor. This effect persists even when the affected individuals are no longer within range of SCP-1225, but gradually fades over the course of 8 days. This increase in aggravating factors typically results in heightened levels of interpersonal conflict, most commonly expressed by severe verbal or physical fights. When more than one individual affected by SCP-1225 interact with each other, the effects are much more severe and escalate much faster. In 27.5% of cases, this results in serious injuries or fatalities. Addendum 1225-H: Due to a statistically abnormal amount of equipment failure, structural decay and interpersonal conflicts requiring administrative action at Site 37, more in-depth studies were performed on SCP-1225. The current prevailing theory is that SCP-1225 still operates even when not placed on a plant, but much slower and less intensely. It appears to treat enclosed structures or buildings containing it as if they were containers placed beneath it and will affect them as well. Whether or not the containing structure includes a roof, trellis or other overhead cover appears to most strongly determine whether or not SCP-1225 will affect the structure. The acquisition of D-Class personnel from SCP-784 is currently under consideration due to the fact that these personnel are less prone to equipment failures caused by SCP-1225. Further research is required in order to determine the exact nature of this effect. Containment protocols have been updated.LINCOLN — Hanscom Air Force Base returned to normal Thursday afternoon after a moving truck that had tested positive for possible explosives was inspected and deemed safe. But some shipping crates in the truck contained a residue that will undergo further testing, officials said. “No one is under arrest. No one is suspected of a crime. What we’re trying to figure out is how some explosive material ended up on this package,” Major Fran Leahy of the Massachusetts State Police told reporters outside the base’s gate in Lincoln. The announcement ended a heavy security response that involved numerous agencies, including the FBI, the National Guard, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. While the State Police bomb squad inspected the truck, officials closed a gate onto the base, shut down the exit from Route 2A to Hanscom, and evacuated several buildings. Advertisement Television news helicopters circled overhead, relaying video of the scene, as troopers investigated the truck and its contents over several hours. Get Metro Headlines in your inbox: The 10 top local news stories from metro Boston and around New England delivered daily. Sign Up Thank you for signing up! Sign up for more newsletters here Leahy said the heavy security measures were appropriate in an era of heightened sensitivity to terrorist attacks. Related Links Read Story Read a statement from the moving company involved in Hanscom explosives scare Hanscom Air Force Base returned to normal Thursday afternoon after a moving truck that tested positive for possible explosives was checked out and deemed safe. “In looking back now on the response that was given, it was the right call by the United States Air Force and it was the right response,” Leahy said. “We realize it was an inconvenience to some of the people who work and live here but, given the times we live in, we operate in an abundance of caution.” The incident began around 9 a.m., officials said, when a moving truck carrying belongings for a member of the military tested positive for explosives during a routine inspection at the base’s gate. State Police were summoned, and a dog from the bomb unit confirmed the presence of explosives. That triggered a full response from state and federal law enforcement and security agencies. Advertisement Officials eventually determined that there were trace amounts of an explosive material on shipping crates inside the truck. Officials said they were not sure what the substance was, or where it came from. The crates were sent to the State Police crime lab for testing, and the truck was deemed safe shortly after 1 p.m., and allowed to make its delivery, officials said. Leahy said it was a “high priority of the Massachusetts State Police to determine what caused this event today.” The truck belonged to Big Foot Moving & Storage of Acton. “Big Foot Moving & Storage employees and company personnel complied with all request of state, federal and military authorities managing the inspection and investigation. Our vehicle and personnel have been cleared and we are thankful that the incident has been resolved,” Big Foot president and chief executive Mike Bavuso said in a statement. Advertisement “We thank all the authorities and military personnel for their thoroughness and their commitment to protecting our country every day,” he said. The base oversees acquisition and implementation of Air Force technology, said spokesman Benjamin Newell.The C64 Reloaded has been discontinued replaced by the Commodore C64 Reloaded MK2. The C64 Reloaded is a new C64 mainboard - made in 2015. So what's new about the C64 reloaded? We're proud to say: Only very few things are new. We took the original Commodore schematics for mainboard 250466 and only did tiny surgical improvements to create a mainboard that is fully compatible with the original C64, but also has enhancements in a few spots that add to it's usability and reduce power consumption. Other than that, it's a C64, and we assume that you know exactly what that is - we therefore don't describe the C64 here, but the differencies and enhancements that we've made. The power switch looks just like the original, but instead of two positions, it has three of them. In "down" position, the computer is switched off. In "middle" position, it's switched on. The "up" position will reset the machine, and automatically click back into the middle "on" position. This lets you use a reset button without the need to drill a hole into your case for an additional button. Power conversion is probably the biggest change from the original C64 to our C64 Reloaded: Our design makes use of modern a DC-DC converter, which brings efficiency of the whole computer into the 21st century: While the original C64 requires a transformer-based power supply, which is very low-efficiency by it's design principle, our C64 Reloaded takes a 12V DC power source, so you can make use of a modern power supply that is compliant with the EuP-directive. This new, smart power design has a lot more reserves than the original C64: With up to 4 amps on the main 5V power rail, the C64 Reloaded can provide more than twice as much power than it's role model. The original C64 can use a standard TV as a monitor, because it had a built-in TV modulator. The C64 Reloaded does not use this technology any more, because in the year 2015, TV sets with an interface for that kind of signal are not common any more. The C64 Reloaded has two connectors in the place of the TV modulator that let you make use of more common audio and video interfaces: An S-Video connector and a 3.5mm audio jack. These two connectors are mounted on a separate circuit board, which is mounted at an angle on the C64 Reloaded. This puts the two connectors in positions where the holes of the original C64 case can be used, and drilling or milling won't be required. All ROMs of the C64 are united in a single EPROM chip, which not only reduces power consumption, but also gives some extra space for a second Kernal ROM and a second character set. Customers who own an EPROM programmer can create their own set of ROMs and switch between the two choices: The C64 Reloaded board gives the RESTORE key an additional meaning. The standard use of this key is to tap it once. On the C64 Reloaded, you switch between the two Kernal ROMs by holding down the RESTORE key for three seconds or more. Once again, this enhancement does not require any modifications on the original C64 case, so you don't have to damage such an original case. The EPROM of all C64 Reloaded boards are pre-programmed with two identical Kernal and character ROMs. Finally, there is a true innovation under the hood of this new motherboard: The VSP-fix. VSP stands for "variable screen position" and it was first discovered in 1987. However, this programming trick does not work on all C64 computers. Some computers crash when this effect is used, and others work fine with it. For the C64 Reloaded, it's not a game of chances: All C64 Reloaded boards are VSP-safe. For an in-depth description of this feature, please read the technical article in our Wiki. There are a few more technical details of the C64 Reloaded that may be of interest if you are a technical person. An in-depth description of jumpers, connectors and chip options can be found in our Wiki article about the C64 Reloaded, which also serves as online documentation. Please keep in mind that some of the chips on this motherboard are used. Especially the two 6526-CIA chips, but also the video chip may have scratches. However, all boards have passed the same test procedure that was used by Commodore, and you have the iComp warranty on that. Please also note that we can't take your preferrence for any chip revision - the boards come pre-assembled and tested, and it would be too expensive and time-consuming to assemble the boards as orders come in. The box includes: C64 Reloaded motherboard CSG8701 replacement circuit (PAL or NTSC, pre-installed) CIA chips 6526 or 6526A To make it a full computer, you need to add: Processor 6510 or 8500 Video chip 6569, 8565, 6567 or 8562 PLA chip 906114-01, SuperPLA or RealPLA SID chip 6581 or 8580 case keyboard 12V DC power supply metal side-bracket (if you want to use the breadbox-type case) For detailed specifications and related downloads please look at our wiki.The soak and strain washing bowl is a bowl that you can use to soak, wash, and rinse your food with so it doesn't fall out when doing so. No longer will you need to worry about your food falling into the nasty sink where you just through saw raw chicken into, even though you would just pick it up and put it back in the bowl, what Daddy don't know, don't hurt him, until he gets food poisoning, that will hurt him. The soak and strain wash bowl is great for soaking dirty fruit you find in the garbage or on the side of the road, just let it soak for an hour, then dump the black opaque water that it creates using the strainer and your so called food will stay in the bowl. Perfect for fruit, veggies, pasta, herbs and more, the soak and strain bowl comes with an easy grip handle, is angled for easy draining, is dishwasher safe, can withstand temperatures of up to 220 F, and measures 7.5 inches in diameter.While They Watched uses archival footage and defector interviews to accuse the world of ‘wilful blindness’ for failing to intervene A breaking news alert cuts across the screen announcing that North Korea “has fallen”. There are celebrations on the streets of Seoul, as analysts debate what will happen next. The opening scenes of While They Watched, a new film about North Korea, imagines what would happen were the regime to collapse. Set in an unspecified time in the near-future, it uses archive footage and interviews with former prison guards, defectors, and human rights activists to build up a picture of what we know about the totalitarian state – and to accuse the world of “wilful blindness” for failing to intervene. North Korea’s government stands accused of widespread atrocities and the country’s young leader, Kim Jong-un, has been warned by the United Nations that he could face charges for crimes against humanity. Yet the film points out that despite evidence from investigators and defectors alike, no real action has been taken. North Korea human rights abuses resemble those of the Nazis, says UN inquiry Read more Director Jake Smith said he had been a “naive Londoner” until he read Nothing to Envy, a damning book about life in North Korea written by Barbara Demick. “I decided to dig deeper,” he said. “I moved to South Korea and began meeting defectors and finding out if these things were true. I was shocked.” He decided to make the film as a plea to world leaders to take a stance. It got off the ground thanks to £1,500 pledged on crowd-funding site Indiegogo, before securing support from a South Korean production company. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Michael Kirby holds up the damming UN report in a clip from the film. Photograph: While They Watched/Handout In hard-hitting scenes, the trailer combines images of the Kim family being cheered by adoring crowds cut with archival footage of a Nazi-era concentration camp. Later, black-and-white images show Adolf Hitler enjoying similar adoration. It uses news clips of the UN’s Michael Kirby, the chair of a commission on human rights in North Korea, issuing stark warnings about the fate of the country’s citizens. Kirby’s report concluded that the government’s actions resembled those of Nazis during the second world war, and the film follows this narrative. Smith knows that the comparison between North Korea and Nazi Germany is controversial. More than six million people were killed during the holocaust, whereas estimates of the death toll at the hands of the North Korean government range from 200,000 to 3 million since 1990s – with starvation playing a key role. He invited Kirby to appear in the film, but the Australian judge declined on the grounds that he had to stay impartial. Countering apathy Three governments come in for the most criticism: China, over its forced repatriation of North Koreans who cross the border illegally, South Korea, for ignoring the problem north of the border, and the DPRK itself. After living in South Korea, spending time with defectors and shadowing campaigners, Smith said he was surprised by how little southerners know, or care, about the plight of their neighbours. “It’s on the news but no one talks about it... people have little interest,” he said. A 2014 public opinion survey found an increased level of detachment and apathy amongst young South Koreans about the situation facing people across the border. One of the stars of the film is Yeon-mi Park, a defector who has become an outspoken critic of the country. Yeon-mi, who was relatively unknown when filming started, gained global recognition for her “courageous” and “harrowing” speech at the One Young World Forum in Dublin, Ireland last year. Smith’s team had already secured exclusive access to film her. Such is the control over information that leaves the country, the outside world relies on defectors like Yeon-mi to fill in the gaps. This process is far from perfect: some testimonies, including Yeon-mi’s, have been questioned over their accuracy. It’s a dilemma Smith says he was well aware of, but believes it’s no coincidence that defectors stories paint the same picture of hardship and abuse at the hands of the regime. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Park Yeon-mi in the film, the young defector has been questioned over the accuracy of her story Photograph: While They Watched/Handout While the details may vary from the truth slightly, “people are missing the bigger picture: the trauma people went through and the stress they suffered”, said Smith. It’s not a question of a hidden agenda, he adds, “when they tell their stories I think they truly believe them”. The film will be shown to its main backers and supporters in Seoul tomorrow and is being submitted to the festival circuit in the UK later this year. Full details of the release will be available on the film’s website. Smith and his team have also set up a campaign page assisting people in “immediately and effectively alleviate the suffering of the North Korean people”. It includes links for more information, instructions on how to raise awareness and funds for platforms like Open Radio North Korea, an information programme that broadcasts over the the hermetically sealed border.Karma is a book with a lot of promise that fails to deliver. The actual concept is what caused me to go ahead and read this book, but the execution left a lot to be desired. There were too many inconsistencies in this book to make it likable. The main characters were all terrible people (including the protagonist) with no redeeming qualities other than it seems that they were all attractive (with two exceptions). The protagonist read like an 18-year-old girl rather than a supposed well-educated lawyer and her responses were so childish that I rolled my eyes on multiple occasions. The author also repeated the same details over and over again (yep, we get it, Fate is sexy and he likes to lean on things, yes, we understand, Karma hates Fate even though he is sexy). My biggest issue is that the entire reader relationship with Karma is a cheat. Since the book is written in the first person, and we get to see her perspective on everything, the "twists" in this book make no sense. I can't elaborate more without a spoiler, so my thoughts on that will be included in the spoiler section below. Like many authors, Donna chooses to make the romantic interest for Fate a total tool. He is rude, abusive and uncaring, but readers are supposed to root for some kind of relationship between him and Karma. All I can think is run the other way - fast, faster! Putting this type of man into the role of the ideal is just stupid. WARNING SPOILERS AHEAD (skip to end for final thoughts with no spoilers) In terms of Karma, we are led to believe (by her own introspections) that she is a lawyer for the downtrodden. She takes on big firms and represents the little guy, the one that gets trampled over by corporations because they don't have the big bucks to pay for a high-quality lawyer. Her goal is to become a judge so that she can help those that aren't spoken for even more. She is engaged to a physiatrist whom she loves and admires. Her very best friend whom she can tell anything too (repeated several times in the book). She feels sorry for women that stay in bad relationships with men who cheat or who are abusive - she's not that type of girl, she is strong and in charge. In reality, however, (this is the twist for some reason) she is a terrible person who represents the dregs of society, getting people off from crimes they should have served years in jail for. Her relationship with her fiance is fake as well. He is cheating on her and she knew it. She decided to ignore it because she was tired of relationships not working out, totally dispelling the idea that she is a strong woman that doesn't take crap from any man. When she starts the job, she is required to kill someone to adjust their karma (the person in question was a murderer and a thief) and she freaked out and said never again. Then spent the rest of the book actively trying to kill those she decided were the bad guys. Every aspect of her character is a lie it's just stupid. END OF SPOILERS From the beginning to the end, the lack of training, information and the misinformation was frustrating. The one saving grace is that the author does know how to tell a story (in terms of right word use, correct grammar, and even flow) but that isn't enough to save this series in my opinion. Based on some other reviews, I think I would be willing to try something else from this author, but this series is a no go for me.Sexual Abuse Lawsuit: Federal court dismisses case against Bellows Falls man Posted Friday, April 7, 2017 3:31 pm BELLOWS FALLS — A federal judge dismissed a lawsuit filed against the Bellows Falls Congregation of Jehovah's Witnesses and Norton True, a former baptized minister of the church. The church and True had been sued by Annessa Lewis, who contended she was sexually abused by True sometime between 1991 and 1993 and elders of the church, who were told about the alleged abuse in 1996, failed to do anything about it. The alleged abuse was reported to the Vermont State Police, which concluded there wasn't enough evidence to charge True. The court's decision hinged on a reading of Vermont's statute of limitations and previous rulings that defined how an organization can be held liable for crimes committed by a person it had control over. Vermont has a six-year statute of limitations for actions based on "childhood sexual abuse," starting from either the date "of the act alleged to have caused the injury or condition" or "the time the victim discovered that the injury or condition was caused by that act." According to the court ruling, because Lewis turned 18 in 2005, the statute of limitations ran out in 2011, and she did not file her lawsuit until 2014. "Lewis does not refer to specific dates she sustained or discovered her injuries in her complaint and does not allege how she discovered her injuries. She merely alleges that 'prior to [her] fifth birthday... Defendant True... touched [her]...' [w]ithin the six years predating the filing of this Complaint, [she] discovered that the injuries and conditions as to which she complains herein were caused by the childhood sexual abuse... and that Defendants were responsible for the injuries and conditions," wrote Judge J. Garvan Murtha. According to documents presented in the U.S. District Court for the District of Vermont, Lewis had made comments to family and friends and had written about True's alleged abuse before she turned 18, noting the "abuse could have caused her emotional distress and physical manifestations of emotional distress..." The Vermont law does not provide limitless causes of action, accruing every time a new condition is discovered, wrote Murtha. "Normally, a plaintiff cannot claim that an additional limitations period is inaugurated when additional injuries arising from the same incident are discovered later. A cause of action is generally deemed to accrue at the earliest point at which a plaintiff discovers an injury and its possible cause." Murtha noted that "a reasonable factfinder," such as a juror, could conclude that the statute of limitations began ticking when she was 9, when she first revealed the alleged abuse to a family member, or even in her teens, when she told friends about it. "Lewis had sufficient information to put a reasonable person on notice that True may have been liable for her injuries: she knew she was sexually abused by True and she knew she suffered flashbacks of the abuse during sexual activity during her teens," wrote Murtha. "Lewis does not allege suppression of the memory of the abuse, and admits she suffered intense depression during her teen years, but asserts she did not receive effective counseling to help her understand that she had been impacted. The law, however, does not require absolute knowledge of a link to trigger accrual of the statute of limitations." Because Lewis waited until she was in her late 20s to file a civil suit against True, the statute of limitations had run out, noted Murtha, therefore the case against True was dismissed. Lewis also claimed the Bellows Falls Jehovah's Witnesses Congregation and its national organization, Watchtower, were negligent in supervising True. However, wrote Murtha, her claim that the church could held negligent had to pass three elements to prevent dismissal, including "whether the Congregation... undertook to provide protective monitoring services; failed to so monitor True; and the failure increased the risk of harm to Plaintiff.... The Congregation argued that Lewis's claim fails as a matter of law because they did not undertake to provide protective monitoring services, did not breach any duty, and there was no increased risk of harm." "The fatal flaw in Plaintiff's argument," wrote Murtha, "is that Lewis's mother's friend... took Lewis to her father True's home while she was babysitting Lewis on the day the abuse occurred. Lewis's mother was not aware (her friend) sometimes took the Lewis children to True's home or that she did so on the day the abuse occurred. Even assuming the Congregation and Watchtower had a duty to vigilantly monitor True in the congregation setting and they breached that duty thereby increasing the risk of harm to Lewis, no reasonable factfinder could conclude that breach was the cause of Lewis's sexual abuse because a third party provided True access to Lewis at True's home." However, Lewis provided no evidence that True was subject to the Congregation's control. Murtha dismissed the suit against True, the congregation and Watchtower "with prejudice," which means she is barred from bringing an action on the same claim. However, Lewis could appeal his decision to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Bob Audette can be contacted at 802-254-2311, ext. 160. Follow him on Twitter @audette.reformer. TALK TO US If you'd like to leave a comment (or a tip or a question) about this story with the editors, please email us. We also welcome letters to the editor for publication; you can do that by filling out our letters form and submitting it to the newsroom."Whatever be his descent from father to son, by some chance the blood of Westernesse runs nearly true in him; as it does in his other son, Faramir, and yet did not in Boromir whom he loved best. He has long sight. He can perceive, if he bends his will thither, much of what is passing in the minds of men." –Gandalf on Denethor Temple of the Deceived, the next Adventure Pack in the Dream-chaser cycle for The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game, is scheduled to arrive at United States retailers in just over a week. When it does, we will have traveled fully halfway through the cycle's many surprising twists and turns. Simultaneously, we will have seen half its new heroes and player cards, and many of the new deck designs that the cycle's new cards promote will have already begun to come together. In today's Second Breakfast article, lead developer Matthew Newman presents one such deck design. The Dream-chaser and the Men of Gondor One of our larger design goals with the Dream-chaser cycle was to introduce new ways for players to interact with resources, whether by playing allies that benefit when played with the resources from a single hero’s pool, by introducing high-cost allies with powerful effects, or by adding abilities to cards that could be paid for by multiple players. As a matter of happy coincidence, all of these new effects add new synergies to the Gondor trait, which has always benefited from having a wealth of resources, and there are a lot of Gondor-themed cards in the game which allow you to gain extra resources. For these reasons, the Dream-chaser cycle adds new twists to a lot of the older Gondor cards, and we decided it was the perfect time to introduce a new Leadership version of Denethor (Flight of the Stormcaller, 1). If the Lore version from the Core Set represented the far-seeing Steward who dared to search for knowledge in the White Tower's Palantir, then this version represents Denethor as the leader of his people. He works well with other Gondor cards, he encourages you to play Steward of Gondor (Core Set, 26) on the real Steward, and he inspired us to design a new Gondor deck that takes advantage of his ability, as well as those of his sons. For Gondor! Deck Created with CardGameDB.com The Lord of the Rings Deckbuilder Total Cards: (47) Hero: (3) 1x Boromir (Heirs of Numenor) 1x Denethor (Flight of the Stormcaller) 1x Faramir (The Land of Shadow) Ally: (25) 1x Anborn (The Land of Shadow) 3x Citadel Custodian (Heirs of Numenor) 3x Envoy of Pelargir (Heirs of Numenor) 3x Gandalf (Core Set) 2x Guard of the Citadel (Core Set) 2x Herald of anórien (Trouble in Tharbad) 1x Ingold (The Wastes of Eriador) 2x Pelargir Ship Captain (The Morgul Vale) 3x Squire of the Citadel (The Blood of Gondor) 3x Veteran of Osgiliath (Escape from Mount Gram) 2x White Tower Watchman (The Drúadan Forest) Attachment: (12) 2x Armored Destrier (Temple of the Deceived) 2x Heir of Mardil (Celebrimbor's Secret) 2x Rod of the Steward (Flight of the Stormcaller) 2x Steward of Gondor (Core Set) 2x Tome of Atanatar (The Blood of Gondor) 2x Visionary Leadership (The Morgul Vale) Event: (12) 2x A Very Good Tale (Over Hill and Under Hill) 2x For Gondor! (Core Set) 2x Reinforcements (The Treachery of Rhudaur) 2x Sneak Attack (Core Set) 2x Captain’s Wisdom (The Thing in the Depths) 2x Strength of Arms (The Drúadan Forest) Side Quest (1): 1x Send for Aid (The Treachery of Rhudaur) This deck uses only one copy of the Core Set, along with cards from select expansions from the Against the Shadow, Ring-maker, and Angmar Awakened cycles. It also incorporates a few cards from the Dream-chaser cycle. With its emphasis on mustering an army of Gondor allies, the deck allows you, too, to bring the might of Gondor to bear against the Corsairs. How to Play the Deck As the Steward of Gondor, Denethor is the perfect candidate to lead his two sons and an army of Gondor characters into battle. And his ability goes a long way toward ensuring you get a quick start. When you play the deck, you'll want to focus on getting a handful of useful attachments on Denethor, Borormir, and Faramir, and then pumping out as many allies as physically possible. Your first goal is to get Steward of Gondor and Rod of the Steward out onto Denethor as fast as possible. Once this is accomplished, Denethor can provide his sons with a wealth of resource tokens, while simultaneously providing some much-needed card draw when necessary. Visionary Leadership goes on Boromir, as it mirrors his card ability, and Heir of Mardil can go on either brother, whichever is your favorite, allowing Denethor to ready him whenever he transfers a resource. Finally, the upcoming Temple of the Deceived provides us the new Armored Destrier Mount, which is a great play on any of your three heroes. It allows you to defend twice with Denethor, or defend with Boromir or Faramir and ready for a counter-attack—all while discarding a shadow card in the process. The new event from the recently released The Thing in the Depths, Captain’s Wisdom, is a fantastic include in this deck. All three

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